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| SOFTBALL LINKS |
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You Paid How Much For That RocketTech?
by Dave
Monday, June 26, 2006
You can find just about anything for which there is a reasonably good sized market on ebay. That's true if your desire is to purchase advertising on somebody's forehead, a 200 year old family bible, previously owned sneakers, hand painted postcards, or almost anything else you can imagine. But ebay is not just the world's largest garage sale where folks empty their closets and basements of unwanted garbage. It is also an incredible marketplace of low-overhead merchants selling all sorts of new goods including softball equipment. If you are careful, smart and patient, you can get some incredible deals.
Find Softball ItemsThe way to unlock the softball equipment riches located deep within ebay is to go to the home page: www.ebay.com, click on "buy," then find the category "sporting goods" and click on it. Next find "Baseball & Softball" about half way down the page on the left side and click on that. Then find an appropriate category for your shopping like "bats." When you're in the right general category, look for something a little more precise. In our "bat" example, once you arrive at that page, look on the left hand side and you'll find a sub-sub category for "Softball - Fastpitch" which had more than 700 items when I last looked. An alternative to perusing the categories is to go to the "buy" page and try a "keyword search" like "RocketTech" which should get you to a list of all bats for sale containing that word. You can conduct such a search from almost anyplace within ebay so there's no need for you to follow my instructions verbatim to locate softball equipment.
At any given moment you may not find precisely what you are looking for on ebay or you may find a couple dozen of the item you seek. ebay is an open marketplace. It is not like your corner sporting goods store which carries 30 or 40 makes and models of softball bats. Before something is available on ebay, some person just like you has to set up shop there. So if nobody is interested in selling a specific kind of bat, you won't find it there right now. But there's no way to be sure it won't appear on the site moments, a week, or a month after you visit. So, if you don't see what you want, don't despair and never return to the site. New merchants are born every moment. New products are offered constantly. Check the site frequently to see if somebody has listed what you want.
Various SellersIf you find several dozen of the specific item you seek, you will probably see about 6 or 7 sellers of it. All sellers on ebay are not created equal. It is possible that somebody who normally sells dogs-playing-poker pictures has a kid who plays softball and wants to get rid of their used bat. It is also possible that you will find somebody selling what you want who supplements their living or even earns their primary income from selling Louisville Slugger bats on ebay. Check out all sellers who have what you want. If you're spending $200 for a bat, you don't really want to deal with a one-time seller who will be disinterested in that product as soon as they get rid of the one they have for sale.
Ebay sellers are rated by those who have made previous purchases via a "Feedback" mechanism. On each item page you should see the seller's "nickname" which might be something like "sellbatsforless" or something along those lines. Next to the "nickname" is a rating number or "feedback score" which indicates the number of sales to unique persons the individual has made for which they received a positive feedback less the number for which they received a negative. Just below the "feedback score" you will also see a percentage which represents the percentage of sales made to unique purchasers which resulted in positive feedback over the total number of sales resulting in feedback. For example, if a merchant had 3531 sales, 3528 left positive feedback and 3 negative ones, the "feedback score" would be 3528 and the positive feedback percentage would be 99.9%.
In general I like to stick to sellers who sell lots of my kind of item and have 100% positive feedback. But when a seller has lots of transactions, an occasional negative feedback may not indicate any sort of problem. If the negative feedback is fairly recent, you may be able to find what the buyer had a problem with. There are all sorts of people on God's green Earth and sometimes mentally unstable people can put blemishes on an otherwise great merchant's account. You might read something like "the item should have gotten here in 5 days but it took 6 and seller didn't return my many e-mails" or something like that. If you find someone who has sold 15,000 RocketTech bats and has one such negative comment, you should be able to do business with this person without any negative experience of your own.
Shopping PricesI told you that you may be able to find some incredible deals on ebay. That does not mean you always get a great deal. It is a competitive bidding site so it is entirely possible to buy something available at your local store for more than the retail price of the item. It is also possible to get the wrong item or a used one when you wanted new.
Before you go to ebay, you should know exactly what the item you are looking for is. There are often a variety of models within a particular make and sometimes there are different products made from year to year. Know exactly what it is you seek including model and year of manufacture, and know what the regular retail price of the item is. Also make sure the item you are getting is new, if that's what you're after. "NIW" is short for new in wrapper. Read the entire item description, look at all the pictures and just generally be wary of anything on the page which might clue you in to a bad purchase.
For example, according to the Anderson Bat Company's web site, there are currently four bats called "RocketTech" and 3 are slow pitch bats. But there are models from other years and some of these might be banned from ASA and other play, or maybe they retail for far less than the current model. You want to make sure you only bid on items you want. Often a seller will say "like new" and follow that up with something like "only used once in practice." BS! I want new or I want a STEEP discount.
Once you know you have the right item, you want to make sure you get a good deal on it. The Anderson Bats site shows the retail price of a brand new 2005 RocketTech FP as $229.00. Softball Junk sells it for about that, but Dicks Sporting Goods sells it for just under $200 and so does Sports Authority. Before you make a bid on ebay, you want to know how much you can get the item for via other outlets including local stores. You're on ebay to get a deal not just make a purchase.
Aside from the price, there are other considerations too. You bought the item for X price but now the seller has to ship it to you and unless the page says so, that is not free. Sports Authority will ship you your bat for $7.84 making your all-in price there $207.81. Each seller on ebay has their own quirks when it comes to shipping prices. One bat seller on ebay will ship the Anderson RocketTech for $13, another $14, and yet another $16.99. One seller offers "optional" shipping insurance for $2, another requires it for $5.99, and yet another does not offer it.
So you've gone and found an Anderson 2005 RocketTech FP and won it for $190.00 (not bad for a $229 bat, right?). Shipping was $16.99 and the seller required insurance of $5.99 even though you used a credit card through the PayPal system and were already insured twice for the purchase. Your final all-in price was $212.98 when you could have bought the item from a major retailer for a little less. That isn't why you came to ebay. I suggest you made a bad deal. It wasn't horrible but you could have done better and had the peace of mind of having dealt with Sports Authority.
So, how do you make sure you do better than this? Patience, my dear, patience. The way to shop ebay is to watch and wait. If you haven't done so already, you should establish an account - it's free - and set up your "my ebay" section. My ebay allows you to track items and sellers and see what happens with the items you're interested. If you track Anderson RocketTech bats for a few days, you'll probably see some go for as little as $160 ($174 with shipping) and as much as $220 including shipping. You may even see one go for as little as $100 although that is probably a used bat or purchased from somebody who has some blemishes on their sales record. The point is, if you are careful, smart and patient, you can save yourself some money.
It's not just batsWhile any parent of an aspiring softball player can tell you that they had a rude awakening once they learned that their darling daughter is incessant in her frequently spoken desire to obtain X bat at a cost of $250, there are other expensive equipment concerns as well. Ebay has almost everything a kid could need to outfit themselves for softball. There is catching equipment (both new and used), batting helmets, equipment bags, batting gloves, mitts, training aids, the "Game Face" safety mask, and much, much more. Again, before you bid on any of this equipment, you want to make sure the seller is not merely selling one used item of this sort, he or she has good and voluminous feedback, you know the retail price of the item and factor in all shipping and other costs.
ConclusionWe poor parents are caught in between when it comes to girls fastpitch softball. When we were kids, we were considered spoiled rich kids if our fathers bought us one or two bats in our lifetimes. That bat was a piece of wood we bought based on what it looked like for probably less than $20. "It's gonna be a little heavy at first son but you'll grow into it in a year or two." We didn't have ten models of $250 metal bats which were rated for hitting speeds. Our fathers did not consult us when they bought a glove which was supposed to last for the next ten years. Our feet ached in the cheapest cleats mom could locate at the flee market. Team uniforms were a tee-shirt with "Butch's Car Wash" in big letters on the back. Travel ball meant you were asked to play on the all-star or American Legion team. Things were simpler then and buying equipment of any sort online was not even a remote possibility.
Well, times have changed. Now nine year old girls beg to keep their time slot for $50 per week catching lessons because they have to miss one lesson in order to try out for a travel club. Aside from that travel club being based a half hour's drive away - not cheap in your 15 mpg SUV, the cost of joining it will be $350 plus two uniforms plus every girl trying out for the team has a $200+ bat. The team isn't very good but they are the best available in the area. They'll play 8 tournaments next summer - fall ball will cost you another $100. Despite the fact that the team collectively owns $3,000 worth of bats, $1,000 worth of batting gloves, and other assorted bells and whistles, they'll probably be shut out in a quarter of their games. They'll probably finish in the bottom half of most tournaments. But, heck, this is fun. And if you can save a couple hundred on equipment purchases by becoming ebay savvy, all the better. You'll need that money in order to help pay for motels or dinners out at those far away tournaments. Nobody ever told you parenting was easy ... or ... cheap.
 
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