TOPIC: TD Tavern Tokens for Sale (post #1)

As a regular customer of Kirk's, I am a bit biased, but I found this post quite helpful. Thanks.

This post was incredibly insightful, and well thought out.

Kudos to you for the service you provide for this community, as well as your transparency.

One of the things I didn't see mentioned was they difficulties you sometimes encounter in dealing with certain individuals.

It's a class act who explains virtually everything about his business model for free, and doesn't mention once the challenges that come with it, or use them as an excuse.

Always an incredible ambassador for this game.

A thoughtful and realistic analysis.

I do something similar - I don't want to spend as much time maintaining my pricing, so I like tokens that I think will appreciate at higher prices than they are today worth.

For example, I'd list Pouch of Tulz at $150 even while it's a PyP. Not because I think that's the right price for a PyP, but because I don't want to have to keep fiddling with it. It's like an alarm/notification that fires off when someday, 3 years from now, someone will buy it at $150 - and then I'll look around at other vendors and see what it should go for.


The main thing I do differently is when I'm in the "shrink inventory" mode on a token, I often won't make an offer, or I'll make it with a lot of clarification like:

"I think this token would sell on eBay right now for $50. After fees I'd be left with $40. I'll offer you $35 on it, you might do better just selling it yourself."

Thank you for the positive feedback so far. I hesitated sharing so much information all in one post as it might not have come across the way in which I intended.

There are certainly occasionally difficult situations that come up. Fortunately a solid 99% of True Dungeon players are great people, but I have run into a few issues. I also sometimes make mistakes. Like one time I shipped 10 Onyx PYPs to the wrong (old) address and they never turned up. Ouch!

Or one time I paid some cash for 40 monster trophy sets, and when the package arrived I was missing one full set of 40 trophies. So I had 120 trophies all of the same three. The seller was certain that they shipped them all. I always want to protect my reputation so I paid anyways since I can't be completely certain I didn't lose them, or if they might have fallen out en route (note that I now have a camera that records all of my incoming and outgoing packaging).

Matthew, I also do that same shortcut at times. If I start running low on a current PYP but know I'm not going to be ordering any more, I will raise the price until such time as something causes me to re-evaluate (for example I end up picking up some more PYPs all of a sudden,).

Kirk Bauer wrote: Thank you for the positive feedback so far. I hesitated sharing so much information all in one post as it might not have come across the way in which I intended.

There are certainly occasionally difficult situations that come up. Fortunately a solid 99% of True Dungeon players are great people, but I have run into a few issues. I also sometimes make mistakes. Like one time I shipped 10 Onyx PYPs to the wrong (old) address and they never turned up. Ouch!

Or one time I paid some cash for 40 monster trophy sets, and when the package arrived I was missing one full set of 40 trophies. So I had 120 trophies all of the same three. The seller was certain that they shipped them all. I always want to protect my reputation so I paid anyways since I can't be completely certain I didn't lose them, or if they might have fallen out en route (note that I now have a camera that records all of my incoming and outgoing packaging).

Matthew, I also do that same shortcut at times. If I start running low on a current PYP but know I'm not going to be ordering any more, I will raise the price until such time as something causes me to re-evaluate (for example I end up picking up some more PYPs all of a sudden,).

When I'm in the situation like Matthew mentions, I'll often just list the token without a price in my store as a placeholder, to remind me to price them at the right time. For instance, for the Ioun Stone Silver Nugget I'm in a "buy" mode now, so it has no price, and I'll add a price when I switch to "sell" mode.

Mike Steele wrote: When I'm in the situation like Matthew mentions, I'll often just list the token without a price in my store as a placeholder, to remind me to price them at the right time. For instance, for the Ioun Stone Silver Nugget I'm in a "buy" mode now, so it has no price, and I'll add a price when I switch to "sell" mode.

I can't currently do that today, but certainly it is something I might look into adding for my shopping cart system. I mean it is technically possible, but there are a few things I'll have to work out first. Ideally in that case I would just not show the product, but then it is complicated if somebody also has a consignment listing.

I've dealt with Kirk on at least 6 occasions and he has been a class act every single time.

At Gen Con 51, he actually tracked me down to deliver ~$7 worth of product. There was an e-mail communication that he forgot about and in order to make things right, he went out of his way texting and calling me so he could meet me where I was playing board games and set the transaction right.

TD Tavern is an awesome resource for the game and I'm glad Kirk is around to put so much care and thought into its operation.

I think what a lot of value Kirk offers me is that I can preorder tokens before they even ship and I don't have to do 3-4 weeks of transmutes and pay the shipping on all those transmutes back and forth. Lets say I am missing some Parchment for a transmute so I need to order and pay shipping on that and then order my tokens from true dungeon and then ship and order a transmute then once they are transmuted I have to maybe do another round of transmuting again. Now I know I could go to a con and do most of that bulk transmuting in person but here's the thing I don't have unlimited space for my tokens. I usually keep 3-4 binder plus a case and a box of tokens. When I get my order for the year I basically sort then that night or over 2 days and then I have to send the transmute back in otherwise I just have tokens everywhere. It is also nice for me when I am still finding old token stashes from the late 2000's to be able to give those tokens to someone who values them and will sell them to others instead of me just sitting on tokens I am never going to collect or use.

I recently had to sell some tokens to make ends meet after a client stiffed me a ton for a job, but kirk made the consignment process easy on his website to get some cash for some of my extra tokens and helped me out. Its nice to have that option because I don't think I could have sold most of those tokens for the rates I got even minus the discounts and commissions on the forums or even ebay. Ebay takes 10% fees and can be a real pain to deal with.

Kirk is great. His business has been great for me/us.

TD is not an efficient market. Yes, a lot of eBay selling prices are fairly close to what I put my valuation on a token at, but it's still not remotely an efficient market and you get such oddities as no one bidding on a Charm of Avarice at 1100 from someone with decent reputation.

You can find one forumite who has a great price on a token and not on another, then another forumite that's the reverse. So, I don't get why someone would be complaining. If don't want to sell something cheap, don't sell it. I've made deals I've regretted, won auctions on eBay I never expected to win which sometimes was pretty awesome and sometimes wasn't that great, etc. - you make mistakes and learn or ... don't pull the trigger and regret not pulling the trigger and still learn - learn that this isn't an efficient market with clearly defined value. Can just look at current 8k auction to see things I find interesting.

I've transacted with Kirk several times and he has always treated me fairly. If he's offering a price for a token its probably exactly what that token is worth.

That said, Kirk I do think you need to be aware that a lot of people use your site as a first stop for checking the prices on things weather you intended it that way or not precisely because you always have things in stock.

Picc wrote: I've transacted with Kirk several times and he has always treated me fairly. If he's offering a price for a token its probably exactly what that token is worth.

That said, Kirk I do think you need to be aware that a lot of people use your site as a first stop for checking the prices on things weather you intended it that way or not precisely because you always have things in stock.

It’s true. I have considered exposing actual sales history, possibly as part of making a consignment listing. This might give better indications of value.

I want to give my kudos to Kirk!

I have bought many thousands of dollars from Kirk... and I know I paid sometimes what some would consider an outrageous price but I did pay it because I wanted it and couldn’t find it cheaper elsewhere. I have als gotten what I feel are awesome deals from him.

He has always treated me fairly and I trust him implicitly.

I am not in the game to make money... but for the enjoyment.