by Anglobritish » Tue Dec 23, 2014 8:10 pm
Hi Guy's,
Firstly I would like to wish you all a very "Merry Christmas", I also think we should tell Dave what a great service he is providing for all of us.
In my opinion I think sites like this are so important, especially for the novice collectors who have just started collecting coin operated machines. I know there are many experienced collectors and dealers that are members of the CoinOpCollectorForum who offer a wealth of information that is priceless to the novice collector, and all of this for free, where else would you get this kind of top quality knowledge so cheaply, when you have characters like Bill Whelan, advising you what to look for when collecting trade simulators, probably the most knowledgeable person alive on the subject, and Dave who has probably spent more time over the last 20 odd years looking for treasures in the coin machine field than most of you young new collectors put together, you must listen to their advise, as they are the true appraisers of the collectible coin machine hobby.
Some of you seem to think that I am knocking Ebay when I criticize them for the way they treat buyers and sellers of coin operated machines. I don't think that some of you get what I mean, especially those members that sell on Ebay and have very little knowledge of the problems they cause for collectors in general.
I am going to try to explain a little more where I am coming from.
When most of us older collectors started collecting coin operated machines, we would go on the road sometimes for weeks, following leads from people who told us, this guy down the road as some old machines in his barn, there is an old lady who's husband died and he was a coin machine operator in the 1950's, she may have some machines, or after we may have put an add in the local paper, we got an answer to that add, from people saying this guy as this or this guy as that, perhaps we would get a phone call at 7:00 in the evening while we were having dinner, from a person who says they have a very old slot machine they wanted to get rid of, I know that there was many a time, when I would get up from the table grab a few dollars and tell the wife, "I won't be Long" and take of in a van thinking all the time that I was driving to the place, I wonder if it is a Caille, could it be a Liberty Bell, and so on. Only to find when I got their, it was a common Gum Ball machine.
But the excitement was the hunt, hoping to find that one elusive machine that is found perhaps only once in a lifetime,
Although Ebay as made many of those elusive machines come to light, it as also educated those people who did not have a clue of what they have, and still don't, but because they have seen a particular machine sell for several thousand dollars on Ebay, they think they have one that is worth just as much, even if it is only worth a few hundred dollars.
Then you have the scam artist who knows every trip in the book when it comes selling to the honest and unsuspecting public.
And like Slot Dynasty say's, Ebay should have a professional team of people who understand the buying and selling of coin operated equipment, so as to stop the scam artist who offers deals that are so ridiculous that any collector with any knowledge of these machines knows right away that it as to be bogus.
One of my business's is manufacturing video games for the home market, I also design and convert many modern day video games to use the LCD type of monitors, one of my big and most successful conversions was to the Golden Tee Golf Games, while doing these conversions, I would take in part exchange the various older model kit's, I thought it was a good idea to offer these kit's on Ebay, believe me it was a nightmare, I had buyers wanting to know if they could do this, if they could do that, and when I told them no, they argued that so and so said this and so and so said that, I would tell them they cannot do certain things and also they should not even attempt certain things if they were not experienced to do so, I would even refer them to Incredible Technologies, the company that makes the machines, to cut a long story short, they would blow up the board, complain to Ebay, who in turn would tell Paypal to hold back the payment until the seller satisfied the buyer, an impossible task as the seller had blown up a perfectly good logic board, and although we had great feedback from many satisfied customers, we were still the villain, One guy bought a kit, he wanted to do a crazy thing with a bunch of boards, we told him even before he bid on the item, that what he wanted to do was physically as well as technically impossible, he still bought the kit, he paid $450.00 through Paypal, after he blew up the boards, he complained to me, I sent him several more boards at my cost for free, he then still complained to Ebay, who in turn passed it on to Paypal, who in turn took back $450.00 from my account, I then spent several hours going back and forth with ebay, I finally spoke to a supervisor who I asked to look at the 47 e-mails that I had sent to the buyer, after looking at those e-mails the supervisor said it was clear that the buyer was at fault and re-instated the $450.00 back into our account, 3 weeks later they took it back again stating that the buyers credit card company had done a charge back, So that was enough for me, the moral of my story is Ebay does not understand the coin operated machine business. and like Slot Dynasty says they just want their money.
So I closed that end of my business down.
Freddy Bailey