FAQ #5: How much does this card cost?
Sometimes — not always — this question puzzles us because the price of each card is listed at least once, and sometimes twice, in the description. Yet so many people ask.
It’s not the same as ordering several cards (which is what most customers do) and asking for confirmation of a total, or asking us to double-check their math for calculating postage. No puzzle about this at all. Once in awhile, someone will ask if the listed price is in US$ or Hong Kong $ or Canadian $ or someone else’s $, and we will steer them in the right direction (it’s US$). And, luckily, PayPal will do an instant conversion for someone who wants to pay in Euros or whatever.
So then we have to ask ourselves if there is a better way to show the price of each card. If we were bigger, we would have one of those “add this card to the cart and proceed to checkout” functions, but we’re not geared up for that and even if we were, it would mean re-listing every entry where we have more than one of the same card, but in different conditions.
By now, you’re yawning and thinking “yes, yes, life is full of problems, move on.” So we will. But this is a real FAQ and our polite answer will always be: thanks for asking, it will cost US$___. There you go!
Until next time.
Actually the value is truly in the eyes of the beholder. So someone looking for cards based around a particular subject or theme needs to weigh up one simple thing (assuming the card is in good condition) – will I ever see it on offer anywhere else? The fact that someone has gone to the trouble to provide a centralized opportunity like Global Postcard Sales to search for particular postcard subjects suggests immediate value, since the website owner must have been collecting cards for many years (given nearly 30,000 cards listed – how many unlisted??). Since much of the hard work has been done, the answer is if you see and like it pay the price, you probably wont see it again, at least without some major effort.
~Goloh replies: Yes, thanks for acknowledging that putting a site like this together is sometimes work, but it pays off when (A) someone buys, and (B) shares their reason for doing so. Not many people buy randomly, which is why we keep coming back to the example of the blue beach umbrella. We think many people feel the fun is in the hunt, sometimes even more than the actual capture. Imagine going through 30,000 cards where “beach umbrella” is not a category, just to find that one elusive example you’ve been searching for years. It happens. And how to put a price on that? Actually this is slightly off subject for this blog entry but it’s been on our mind too.
In a way it reminds us of an old story about a farmer who wants to sell cucumbers at a stand by the side of the road. Each cucumber would cost … how much? A few cents? But he hasn’t had a customer for weeks. One day an expensive car pulls up and a rich man steps out and says “I need some cucumbers for tonight’s salad. How much are they?” And the farmer says: “$10 each.”
At least our prices are listed!