Vive La France!

Unless you are a collector, it’s a solid practice to check that closet full of photo gear annually and sell anything untouched since you last looked. That especially applies to film gear which will very shortly become a genre for collectors only, as there will be no more film. Dump it now!

The very worst place to sell anything is eBay. You are selling to an ethically challenged audience though an auctioneer who disclaims any liability for anything. eBay is like the gun dealer who holds himself innocent because, after all, he did not pull the trigger. (Please, no lectures on the Second Amendment – any modern, civil society which permits handgun ownership is anything but a civil society).

Mercifully the French (no way the US tort-owned legal system would ever do this) have seen through this little game, as the WSJ reported yesterday:

In the US there are many amateur photo oriented sites which cater to classified ads, and you will not have to pay 15% in fees to eBay/PayPal in the process. My experience with these has been consistently good. They include:

• Fredmiranda.com – if you can ever get them to actually post your ad. Lots of Canon DSLR gear, much of it higher end
• Photo.net – some of the dumbest chat boards ever (Nikon v Canon garbage predominates), but sales are easy
• Your local Craigslist.com – cheap (free!) and easy, but less photo oriented, obviously
• Rff.com – mostly Leica and RF gear

Doubtless there are many others. Sure, they don’t offer fraud insurance but, then again, ask yourself why eBay feels the need to offer this.

A couple of years back when I sold all my film gear (phew! prices have crashed since) I did much of that on eBay because that’s all there really was. The alternatives did not have sufficient followings to constitute a broad market opportunity. That is changing.

In the meanwhile, if you must list on eBay, here are some of the steps I took to avoid being trapped by the ethically challenged:

• No sales to foreigners – yes, that includes Canadians and the UK. (To make Canadians and Englishmen feel better, the same rule applies at your end). Dispute resolution is doubly difficult, multiple legal systems come in to play and you really want to do all those custom forms and constantly be asked to under-declare value, making you a felon? Eastern Europe? Don’t make me laugh. That’s where you go for illicit anything. Stick with the US and forget AK and HI where you will always lose money on fixed postage estimates. The US contains 100 million of the world’s most affluent consumers. What’s not to like?
• Mail all packages UPS insured and make it clear in your ad that any damage in transit is the buyer’s responsibility and that the buyer must file the insurance claim with UPS. UPS makes this optional and you do not want to be the one filing the claim.
• Overpack. Bubble wrap is cheap. “It arrived damaged” is Scam #1.
• Keep and provide UPS tracking information – “I never received it” is Scam #2.
• When listing make an extra effort to take the highest quality pictures and be fastidious about illustrating any dings, defects, etc. “You didn’t tell me about the ding, etc.” is Scam #3.
• No returns. Ever. You want to loan your gear to a crook? “I need to return it” is Scam #4, and means the buyer got remorse (the spouse found out, likely as not) or used the camera for the weekend wedding and now wants his money back.
• Don’t list for $1 hoping for the best. Set a realistic minimum selling price, make the listing for 7 days and make sure it ends on a Sunday afternoon. That’s when most buyers have time to look at their computers, which enhances the possibilities of a last minute bidding war. You will get fewer bids, but then an opening bid of $1 is not a bid (unless you are really unlucky and it sells for that!). Multiple bids do not correlate with the best selling price. One good one will do. Still, if you like excitement, list at $1 and keep your fingers crossed. You will not do as well as I will.
• Don’t use price reserves. Would you bid on something whose price is unknown? Plus, reserves cost extra. Use minimum selling prices as described above.
• Be realistic about setting a minimum bid price. I generally look at completed auctions (active listings are useless as the price is not known), check a few other sites and set the starting price at 80% of the expected selling price. My failure rate (meaning no sale) was 5% using this approach, based on 40 listings.
• If selling a camera or lens, include some snaps taken with the gear. That says you are a user, not a clueless dealer, and sincere about the function of the equipment.
• Don’t waste money on listing enhancements like bold face and color. Educated buyers search by description, not listing appearance.
• If you start your listing at 80%, add a ‘Buy It Now’ option at 110%. This will attract buyers who really want your item and do not want the bidding war risk. Fully 40% of my auctions sold for the ‘Buy It Now’ price, generally within 24 hours of listing.
• Forget about making a killing. Price discovery in the market for used cameras is perfect, unless you are selling Oscar Barnack’s original Leica, in which case you need to use the higher class crooks at Sotheby’s and Christies.
• Don’t ever leave bad feedback. You will get in a time wasting argument and do nothing for your sale prospects down the road (because I guarantee that you will get retaliatory bad feedback, and good luck trying to get eBay to remove it), even if you were right. Saying nothing and swallowing your pride is the path to success here. Though, come to think of it, I just checked today and guess what?
  

  So now, even if your buyer assaults you, he remains a good guy. Great system, huh?

• If you have high value outfits, it generally makes better sense to sell them piecemeal (body, lens, etc.) than as a kit. You will get better aggregate proceeds. Kits attract what I call the ‘kit discount’. Easier to sell as a kit, sure, but it’s your money.
• I sold some 40 items over one year and it took a while to learn the above. Since then the only complaint I have is the egregious fees charged by eBay and PayPal (which is owned by, you guessed it, eBay. Based on prior fines, PayPal is the place to launder your illicit drug proceeds – it’s nothing more than a poorly regulated bank, though in the US I suppose ‘poorly’ is axiomatic when it comes to the methadone cases who are bank regulators here).

In summary, if you start with the premise that you will be cheated and follow the steps above you will greatly mitigate the risks. Above all, be scrupulously honest in your listing.

Here’s an extract from my recent listing which applies the above rules:

No problem. The camera was as described, the buyer honest.

If you know a little HTML you can have hyperlinks to your detailed slideshow at your ISP – as above – avoiding eBay’s additional fees and securing a better presentation in the process. The pictures also serve as a perfect record in the event a fraudster alleges damage or other non-existent faults.

Now here’s the one for the lens:

Note the use of a free lens hood teaser if the buyer elects ‘Buy It Now’. The buyer of that one left me perfect feedback ….

…. then filed a claim with UPS alleging the goods were damaged. UPS paid him $300 and he got to keep the lens – see what I mean?

But, best of all, if you have fake gear to sell, list it on eBay because the US legal system will never do anything about it. And then you will be just another typical eBay seller.

And meanwhile, eBay and PayPal, I am pleased to add you to the Hall of Shame – a destination at which you arrived years ago.

Imitating the Great Liar

That infamous master of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, remarked that if you tell a big enough lie and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

Generations of politicians, lawyers and marketers (many of these know all about lying, of course) have taken that to heart, none more than Canon in their advertisement for their latest consumer grade DSLR. This sells for $750. Doubtless a competent and effective tool and you can see their slick ad here.

But that’s not the point. Clearly the TV ad is advertising their inexpensive mass market camera body.

No. What gets my goat is that there’s another video wherein Canon prides itself on explaining just how the ad was made – the second one of the choices on the right. A minute or so into it and we are told that no fewer than ten Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III cameras were used by the pros to take the snaps in the ad video. Last I checked those run $7,800 a pop or some ten times the cost of the featured product.

So how, pray, do pictures taken on a $7,800 camera end up misrepresented as having been taken on a consumer DSLR one tenth of the cost? And why, if the new cheap model is so good, was it not used to take the snaps in the ad? Never mind the carefully chosen words in the above (“….real photographs taken by Canon digital SLR cameras….”) the opening shot of the ad shows Mrs. Housewife clearly using the consumer DSLR, immediately cutting to the snaps taken by pros using the top of the line $8k honker. Not that you would know, of course. Anyone watching the ad would conclude exactly what Canon and its sleazy US management and lawyers intend – that all the pictures you see were taken on the camera shown.

Shame on you, Canon.

Just another case of a lack of journalistic integrity?.

When I trashed the Panasonic L1 I wrote positively about Michael Reichmann’s objectivity when he wrote about this camera on his web site.

I now have no reason to any longer think that Reichmann is an objective writer.

He has admitted (after clicking the link go to the bottom) that, in ‘reviewing’ the Leica M8 he pulled critical comments from his piece as requested by the Leica Company who had loaned him the camera. It is possible that many who based their purchase decision on his purportedly objective review would have refrained from buying the camera had these comments not been censored.

While he has since bought an M8, I assume using his own money, the reality is he allowed his objectivity to be irrevocably compromised, in this writer’s eyes, by the provision of a free loaner, trading it for self aggrandisement that comes from being one of the favored few to be graced with a pre-production M8. “Look how important I am. Leica gave me a free loaner.” Psychic payola, and good value, had it worked for Leica. They didn’t even have to write a check. In the event, collusion between manufacturer and ‘reviewer’ has, in this case, hurt both.

Had Mr. Recihmann published his adverse findings, explaining that Leica told him they had fixed the problem (they have not) that would have been quite different. In that case he could have stated that he would verify such claims in a follow-up to his review.

As long time readers of this journal know, there is no earthly chance that Yours Truly would ever be given anything free by any manufacturer to ‘review’, as a manufacturer’s publicity machine is not intended to spread truth, justice and the American Way. Rather, its sole intent, which is fine with me, is to sell products. Just don’t expect me to write manufacturer-censored reviews under the guise of objectivity.

You may check my ethics policy by clicking ‘Author and ethics’, below.

The closing three sentences of Reichmann’s apologia are breathtaking and I quote – my underscore. I quote, in case they should one day disappear from his site – please read his whole piece to put these in perspective by clicking on the link in the third paragraph above:

“But, in the end I would do what I did again, simply because I felt that potential owners needed to know what I had learned in my testing, without delay. And, I would have held back again on the issues that I was requested to because that’s the proper way to deal with manufacturers, who one assumes will take their responsibilities to journalists seriously. Enough said.”

If you can reconcile the first and second sentences, please educate me by leaving a comment, below.

So now that you understand Mr. Reichmann’s “….proper way of dealing with manufacturers….” you will know better than to believe anything he ever writes again on his Luminous Landscape web site.

Mr. Reichmann, let me put you out of your naïveté. A manufacturer’s goal in a capitalist system is to get journalists to write what is best for the profitability of the manufacturer. A journalist’s goal is to write unconflicted truth as he sees it, pulling no punches with regard to material facts.

And here is what you really meant to write, and do feel free to copy and paste it into your column – no attribution needed:

“Dear Luminous Landscape readers – I made a serious ethical and journalistic error in withholding information regarding product defects in the new Leica M8. I did this at the request of the Leica Company who had given me a free loan of the camera. In doing so, I made a material misrepresentation to you, my readers. I have seriously compromised my journalistic integrity and accept full responsibility to all of you who bought the camera on my recommendation and now find that, had my findings been uncensored, they would have changed your purchase decision.”

Trust, once lost, Mr. Reichmann, is seldom regained. Print a proper retraction on the lines of the above and I will be happy to publish it here.

As for Leica, the company may have knowingly released a faulty product. If that is the case, the class action lawyers will take care of them, assuming there’s enough money left there to make the suit worthwhile. Why, even Mr. Reichmann would collect something in the settlement.