Are you in the market to buy more comic books? Let’s be honest- who isn’t!
It doesn’t matter if you’re buying comics for the love of collecting or if you’re looking to benefit financially – or both! – you’ll want to ensure you’re buying them at a fair price. Buying your comic books at a fair price ensures things don’t get unnecessarily complicated or difficult down the line, for a number of potential reasons.
Here are some tips on ensuring you buy comics at a fair price next time you’re shopping around:
In this article
What Is A Fair Price For A Comic Book?
At a very basic level, buying a comic book at a fair price means that you’re not buying it too far above or below fair market value. The next obvious question would be, what is the fair market value of a comic book?
That’s a bit tougher of a question to answer, only because there’s no real correct answer. As with all collectibles, the price of a comic book is simply what someone else is willing to pay for it. There are ways to determine the market value of a comic book, but it’s more of an art than a science.
There are three solid ways you can determine a comic’s market value with some level of accuracy:
Check What Similar Comics Sold For. Because a comic book’s value is simply what someone else is willing to pay, what better way than to get real world data? Lucky for us, you can utilize a tool like eBay Advanced Search to find similar comic books, filter for completed auctions that sold, and see what their final selling price was. That should be a great baseline to work from, and from there you can adjust for market conditions, the condition of the comic book versus yours, and many other factors to really hone in on a price.
Work With An Expert Broker. Seeking advice from a trusted expert is another great route to take when determining the value of a comic book.
Get A Second Opinion On A Purchase Price. No matter what route you take, always try to get a second and third opinion before making any big purchase decisions!
Why It’s Important To Buy Comics At A Fair Price
The reasons for not wanting to overpay for a comic book are pretty obvious. If you’re into collecting comic books simply for the love of collecting, if you overpay for comic books you won’t be able to collect as many books as you otherwise would have been able to. Similarly, if your goal of collecting is to gain financially, then you’ll want to avoid overpaying because it will directly affect your bottom line profits when you sell, plus you won’t be able to make as many transactions as you otherwise would have.
But why would you not want to drastically underpay for a comic? Those reasons are less obvious, but they are definitely just as important to understand. It really comes down to reputation. The comic book community is small, and if you gather a reputation for only making low-ball offers or only capitalizing on unfair deals, other collectors, traders, stores and organizations won’t want to work with you in the future. When it comes to successfully collecting comic books, having a network you can always go back to for buying and selling makes the process much easier and enjoyable, so you’ll want to do everything you can to preserve that network and your reputation.
Let Sparkle City Comics Be Your #1 Comic Book Resource
Sparkle City Comics is one of the largest buyers and sellers of comic books nationwide because we pride ourselves on providing the best customer service possible and we staff our company with experts in the industry. We’d love to use our industry experience to help guide you through your buying and selling process! If there’s anything we can do to assist, please feel free to reach out and one of our experts will help the best they can!
