hi gang!
Anybody ever visit Watchbox and look at their pricing trends? Do you think they’re accurate or simply indicative of a few auction site results? Thanks everyone...

 

don't know them. But looking at the site it seems to me, like Chrono24, Catwiki, and others that their best interests lie with overpriced timepieces.....I don't think I've seen a definitive and accurate site. The best way is probably watch a helluva lot of ebay auctions and see what they actually go for, not what the folk BIN label them....Example Jaeger lecoultre Futurematic. You'll see these for BIN sales in the 1500-3500 USD range , but with a no reserve they tend to go for 600-1100.

 

Wow! That’s terrific advice, Chips! I’m sorry my naïveté is shining so brightly! I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to enlighten me. I’ll attempt to keep my inane questions to a minimum. Thanks for your patience! Cheers!

 

ps-I’m a huge Peter O’Toole fan, and we had a fairly extensive pen pal relationship some years ago. He even sent me two books he had written and inscribed fo me. Miss him still...

 

What a cool story. Lawrence of Arabia is in my top 5 favourite films...then there's Murphy's War, and that quite brilliant comedy "my Favourite Year" towards the end of his career . Brilliant actor! Did you ever get a chance to go hellraising with him?

 

Chips! We met up in NY once as he was about to begin a book tour. I did my best not to appear star struck which was quite easy because he made me feel so comfortable. The doctor had him off of whiskey, so he(we) compensated with a couple of kegs of Guinness, and I don’t know how many bottles of wine. Our evening ended at Pete’s Tavern with Pedro singing Gaelic songs at the top of his lungs! I still carry this coin he gave me that signifies a visit he made some twenty years prior to a well known establishment he described as being ‘horrible hosts.’ What a marvelous person he was. Completely unaffected by fame or celebrity, and remarkably nice to one and all. It was a most memorable evening that remains wonderfully vivid in my memory! Cheers!!!

 

Hi Butchhuff - WatchBox is a sister company to Govberg Jewelers. The app was designed to aggregate data from auction sites as well as internal and wholesale sources to give a general idea of pricing by reference number, across approximately 80,000 references. You will see a "confidence" score to give you better guidance of how confident the system is in the data - the more recent data, and the less variable that data is, the more confident the algorithm is. Since it is automated and watches vary by condition, inclusion of accessories, etc - there will always be examples of reference numbers that are off (and sometimes WAY off). However, the feedback over the last year plus that it has been live has been very positive and we do use it ourselves to help set prices for us to buy and sell watches.

I would quibble with the point that it is in our interest to have the prices be high in the app. We are both a buyer and seller of watches, so artificially high prices make it harder for us to acquire watches at the prices we need to stay in business. Our goal is to provide transparency into the marketplace as much as we can - so we make our margins based on our ability to quickly acquire, refurbish, and sell watches to keep our inventory turning quickly.

Hope this is helpful and thanks for your feedback!

David Kaplan
Chief Marketing Officer, Govberg/WatchBox

 

David, thank you for enlightening me! I appreciate you taking the time! Cheers!!!