Thank you for your offer!

Please excuse this impersonal reply to your email offering to buy our items for less than their stated price. We're always happy to hear from people interested in our items, and we read all the email we receive from people interested in buying.    Unfortunately,  we cannot accept your offer
for a number of reasons.  Please, read this FAQ to learn how to make a reasonable offer.

WHY ARE THINGS SO EXPENSIVE?

Once you know what goes into a price, things won't look so expensive to you.  Setting a fair price requires considerable careful thought.  Consider what goes into setting a fair price; it costs money to sell anything.  Even yard and garage sales take time, effort and energy. However, selling only via flea markets, yard and garage sales won't feed and clothe you, because when you add up all your costs, you'll probably find you've worked a 10 hour day for practically nothing.  To endure in business, sellers must charge enough, and sell enough, to pay bills on time, pay employees, cover expenses,  and have enough left over to buy nice things to offer the next time customers want something.  If they don't, sellers are paying customers to buy from them.

EBay is a giant international flea market, garage and yard sale.
EBay charges $$ to rent space on eBay and you must pay it in order to sell on eBay;  you pay this rental space fee whether or not your items sell.  You must also pay eBay $$ part of your profits when you do sell something on eBay. When you use PayPal to accept payments, you pay PayPal $$ part of your profits for their service in accepting a customer's payment on your behalf.

Items don't sell right away. On eBay, for example, there are literally millions of items for sale and most are typically "on the market" for about a week;  it takes time for the  right buyer to find your fabulous thing.  The fact that things take time to sell , and that they might not sell right away,  is not a reflection of their worth or value; it is simply an artifact of the eBay marketplace.  Your expenses include the cost of renting space for as long as it takes to sell your item,  while you wait for the right buyer to find it. Advertising might help buyers to find your item faster, but selling still takes time, and costs money, and you need to consider this as an honorable cost of doing business.

When we put an item up for sale, we put it up for the absolute minimum price we find appropriate.  We consider a lot of information when we set prices:  what it cost to make, what was paid for it , what similar items sell for in the current market,
what it is "worth" in an efficient marketplace, what it costs us to sell it, what it costs us to pack it and to ship it, what it costs to store it until we sell it,  what it costs us to tell customers it's for sale, etc.  Owners of consigned pieces authorize a price after consulting with us, and not only are we unable to accept offers lower than that price, we earn only a small percentage of the sale.

For more than 10 years, we've been eBay PowerSellers.
We can tell you innumerable stories of items that sold only after 20 auctions or after months in a "store."  At auctions, sometimes items sell for several times their minimum bid after attracting no bids at all for many rounds.
It sounds odd, but that's the way it is.
Most items take time to sell ; most items do not sell right away.
All our items are easily worth at least our asking price, and we will eventually sell them for that price or more.