The Remarketer

Scores of businesses have been altered by the presense of auction sites.
How does one handle the eBay effect? You can:

A) Bask in eBay’s afterglow.
B) Hide from the Nuclear Rays, or
C) Let your own soul glow…?

Our company, Vibrant Technologies, buys and sells quality used servers, storage and networking hardware and we have observed the thick of the eBay effect. We’ve mostly chosen not to go with option A in that we don’t market very many products at auction. We also would be daft to ignore the effect that eBay has had on the marketplace, so we aren’t avoiding those nuclear rays, either.

You want to get full value for your excess IT hardware, right?

The following guidelines are useful whether you’re planning to sell “IT” on eBay, another auction site or to a remarketer for trade-in.

1) Test and Assess
Make sure you know exactly what you have. A slight change in the processor speed of a server, for example 900Mhz versus 1.2Ghz, could mean a difference of hundreds or even thousands of dollars in final value. Confirmation that your system is in good working condition can also reap you 2 to 10 times as much in value.

eBay can be a fantastic place to find great deals on IT Hardware in appropriate situations. We can’t deny that. In certain cases, even we have taken advantage of great deals on eBay - for an item we couldn’t pass up for our stock, or an obscure part we couldn’t find.

So first, I’ll list four situations in which eBay is a good move. I’ll follow it below with our seven tips for finding “IT” on eBay.

When eBay makes sense for IT
1) Low-end items: tranceivers, cables, internal connectors, etc…

To continue the discussion of how eBay is affecting the used IT Hardware marketplace, I’ve undertaken the following case study.

I performed a “title and description” search for the phrase: ws-c3524-xl-en, which is a very commonly traded Cisco Switch Feature. More precisely, it is a 24port 3500 Series Cisco Switch.

Here is the raw data:
————————————————————–

Search: ws-c3524-xl-en
Results: 39
Listings by professional network resellers: 7
eBay Buy-It-Now Range: $229 - $5500
Median Buy-It-Now Price: $349
Non-eBay Wholesale price: $325
End-User Used Price range: $350 - $400
Original Retail List Price: $2995

Everybody from the press to your aunt (who just made some serious bank on her antique teacups) seems to have a place in their hearts for eBay. But for those in the following five industries, eBay has caused a bit of stress for those who have failed to adapt to its influence.

1) Computer / Server Hardware
It was 4:00 PM on a Thursday afternoon and it had been a long week. One of my best clients called in regarding a Cisco Switch I had quoted him earlier that month… “I really want to pick this up from you, but my manager searched this on eBay and found it for 10% cheaper. Can you come down a little?”

eBay has changed the remarketed server industry and it can’t be ignored. We certainly haven’t ignored it from a business perspective - we’ve actually decided to embrace it, and cover it here on our blog.

While eBay has been a terrific way for many people to make money off of their old Star Wars figures and Teddy Ruxpins, it has also changed the way markets like the used server/storage/networking industry operate. Many server resellers would prefer to ignore how eBay has changed our marketplace. Whether it’s acknowledged or not, the fact is, we have all had to adjust to it in one way or another.