Some absolutely crazy pricing for basic pens on eBay - what is going on?

[Mercian]

Hi all,

having just seen the following listing on eBay, I felt compelled to start this thread.

It is for an ordinary, basic version of the modern Parker 'Urban'...

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/236346487850

..but look at the price that the vendor is asking for it!

 

I initially wondered whether s/he had misplaced a decimal point, but then I looked at the prices that this vendor is asking for other fountain pens:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_dkr=1&iconV2Request=true&_blrs=recall_filtering&_ssn=craftitmylife&store_cat=0&store_name=craftitmylife&_oac=1&_nkw=fountain pen

 

REALLY? 

 

So, do we think that this vendor is 'just' attempting to chase 'the Stupid dollar'?

OK, I know that 'the Stupid dollar' is a really big dollar, but I must confess that my own thoughts tend to the suspicion that this person is attempting to do 'money laundering'.

'Selling' pens to various 'colleagues', in order to generate a paper trail that can start to 'justify' how they happen to have so much income/cash in the bank.

 

I would be grateful to know what everyone else thinks about these prices.

 

Slàinte,
M.

[inkstainedruth]

Um, I'm guessing it's a case of "There's a sucker born every minute and two to take him..." (which is a quote attributed to P.T. Barnum, who had such crowds at his events that he put up a sign that said "This way to the egress" and people thought it was another thing to see -- and thus followed the arrow on the sign -- because they didn't know that the word meant "exit"...).

I paid about $35US for my Urban and even that was a ripoff, because the pen was junk.  Had a converter get stuck in the barrel and had to send it back to Parker (under warranty) and jump through hoops to package it safely.  Only to have it returned in a bubble wrap envelope in a plastic tube with a snotty note about how I'd used the "wrong" converter for it....

I don't know what you should do about that seller -- contact them and say, "Yeah, good luck with asking that exorbitant price" or reporting them to eBay, or what....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[InkyProf]

Seller description: "A specialty shop offering a wide variety of high quality auto and motorcycle parts and accessories."

 

Beyond money laundering, there's another possibility, which is a higher-tech version of Ruth's answer. In the world of online used book sales (and probably elsewhere too, that's just the context I know best) there are "sellers" that, as I understand it, are semi- or fully automated "bot" resellers, which re-list, at significant markups, books being advertised (often in large quantities) by other sellers; if some sucker buys the marked-up version, the bot purchases a real copy and, eventually, the person behind the bot account (or their employee) ships it to the lucky purchaser. The automation makes it possible to engage in high-volume but largely passive trolling. 

 

EDITED TO ADD: One of these bots once attempted to sell a copy of a book I had written for over a thousand dollars, which, obviously, is how you KNOW it's a scam. 🙂

[VacNut]

A seller is free to ask for any price. That is the auction process. There is no right or wrong.

Many would question why we are using fountain pens.

 

I think all sales are taxed based on the local tax/tariff laws. Its not a great way to “wash” money. The relatively low cost of the item isn’t very efficient.

A form of Bitcoin is probably much more simple

[A Smug Dill]

41 minutes ago, VacNut said:

A seller is free to ask for any price. That is the auction process.

 

Or just any “free market” process for arriving at an agreed price for a transaction. There is no pricing policy that is universally considered “fair”, for both random prospective consumers-cum-buyers and also sellers who have the goods and arguably wear the most risk in the “community“ that trades in such items — and we should take extra care not to “take sides” with the end-consumer (or the ones putting money down at the end of the sequence of commercial transactions) as if that is a representation of “us” against sellers in the community or marketplace to make a profit as “them”.
 

12 hours ago, Mercian said:

I would be grateful to know what everyone else thinks about these prices.

 

There's almost always going to be information asymmetry, between buyer and seller, or between experience shoppers and newcomers to the hobby. I personally wouldn't pay them; but then I'm not inclined to pay asking prices for 20ml retail bottles of Sailor Shikiori inks that were once part of the Sailor Jentle Shikisai line sold in 50ml inkpots (with a round footprint) for the same MSRP in the Japanese domestic market. That doesn't mean I'd tell others in the hobby today not to buy a 20ml bottle of Sailor Shikiori Wakauguisu at (discounted or full) retail price in the market today as if it was somehow morally wrong for them to be charged as much for the product.

[mke]

I bought a pen for $180. When I sold it, I checked the web and saw it on a website for $8888. I didn't follow if they sold it or not.

The site starts with "air".

So, the fishing for the stupids is everywhere - not only on Ebay.

[A Smug Dill]

11 minutes ago, mke said:

So, the fishing for the stupids is everywhere - not only on Ebay.

 

Just about every fountain pen in one of my local “fine writing instruments” specialist stores in Sydney CBD is offered at roughly (but close enough to) double what I paid for mine ordering online (taxed and shipped) or could get. That doesn't mean every customer of that shop who agrees to pay the asking prices is “stupid” or a “sucker”; we're not all geared towards getting best value for money, trying to spend as little ”real money” as we can to get what we like, or prepared to trade time and effort in study/research/hunting and forgo instant material gratification (and the imagine “security” of having ”one throat to choke” in a known physical location of a bricks-and-mortar store).

[mke]

1 minute ago, A Smug Dill said:

That doesn't mean every customer of that shop who agrees to pay the asking prices is “stupid”

 

I make a difference between overpriced and outrageously overpriced. 

 

Another example: a few years ago someone on Yahoo Auctions bought a Parker 75 pen for about 70000 Yen. I bought exactly the same pen for 2500 Yen a few days earlier.

Sorry, but buying a pen worth 2500 Yen for 70000 Yen makes you a stupid.

 

[A Smug Dill]

13 minutes ago, mke said:

Sorry, but buying a pen worth 2500 Yen for 70000 Yen makes you a stupid.

 

Anecdote (and true story): I worked with someone, back around 2000, who asked me what I did on the weekend. I told him I bought the Alien(s) four-disc boxed set of DVDs for $90. He told me he bought the same, that very weekend, for $135. I suggested to him that he could return his purchase (per the return policies I understand of that bricks-and-mortar retailer, back in the day), and re-buy the identical item from where I bought mine, and save himself $45 in the process.

 

What did he do? He gave me his (physical) receipt for his purchase, and told me I could return the item in my hand to the store where he bought his, and get $135 ‘refunded’, then re-buy my copy at $90 and save/‘make’ myself $45. He said he worked hard to get to that point and not worry about his spend, and the last thing he wanted to do was to shop for the best deal and minimum spend without compromising on what he wanted as a frivolous consumer looking for material gratification.

 

I thought my friend was ‘weird’ because of that, but I didn't and don't think he was stupid, given what I know of him and having worked with him in different companies.

[inkstainedruth]

This is now making me think of one of the listings I was looking at this morning for local estate sales.  I lost track of how many photos of pairs of shoes were on that link....   Not to mention I don't know how many purses there were (at least one of which was clearly still in the plastic it was packaged in...).  

Some people are just like that.  They will buy things for the sake of buying them (a lot of other stuff in that listing were bric-a-brac stuff that just looked tacky, to be perfectly honest).  
I was taught differently.  My parents both grew up during the Depression, and didn't have a lot of money (one grandfather was a foreman in various coal mines in West Virginia; the other one was a professional musician, who ended up moving to the suburbs when my dad was in high school, and he and my grandmother ran a pharmacy in the center of town -- all the people in "the biz" he knew had moved out to Hollywood, but he didn't want to leave the greater NYC area).  

My parents didn't have credit cards until I was in high school -- if they didn't have the money for something?  They didn't buy it!  I don't know whether they financed the cars we had growing up, but they also tended to keep a vehicle for a decade or so (and I remember my dad doing stuff like changing the oil himself -- until it finally got to the point that he couldn't find anyplace to *take* the used oil to anymore (but that was probably after I got married and they moved to NJ).  And my mom would stock up on non-perishable stuff like laundry detergent when that sort of thing was on sale at the grocery store.  

We did have a lot of books, but a good chunk of them were non-fiction (stuff like the Time-Life Nature Library series and the Brittanica yearbooks (which were in the deal when they bought the Encyclopedia Brittanica set when I was a kid).  Most fiction books?  Taken out from the local library.  And I think I was in college before my parents broke down and bought a color TV....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[VacNut]

Expensive is relative.

Would I pay $12M for a gold toilet (recent auction). It’s worth that much to someone and it is their money to use to make themselves happy.

 

It’s all good in the end.

Buy want you like…

[Mercian]

15 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

There's almost always going to be information asymmetry, between buyer and seller, or between experience shoppers and newcomers to the hobby.

 

That is certainly true 

 

But it's the sheer magnitude of the mark-up (900%) that baffled me.
I mean, if anyone is searching the internet for a Parker Urban, they'll find many, many of them in the same 'colourways' as that vendor's pens, and at far lower prices. Even if they look only on eBay.

Perhaps the vendor is relying on people who have purchased some "high quality auto and motorcycle parts and accessories" from him also thinking 'you know what, while I'm here, I might as well treat myself to one of those 'fancy' fountain pens as well' 🤷

[Mercian]

4 hours ago, inkstainedruth said:

Some people are just like that.  They will buy things for the sake of buying them

 

Yes.
One of my mum's best friends was one of those people who shops 'recreationally'.

She was the widow of a guy who had worked for Shell, and she got his (very nice) pension after he died.
After her husband died, she stayed living in the same 4-bedroom family home in which they had raised their kids. And she gradually filled up the bedrooms with the clothes that she bought. First she filled up all the wardrobes (closets), then she piled clothes on the beds. Then on the floors.

My mum told me that most of those clothes never even got taken out of their plastic wrapping.

My own parents, both of whom lived through the Blitz (and the rest of WW2) in industrial cities, and then post-War rationing too, were much more like Ruth's parents.

[Number99]

I had a weird experience. I'll just describe the facts and phenomena as they happened, without offering any opinions.

 

I can open the first link and see the pen. However, from my location, I can open the second link, but none of that seller's listings appear.

When I use a VPN to change my IP address to Europe, I can see many pens. Then, when I log into eBay, the pens disappear again. If I delete Chrome cookies while logged in, the many pens reappear.

Next, log out from eBay, clear Chrome's browsing history, disconnect the VPN, search for eBay UK on Google, open it, and log in using my normal IP address. Sure enough, the fountain pen listing is nowhere to be found; only about two hundred other items are displayed. Even after deleting cookies and setting the VPN to Tokyo, the pen still doesn't appear on the second link.

 

 

[Mercian]

4 hours ago, Number99 said:

I can open the first link and see the pen. However, from my location, I can open the second link, but none of that seller's listings appear.

When I use a VPN to change my IP address to Europe, I can see many pens.

 

I clicked on a couple of the listings that I can see from the second link.
When I opened the 'details'  on those listings about posting/delivery/returns, I found that the seller ONLY posts to the UK & Europe, and that he 'excludes' the rest of the world.

I wonder if that explains why you cannot see his listings when you are logged-in 🤷

[Number99]

8 hours ago, Mercian said:

 

I clicked on a couple of the listings that I can see from the second link.
When I opened the 'details'  on those listings about posting/delivery/returns, I found that the seller ONLY posts to the UK & Europe, and that he 'excludes' the rest of the world.

I wonder if that explains why you cannot see his listings when you are logged-in 🤷

 

In the same situation (VPN settings: London, log in to eBay), car parts, car models, anime figures, etc., are displayed in large numbers. (I believe these also have the same shipping region restrictions as the pens.)

Only the pens are not displayed.

🤷

 

Edited November 29, 2025 by Number99
Delete half-width spaces.

[sketchstack]

When I search Ebay for a given product, I toggle on the search modifier "Sold Items". Then you can see what people actually paid. 

[jebib111]

I understand greed.  And attempting to get an extra nickel as just business or on opening offer.   However, when I see a knockoff advertised as the genuine article that's not greed that's fraud.  And I consider the reply, "we never advertised it as genuine" deceitful.  Full disclosure: I've never got scammed but I did pay retail if something really unusual, a one off appeared.  But as my Professor in business law said, "caveat emptor!"

[Theroc]

Oh, its weird alright.
The same seller had a David Oscarson Blackwater Dragon, listed for £41.00.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/236347322677

The seller has way too many "sales" to be an arbitrage bot or stupid money trap.
Nearly half a million listings.
If you are casting a net to catch dumb money, you would want it to be as wide as possible. Yet the seller only ships to the UK and EU. No eBay-fulfilled shipments.
A lot of the negative feedback is for items not being in stock.
If no actual items are changing hands, VAT and Ebay fees are a cheap way of laundering money.
 

[jebib111]

Regarding the David I have a question: does eBay a seller to bid on their own offering?  I could see this a a way to create a phoney bidding war until a fish bites.