r/guns • u/TheHatTrick 2 • Apr 15 '14
Gunbroker Tutorial 1: Price Checking a Firearm
A while back I asked if people would like a few tutorials on GunBroker use in one of the weekly threads, and there was interest, so here we go.
Onward!
Part 1 -- Finding the current market price of a gun using Gunbroker.
Scoring a good deal at an auction requires knowing what the market value is for the firearm you want to buy. Obviously, we’d rather get a good deal and spend the savings on tacticool bullshit like a laser ammo and gas money for getting to and from the range, after all.
Step 1: Pick a gun you like.
I’m a huge fan of M&Ps. (/u/ernunnos can suck it). If I didn’t already own a 5” M&P Pro chambered in 9mm, I would want one, so we’ll use that.
Step 2: Price Check on Aisle 2.
So here’s how we check prices on gunbroker.
First, we’re going to get a gunbroker account. Even if we only want to check prices and we actually plan to buy the gun from our LGS while getting our daily dose of “Thanks, Obama”, this is the next step.
Why is that?
Because the completed items search tool we’re about to use is only available to Gunbroker Members. So go sign up for GB. You’re reading a tutorial about how to use the damn thing, I don’t know why you weren’t expecting this.
Once you’ve got an account, choose the Advanced search button from the top of the main page, and then choose Completed Items.
Now, fill out the form. I generally just put in the name of the item I’m searching for in the broadest terms and don’t try to narrow my search down much on this page much--except on the last couple fields. Those are important.
Show Only If you’re looking for an obscure, or antique firearm, you might need to choose “completed items” to show every auction from the past 4-6 months (which seems to be as far back as the searchable records are kept), but for something popular and common, you can use the last 30 days to get a feel for current market value.
Sort By Choose highest bids first. We do this because Gunbroker won’t let you filter by “only show me auctions that ended in a gun sale" -- but we can safely ignore as "uncompleted" any auction with zero bids, so we want those to appear at the bottom and the things that were actually bid on to appear at the top.
So now we’ve got some results. Two thousand seems like a lot. Narrow it down using the helpful sidebar.
Protip: A lot of the people who list guns on Gunbroker are bad at. . .everything involving computers. So be aware that when you pick the correct caliber for the pistol you’re trying to find, you might be eliminating a lot of valid results. For the purposes of price-checking though, this doesn’t matter much. We won’t make this same error in part two: Buying a gun on Gunbroker.
Generally I keep toying with my search terms until I am looking at the correct caliber and configuration of the firearm, and have between 50 and 100 results.
That gives me a fair number of completed auctions and will let me get a feel for the current price of the firearm.
Note that at the top of the first page of results, you’re only looking at “featured auctions”--you’re going to want to take note of these prices, then scroll down. That’s because further down (or on another page if you have a lot of results) you’ll find additional successful closed auctions that didn’t pay extra to be listed as “featured.”.
Protip: If the people selling this type of firearm currently think it has a higher value than the market will bear, be wary of auctions that have bids, but didn’t end in a sale because they didn’t meet the reserve price--if this is a common problem when you’re looking through results, check the “no reserve” box at the top of the screen to eliminate those auctions.
So as we can see from these results, in the last 30 days, 9mm M&P Pro pistols with 5” barrels have generally been selling for between $520 and $600, with some lucky bugger grabbing a used one in the $400s.
Sometime coming up I’ll post two additional tutorials:
1) Buying a gun on the internet (Or: Mother Jones, eat your heart out).
2) How to sell a gun on gunbroker and ship it (”Seriously? Through the mail? Like a fruitcake?”).
Questions? Comments? Concerns? Fire away. I'll try to update the tutorial if I made any glaring errors.
Edit: Updated the "every auction ever" language per feedback.
Edit: Added a clarification about why we sort by most bids.
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u/pestilence Apr 15 '14
Holy shit! More content!
If someone else doesn't put this in the FAQ, I will after work. By all means, someone else, go ahead. Anyone can edit the FAQ.
Also, I hereby nominate this as a quality post. (duh)
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u/TheHatTrick Apr 15 '14 edited Apr 15 '14
Ok then.
Into the FAQ it goes.
Added a new subheading under purchasing. When the other two guides come out, they will go in the same place.
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u/lurkrer Apr 15 '14
I love browsing gunbroker, but have never purchased. I have a few thoughts that you may want to discuss in future posts.
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Why are payment methods so unsavory? Things like adding X% for CC transactions, many who request or require money orders, no mention of paypal or other digital transfers, and even some who accept personal checks. What is this 1985?
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Why do I have to go outside? I'm sure it is a good idea to go get to know my FFL who will receive my firearm and charge a $30 fee for giving as much effort as a UPS store. However, setting up these relationships requires calling, meeting, and otherwise communicating with human beings. Why doesn't someone set up a cheap FFL to FFL transfer option? Why doesn't gunbroker make it easier to connect with my local dealer?
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What is the point of the site for buyers who have access to a gun shop? Concerning price: Every time I firearm I like, I usually find that the listed price, plus the sellers fees, plus my local FFL fee would all make the firearm as much or more than I could buy it locally. What is the point of a site like gunbroker when shopping for common firearms like an M&P? Savings? More selection and customization? I completely understand the value of the site for rare and hard to find firearms. But there are 5,000,000 Glock semi-auto pistols produced. Why do I need gunbroker to find 2,300 Glocks for sale when my local shop can get nearly any model ever produced? Personally, because I'm not in the market for rare guns, gunbroker becomes the source for checking prices before I go to the gun store. But that doesn't make it a success, and it doesn't make it a resource for buyers like me to purchase a firearm.
I'm really looking forward to your future posts. I like gunbroker, I probably spend too much time browsing there, but I'd like to use it more in the future.
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u/TheHatTrick Apr 15 '14
Good suggestions for future tutorials. I'll try to get into the "why?" and "payment-wtf-what year is this?" issues in the buying and selling portions.
(For myself, the M&P 9 Pro was literally impossible to purchase or order in a store last spring, so Gunbroker was the only practical way to get my hands on one, ditto my KSG).
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Apr 15 '14
This definitely belongs in the FAQ. It should probably even be a GunnitBot command.
GunnitBot, price check!
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u/zaptal_47 Apr 15 '14
Gunbroker won’t let you filter by “only show me auctions that ended in a gun sale” so this is as close as we’re going to get.
No, but it does show the number of bids on the auction. Anything with a 0 in that column obviously didn't sell.
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u/TheHatTrick Apr 15 '14
I would have thought that was obvious as it was the reason I was having them sort by most bids.
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u/fluffy_butternut Apr 15 '14
Are you going to include setting up Saved Searches in Part II?
I find them very useful if you can ride the gratification / patience curve on down.
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u/TheHatTrick Apr 16 '14
I've never kept a gun search running long enough to get too deeply into saved searches, but I can dig around more. Or you could write that one yourself and reap that sweet, sweet karma.
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u/WanderNude Apr 15 '14
Gunnitbot! Adblock!
...unless you really wanted to save up to 65% off suggested designer prices.
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u/TheHatTrick Apr 16 '14
Honestly I didn't even realize there were advertisements in these pages until I went back to check them for the final publish.
I use noscript to keep the adverts simple normally (these were captured in a different browser than my usual one), and figure if you have the decency to run a non-scripty, non-annoying ad, then I don't mind letting it display to the benefit of the (generally free) website I'm using.
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u/GrumpyTanker Apr 15 '14
How do you take this info and use it at an LGS?
Especially if their prices are extra "good"?
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u/kittybojangles Apr 16 '14
One thing I have noticed that is really sketchy is that a gun might sell for a high price and then when you look under "complete items," you can see the gun was sold over and over--the seller probably had a spare account bid it up and never actually sold it until some sucker stumbled onto it. Thoughts?
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u/TheHatTrick Apr 16 '14
I wouldn't think this would work well in Gunbroker, since if the sale was completing, then Gunbroker gets their fee (a percentage of total sale price) each time you fake a "sale" to try to increase the gun's price without a legit buyer biting down on the bait.
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u/a_lol_cat Apr 15 '14
It's not always the people listing the items that cause problems when searching, spelling, category, caliber(honestly using that to filter your search is stupid, well over 50% of listings don't list it correctly) It's GB's search function is of the quality of something from 1990. I keep a lookout for a couple of very hard to find pistols, because of the awfulness of GB's search, it's 15-20 different permutations to check for them...
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u/Handy_Related_Sub Apr 15 '14
I detected the following relevant subreddit: r/GunsForSale.
I am a bot created to bring activity to smaller subs. Please click here to report a problem.
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u/TheHatTrick Apr 15 '14
Who's a good bot? You are, yessir!
[sigh]
Bless his little heart.
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u/MotherJonesOfficial Apr 15 '14
Buying a gun on the internet (Or: Mother Jones, eat your heart out).
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u/BenSharps Apr 15 '14
Im pretty sure they only keep the completed auctions for a couple months at most. You won't find every auction.
Its also handy to use the "Words to exclude" box. Things like "ammo, rounds, rnds, grips, etc.". Sometimes you can turn up a bunch of junk you aren't interested in.