Need Help Selling Vintage Toys (Non-LEGO)

[Zeya]

I'm hoping some people in the EB community can help me out here with some advice. My sister and I are selling my mom's house and contents. Sad times. Most things will go through an estate sale, but we're making an exception for certain things. I insisted that we try and sell our old toys ourselves, or half of them anyway. We always kept our toys in good shape and put them away before bed in nice painter buckets, so nothing is horribly damaged, and most of it is in surprisingly good shape.

Okay, so what I took home to try and sell are about 3 big rubbermaid bins full of stuff. Luckily they're pretty well separated and not jumbled together. I've got He-Man, Battle Beasts, Ghostbusters, Dino-Riders, "Bone Age", and Micro Machines (Micro Minis?) that I took. These were all mine as a kid.

I left my sister's stuff back home (I live very far away), but she had My Little Pony, Barbie, Strawberry Shortcake, Cabbage Patch, and some other lesser stuff. I also left behind my Hotwheels/Matchbox cars (godawful heavy). I need to decide soon if it would be worth it to ship the rest out to me to try and sell. Shipping all that might cost around $800 with the method we've been using (industrial pallet shipping - a friend has a shop and hooked us up). If I end up not making a special shipment for that stuff, it'll get sold at estate sale. Which means, they will ask something reasonable for it, but they won't be trying for top eBay dollar for it, and then the estate sale people take a 30% cut. Just FYI.

By the way these toys are all from the 80's and early 90's, not any re-release sort of stuff at all.

Anyway, I'd just like general advice on how to sell these. I've sold stuff on eBay before, but not nearly in this amount of bulk. I do want to stretch the dollars for us. However, there's a lot of stress right now and my time and stress is a consideration. You know, I don't want to be burning a lot of time I don't have, just to get another dollar per action figure.

Would you guys recommend trying to sell these things in one bulk lot on eBay? Like *boom* here is all the He-Man laid out on a table, all 40 figures or whatever. Or would it be better to find some kind of price guide (do they even exist?) and try to weed out the "cloud city Boba Fetts" from the bunch, if you know what I mean?

Any advice is appreciated. Thanks for reading.

P.S. The silver lining is that I also found my old Lego collection!!! Almost forgot to mention that. I've got some sweet old stuff in there that hopefully I'll get around to playing with some day soon. I'm keeping the Lego of course. The rest of the stuff, while nostalgic, I'm fine with selling somehow. Go figure.

Edited July 12, 2012 by Zeya

[escortmad79]

I'd be tempted to list them individually on eBay or try & see if you can find a specialist toy auction anywhere close by & list them there.

A lot of work but likely to get the best results

[Zeya]

I'd be tempted to list them individually on eBay or try & see if you can find a specialist toy auction anywhere close by & list them there.

A lot of work but likely to get the best results

The thing about listing each one individually is that there are dozens of these things. That's a lot of packing and shipping work. Although I do wonder if I can pick up the small flat rate USPS boxes or flat rate bubble mailers or something like that. Hmm.

I have never heard of specialist toy auctions before. I'll see what I can find.

Another question to add: does anyone know of a "Bricklink for vintage action figures" or any such resource, maybe on a per-series basis (one for He-Man, one for Ghostbusters etc)?

[streifen]

For a fast sale, sell your action figures as bundles. i.e. He-Man with the other Masters of the Universe figures, Beast Wars in another lot. That way they move faster.

If you sell individually, the popular ones will be gone and you are left with the unwanted ones.

Also it saves you time listing one by one.

You can do this on eBay.

[Jimbobulus]

I would definitely recommend selling things individually on ebay. some of the vintage stuff if in good condition should fetch high prices, but if you bundle them people may be put off by things they don't want. Maybe bundle some of the lesser value things.

Ebay is very good, safe to use etc. If you list things with good photos, and lots of information things should sell like hot cakes. you can always put a reserve/starting price if you don't want things selling for less than you want.

Good luck!

[Zeya]

Update time. I got around to going through all the He Man / MotU stuff (That's Masters of the Universe, lol). I snapped a bunch of pics and I'm going to head over to heman.org in a little bit to post on their forum for more specific advice they may have. You know, if they can spot anything especially desirable.

I actually spent a lot of time this weekend going through the guide they have there and matching up all the weapons with all the guys they go with, etc. Yikes. But it was pretty fun too. Anyway, here are some pics. I also made a spreadsheet listing each thing, which should help me when I go to make ebay listings and such.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zeya/sets/72157630934606300/