NM Collector Software

A common question regarding collectible items is “How much is my item worth?”   For example, I frequently receive emails asking for gun values.  The answer is not as easy as some people might think.

At a theoretical level, the value of any item depends on the supply of and the demand for the item.  If an item is common and the demand for it is low, the value will be low.  Conversely, if the supply is low and the demand is high the value will be high.  Interestingly, and not necessarily intuitively, if an item is rare but the demand is low the value will also be low!  Of course, like the early Ford Mustangs in the 80’s, an item can be quite common but still command a high value because the demand is so much greater than the supply!

At an individual level, an item is worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it.   However, the buyer and the seller must be able to find each other for the transaction to occur.  Sometimes this can be easy while other times it can be very difficult.  This ability of buyers and sellers to get together in the marketplace is addressed at a theoretical level by the economic concept of “market imperfections.”  However, for an individual seller of an item, which is generally the focus of most people who ask me the value of their item, this boils down to finding the right asking price given the potential buyers available to the seller (whether than be local, national, or international).

With today’s internet marketplace, it is much easier to sell nationwide or even worldwide.  In the past the value of an item often depended more on the local market than the national or international market.  For many items, such as firearms, where there are still substantial barriers to legally transporting items across state or international boundaries, that can still true.  Economically, these artificial barriers to trade often lead to illegal black market conditions but that is not the subject of this blog.

So, bottom line, how does one go about finding the value of a particular item they want to sell? 

Essentially, the seller needs to find a price that is acceptable in the marketplace available to them for their item.  There are many ways to go about doing that which I will discuss below.

1.  Take it to a local auction and sell it for whatever you get for it.  Local auctions give you a small subset of the local market.  Although the excitement of the local auction atmosphere can lead to over-bidding on an item such that it sells for more than it might otherwise have sold, there is a very great risk that it will sell for substantially less than it is worth.  Reserves can help mitigate that risk but they can be costly.  Also, the fees involved in selling an item can significantly decrease the net proceeds to the seller.   In my opinion, local auctions are not an ideal way to sell an item.  Of course, this also does not provide you a value for your item until after you have already committed to the sale of the item.  This is not an ideal situation for most people looking to value an item.

2.  Find an expert appraiser.  These can be local, national, or international.  This is probably the best option for determining the value of an item in a local marketplace.  However, these experts can be hard to find!  Once you find them it can be hard to find a time that they are available to help you.  Also, they can actually be wrong when it comes to your particular item simply because no matter how expert an individual is in any field they can still make a mistake!

3.  Purchase a valuation guide for the type of item you want to know the value of.  There are many guides available that come up with some sort of an estimate of value based on the author’s access to sales data.  Usually that access is based on historical (hopefully recent) auction results (usually auctions that specialize in the items that are the subject of the valuation guide) from across the country.  These can give you an idea of national marketplace values.  However, the data is often over generalized and can become stale.  These guides may over-estimate or under-estimate the value of your particular item.

4.  Consult asking prices of retail outlets (local, national, and international).  With the internet search engines this becomes really easy.  Just enter your item’s description in a search engine and see what comes up.  The only drawback to this approach is that it shows you what people are asking for items similar to yours but it does not show you what they actually sell for.  Also, retailers generally have broader access to the marketplace than any individual has.  They spend a lot of money to guide buyers to their items that they have for sale and, generally build up a reputation over time that is usually greater than any individual can establish for a single item they want to sell.  It is not likely that an individual will be able to get the price for their item that is asked by retailers for similar items.

5.  Consult realized prices from on-line auctions.  The actual sale price of items like yours in on-line auctions gives you actual data points of what price was actually paid for an item in the national and/or international marketplace.  In my opinion this is by far the best way to determine the current value of an item that you have for sale.  Of course, the drawback is that his is a hit and miss proposition.  Sometimes you can not find an actual completed auction for an item like yours in the condition that yours is in.  Often, however, you can find similar items to give you an idea yet, you may actually have a unique item that should be valued differently than similar items.

6.  A combination of the above.  Perhaps the ideal approach is to consult multiple sources and combine the best of all of them.  This is probably not worth the effort for a common item that you can easily find a match for in on-line auctions.  However, if there is anything unique about your item it should be worth the time to investigate several options for valuing it – particularly before actually selling it!

As a final comment, I have heard many stories, including first hand accounts, about dealers taking advantage of unknowing sellers.  It’s one thing for somebody to offer to sell an item for a certain price and the buyer accepting that price, even if it is a good deal.  However, it is quite another thing for a seller to ask a dealer how much an item is worth and then for the dealer to lie to them about the item and offer to buy it for a fraction of what it is worth.  Some would argue that even in the first case, a knowledgeable person should correct the seller of an item if they are asking too little for their item – however, how often does that happen? 

It is best for the seller to take the time to research their item and know its value before offering to sell it.  Hopefully this article helps in that regard.

The other night while watching TV a Dominos Pizza commercial came up where they encouraged customers to complain so they can improve their pizza.  That is my attitude towards my collecting software.  If you have issues with NM Collector Software please let me know so I can improve it!

There are many ways to let me know including my public support forum.  In it are two sub forums of particular importance for improvement.  One is for reporting bugs and the other is for submitting enhancement requests.  I value both!  Please use these forums!  Don’t be afraid to post suggestions or complaints publicly so other people can read and comment on them as well.  This will help me gauge what will be of the most value in future releases.

As for bugs, no matter how hard I try to eradicate them some inevitably make it through.  NM Collector Software is not simplistic so it is very complicated code to provide the rich features that set it apart from the rest.  However, that also increases the chances that some bugs will get through.  Help me stamp them out by reporting any that you find!  Publicly reporting them is the best so that others can be easily made aware of the bugs and any workarounds to use until they can be fixed.

Enhancement requests are how I get new ideas that I might not have thought of myself!  I may not be able to incorporate all of them (for various reasons including technical and/or philosophical) but I value the suggestions.  Even though I may not be able to incorporate a suggestion directly it may lead to other improvements that I might not have thought of otherwise.  Please send your suggestions in! 

I know that my software can not be everything to everybody and there is no way that I can please everyone.  However, I do value feedback from multiple perspectives – every one has something to contribute, and, within reason, I do try to please every one who has decided to invest their time and money in my software.

Thanks in advance for your continued support in making NM Collector Software better!

Clay

I just received the following email regarding NM Gun Collector Software which I think deserves to be shared with others:

“I have been using Penguin software in the past which is not supported on Vista so I must go through this again. I realize that you do not have a crystal ball but is it your intentions to continue to support your software with the ever changing technological world we are in today?”

This is spot on as to why I changed from a Microsoft-based software development environment to a Java-based software development environment.  My old NM Gun Collector Software was written using the latest Microsoft technology available in 1999.  Microsoft promised developers using their technology that their applications  would continue to run in future Microsoft Operating systems into perpetuity.  Well, that turned out to be only partially true.

The advent of Microsoft Windows Vista resulted in changes to the installation model for applications that broke the installation of NM Gun Collector Software.   At the time, the Microsoft solution for fixing the problem entailed purchasing the latest Microsoft Development tools (at great expense), which in trun required migrating the old applications into that new development environment (requiring a very large software re-development effort), and finally redeploying the newly redeveloped application using the new Microsoft development environment.

This was too much for me to bear.  Besides the simple fact of feeling betrayed by Microsoft (which should be no surprise to anyone but I am always an optimist and tend to believe the promises of others) if I was to go through all of that effort why would I commit once again to an environment that I could not be sure would be supported in future versions of Windows?  Since I would have to redevelop my application anyway why not take another look at the available development environments with an eye towards the future?  Well, that is exactly what I did.

As a result, I decided to create NM Collector Software JE (Java Edition) as a Java application.  This offers many advantages including the easy availability of many free or low cost software development environments, the ability to deploy NM Collector Software JE to  multiple platforms (including Windows, Mac, and Linux), and the promise of longevity.  Sure, as java grows and changes I might have to tweak my application to continue to fit within the Java environment but NEVER AGAIN will I have to recreate it from scratch as Microsoft forced me to do.

However, over the many years that it has been available,  Java has stabilized so much that I do not expect to have to make a lot of changes to my application to keep it running long into the future.  So, in conclusion, here is the email response I gave to the person who asked the question:

“No for NM Gun Collector Software (the page you contacted me from).  Because it is Microsoft based the technology has proven to be unstable over time.

“Yes for  NM Collector Software JE (Java Edition).  That is exactly why I abandoned Microsoft technology in favor of Java.  Java allows me to continue to support  NM Collector Software JE not only across multiple operating systems but into the foreseeable future as well.”

You might think that as a result I left my thousands of NM Gun Collector Software customers in the same situation this poor Penguin software customer is in.  Well, if so, you would be wrong.  One of my primary goals in writing NM Collector Software JE was to provide a path for my existing customers to migrate their data into the new system so they would not have to do it manually.  Early on in the development of NM Collector Software JE I was able to meet that goal ( please see http://www.nmcollectorsoftware.com/support/Import.htm for more details ) and several of my customers have already used it.

Why have only a few done it?  Because they love NM Gun Collector Software so much they do whatever they can to keep it working on new systems.  In fact, I have helped them to come up with work arounds so as to keep it running in Vista and Windows 7.  However, I don’t know how long we can keep that up so they now have a proven path to move their data to NM Collector Software JE when they can no longer keep NM Gun Collector working on future versions of Microsoft Windows.

Clay