Questions about user's experience with selling on the fourthirdsphoto.com forum

[Michael Meissner]

With my latest GAS attack (gear acquistion syndrome), I have some lenses I would like to off-load. Since this question is about the process of selling lenses, I won't list the lenses here.

I would like to hear how people have found selling lenses, etc. through the fourthirdsphoto.com buy & sell forum, compared to other forums (I would probably consider using dpreview.com's for sale sub-forum instead of here), or selling on ebay. I have never sold on ebay, and I realize it has greater reach than these forums, but perhaps greater risk. I've bought 376 items from ebay since 2004, and I have 70 ratings from the sellers.

I know another place to sell gear is Amazon marketplace, but I don't know anything about that.

I have sold a few things on fourthirdsphoto.com in the past, but that was a few years ago. My sense is things have slowed down somewhat in terms of sale, both here and in other forums.

If you are curious, I just ordered an Olympus 12-40mm from keh.com. I also bought the Olympus 14-150mm II lens and Olympus 45mm new from my local photo store (Hunts Photo and Video) during the current Olympus sales. While I would prefer a quick sale, I should mention that if the lenses don't sell, they will sit on the shelf, and it will take a few more months to pay off the credit card. But lenses should be used and not just sit on the shelf.

[Don Kondra]

Hi Michael,

My experience with selling on this forum about a year and a half ago had been nothing but positive.

I tried dpreview and Fred Miranda with no success.

Eventually I think I had three lenses that didn't see any interest so they went to ebay.

Their templates are easy to use in creating the ads and I already had a paypal account.

One lens went low, one went slightly high and after all the fees, it worked out to roughly what I would have received here at my asking prices.

Cheers, Don

[Big Greg]

I haven't sold anything here recently, but I have in the past. The forum has been fairly dead, but it's still probably the largest gathering place for 4/3 users. I check every day to see what's on the buy/sell forum. This would still be the first place I would try to sell something. Here, and Craigslist.

[doofclenas]

I've bought and sold here, at mu-43.com, and uglyhedgehog.com. I've also sold directly to amazon with their trade in program. Shortly after olympus made it official and killed the 4/3 body, I checked the trade in value of my E5 and 8mm on amazon. The E5 sold for just below the average selling price here and the 8mm sold for $150 more than I paid for it. It worked out...and I bought the em1. I then decided to sell off all the native 4/3 glass 4 months later...the market was pretty much flat at the time and I took a fairly big hit on the 12-60 and 50. The 50-200 garnished a good price (about what I paid for it), as did the 7-14.