Stage 1/5 of collecting toys: The Newbie stage

Every collector goes through the Newbie stage, much like a freshman.  The Newbie is most curious about his or her new hobby and this is also the time of the most confusion.  Without proper ‘guidance’ from the more experienced Guru collectors, the Newbie can also end up being overcharged or going through ’extra’ steps just to get something simple done, like buying toys from overseas. 

I was luckier in that I picked up my toy collecting hobby at the start when the internet was still new to the world.  Hence I had an easier time learning about my hobby more gradually without too much information overload.  These days, many Newbies can jump start and leapfrog over the Newbie stage to the next Rapid Growth stage because of so much information (verbal, online and printed) provided by the Guru stage collectors. 

It is easy to recognise the Newbie on the forums or on Ebay.  On forums, there will also be a thread called ‘Introductions’ where all new members or newbies are encouraged or rather expected to introduce themselves to the community and tell everyone more about themselves, such as their profile, why they like this hobby and the specific toylines that they collect.

On Ebay, newbies usually have zero or less than 10 feedbacks (of course some Ebay members could really be experienced people who started a new Ebay account all over for whatever reasons like due to termination of their previous Ebay accounts).  Newbie behaviours are easy to spot like when they bid excessively and ridiculously high prices for common toys which all experienced Guru collectors know can be easily acquired for much lower and fairer prices. 

Newbies also tend to engage in unnecessary bidding wars in the closing hours or minutes of an auction for a relatively common toy.  The one who benefits from such bidding wars is of course the ‘lucky’ auction seller.  There is usually a fair market price for every toy and the best place to do a price check (a.k.a. PC) is on the forums.  There are usually senior members (i.e. Gurus) there who have a good idea of the market prices of specific toys.  The Newbie can also do his or her own price check on Ebay by referring to the page on ‘ended auctions list’ and typing in keywords to research from there.  I do not recommend using those printed price guide books or magazines because everyone knows that by the time you read them, the prices might have changed.  Those price guides are to be used as a rough estimation of the toy prices only.

Come back again tomorrow for Stage 2: The Rapid Growth Collector.