We get asked by a lot of customer and potential customers asking us to purchase their watches. 9/10 of these come to nothing as our valuation is well below what they are expecting. Sellers quite often have a value in mind for their watch, i.e., they’ve had a look online at e.g., eBay / Chrono24 etc and think that a professional dealer will pay just below this. The truth of the matter is (and we never make a secret of this) you could always potentially get a better selling price selling privately than to a dealer. What we do offer is a trusted, safe, fast and completely transparent way to sell your watch. There are hundreds of scammers and time wasters out there and selling a Watch isn’t always as easy as it looks!
There are numerous ‘invisible’ costs that many people aren’t aware of or don’t consider when selling to us. Below is an example of what typical costs may be involved in a Watch sale. Let’s take a hypothetical example where we buy a Watch for £600 and sell for £999 on eBay – a hypothetical profit of £399. Out of that, we need to deduct:
VAT on the margin - £66.51
eBay fees (includes 2% promoted listing fee) - £146
Postage & packaging - £15
Watch Register search - £3.36
So that £399 profit has rapidly reduced to around £170. What hasn’t been costed above is time spent preparing/polishing/servicing the watch, time spent on photography/videos and descriptions/ Social Media etc. At the end of it all, if the watch develops a fault within the warranty period, we absorb the cost of putting this right, which could be well in excess of the profit made!
We’re not looking for or expecting sympathy here! We do very well out of our business but feel it’s important to share that the simple equation of sale price minus cost price doesn’t equal profit, far from it. Please bear this in mind when approaching us for a valuation 😊