Post #246083 by Swanky on Tue, Aug 1, 2006 10:33 AM

Ebay is great at some things and awful at others. It's not the death of antique stores. Basically, things that are too big to ship are hard to sell. And things you cannot easily describe so that someone will find it. It may be the coolest thing ever that people ooh and ah over in the antique store, but on Ebay, no one will see it.

Tiki stuff is easy to search for. The more specific you are the better. "Frankoma mug" is easy to find. "Cool retro thing-a-ma-jig" is not.

Ebay has little to do with tiki mug prices I have seen anywhere. Mostly it's lack of knowledge. Priced too high or low. Very few know what something is worth. And you cannot get $500 for a Frankoma War God mug in an antique store. Unless you are lucky enough to have the number one collector walk by, 99.999999999999999% of the people in your booth will simply scoff. You can't price an antique store like Ebay. Especially on tiki mugs. They will never sell because the market of buyers is too small.

Perhaps at a specialty vintage store you can get closer to Ebay prices, but not likely.

The entire antiques business is based on finding something worth more than you paid for it and getting it to the customer who will buy it. If that was a moral problem, all stores are immoral.

Tiki people are, in general, cheap. The old timers are used to spending under $5 per mug. Hard to pay more and many don't see a point in doing so. Others are coming in and they value these things more than the old timers and others and the market goes up. There are new bidders on Ebay every day trying to get the mugs you and I are. The market is generally going up and at the same time leveling off. Fewer big dollar sales, while at the same time the average mug price is steadily going up.

Maybe someone should start a price guide and put the Tiki Leilani as "Ultra Rare - Value:$35" and just see what happens...