Buying and selling on Stardoll may seem simple at first: there’s the Starplaza and then there’s the Starbazaar. But once you enter the collector crowd, things will get dirty.
When it comes to buying and selling rare items, such as popular DKNY, Amy Claire, LE, Elle, and other things from various tribute stores, most collectors find that the maximum Starbazaar pricing limit (500 stardollars) is just a little too cheap. And so, instead, they like to either exchange their precious rares for items equally as rare, or host auctions for them. Of course, this doesn’t always apply to everyone--some people like trading because it’s a more economical way to get an item that they like (and plus, it helps out the person at the other end of the trade, who most likely feels the same way), and some people like bidding because it helps them find the best price for whatever they’re selling and it makes the whole transaction much faster, since there is always a fixed winner of the auction in the end. Sometimes the case is that they're selling a very rare item that happens to have a fixed selling currency of Starcoins and find that the actual item is more worth Stardollars.
Stardoll discourages these types of business deals (wow, that sounded really professional) in their One-Stop rules list. They state that the maximum amount someone can pay for anything on Stardoll is 500 stardollars, and they do not approve of private deals. Frankly, I think these taboos are mainly to keep everyone safe from scamming.
According to Stardoll's One-Stop rules:
“Make private deals to trade items, trade/sell/buy accounts nor sell items for more than the Stardoll limit of 500 Stardollars.”
No matter what Stardoll says, I really want to go over some of the misconceptions people have of auctions on Stardoll.
The things that make up an auction are fairly simple. You have the item to sell, a starting price, a start/end time, and the highest bidder. If you’ve ever shopped on eBay, then you’ll see that these concepts are painfully simple to understand.
The starting price is the minimum price for the item, and it’s purpose is usually to give a price that bidders can start on while guaranteeing a little profit for the auctioneer.
The start/end time is very important because it’s what determines the winning bid--bidders fight to have the highest bid before time runs out, and once it does, whoever bid last is the highest bidder, in other words, the winner.
What’s sad is that on Stardoll, there are many collectors with well-sought-after items that just don’t get these concepts! Because my dear sister Bright16 is an avid collector of all things rare and shiny, I’ve seen her go from auction to auction, occasionally bidding or sometimes just shopping through them all. Unfortunately, from what we’ve both seen, a lot of users seem to think that auctions basically mean uploading a picture of what you want to sell on your presentation, writing ‘BID!’ right under the said photo, and then waiting around for people to spam your guestbook with bids UNTIL you find the bid you like the best. There’s nothing wrong with uploading pictures of stuff on your presentation or screaming ‘BID!’, but the problem is that you can’t just wait for people to jot down bids and THEN just sift through them all looking for a good price. There’s no competition and it’s not fair to any of the bidders that way, and plus, it’s illogical. When you leave out a start/end time, all the rules of the auction are lost and, seeing as it technically never ends, you never really have a true winning bid.
I’ve seen other people mess up auctions in other ways. Some people very wisely leave out starting bids. Even better, they don’t even know what a starting bid is. Lack of a starting bid makes the whole bidding process even more complicated and is also very unfair to bidders because they’re completely in the dark about what’s a good bid and what isn’t.
And then, you have people who simply don’t care. They shout ‘BID!’ in their presentation, politely clean out a room to show off all the items for sale, and then, without putting a starting price or a start/end time, leave for a few weeks and assume that all their loyal bidders will come, make a mess of bids in their guestbook, and somehow win the auction without their consent. If they do moderately monitor their auction, they pay very little attention to highest bids and in the end the auction just fails flat on it’s face.
I REALLY wish more people knew about the makeup of an auction--just imagine how many more happy collectors there would be if there was a more thorough understanding of it! Is anyone else sick of these auction misconceptions?
Meroperiddle signing out! ^0^
BY THE WAY, we went to see the Dark Knight trilogy & midnight premiere and it was just absolutely beautiful--GO SEE IT YOU'RE MISSING OUT ON A LOT OF PURE BEAUTY!!!
