You hit on one area of value which is none monetary and I nuianced in the second essay posts. I didnt realize how passionate I was about baseball card pricing until I started typing. You learn something new everyday about yourself.
" If Owner of Card A had seen Card B on ebay for Less in total than the cost to ship Card A than it would have been foolish economically for him to have executed the trade right?"
Just because something is economically foolish, doesnt mean that its illogical, wrong, or even a bad idea. So if you like building relational capital, that can be super valuable even if you can't put a monetary number on it. Markets are really really bad at evaluating non-monetary value. We shouldn't be considering these things when assessing price, but we also shouldn't discount their value as people. It makes me feel better about TCDB knowing people like you endow it.
Both of you guys have been hitting on cost. You are doing this because you are itemizing the transaction into asset and transaction costs. Like buying and selling a stock. No one ever made money on the purchase of a stock, because you are buying an asset whose worth is identical to what you are paying for it, in that moment, and then paying a trading fee. Only if the stock increases greater than your trading fee do you come out ahead. That's almost a fair analogy for baseball cards except for one differenciating factor. Shipping and Handling are not necessary for all transactions. There is ample Free Shipping options, stores, shows, garage sales etc, that wouldn't charge me S/H, and again the goal is to normalize. Thats not true with Stocks, house purchases. Think about your car price. Kelly Blue book gives you a range of prices from Trade in at the low end, to Retail at the high end, and there in the middle is private party. Because you have options in car buying prices work backwards off of the top number, the all-in retail price. You could then say, well but if I bought a car out of state and shipped it I would pay for that as a sunk cost. And i would say if you could find the exact same car cheaper without shipping you would buy that, and if you had to outsource your car to get the one you wanted, you now own the only car like it in your area and could hypothetically sell it for more than the car price you purchased yours for, proving the point. Why, because you did it.
I would also caution the use of Cost. Cost has to be introduced with Margin. These are concepts only necessary for multi-transactional reasoning. A single Transaction (unless you are considering transation costs) is costless. There is only price. If I wished to flip the asset(multi-transactional reasoning kicks in), I would be considering this transaction price as a cost to a future price, and if I am flipping this asset I consider the cost of the last transaction(s) in the price of this one. I work with Deal Managers all the time, every single one of them will tell you I sell at the highest price I can, damn the costs. Costs are Executive and Engineer's problems. And on a any given single transaction thats how prices work.
So said another way. As a consumer its none of my worry if the product I am buying is profitable, I just want it as cheap as I can get it. As a seller its my call if the consumer isn't offering me what I desire to either accept that and move inventory or sit on it and try to sell it to the next person higher. Only when I zoom out and look across multiple transaction do I worry about costs as a seller.
I don't want to be misunderstood though. If conscience could be gained by agreeing to "Card in the hand", I'd take it over nothing, I can always discount S/H manually after the fact. The most important thing is continuity in how the community creates the pricing mechanism in the tool. I only fear that we would end up being less affective as a community when buying cards from the outside world if we are not factoring the varibles correctly.
*Collects: All Braves // All Topps Base // *92-94 Tops Gold // *Upper Deck Base 89-93
