How to Price your Classified Listings

Please feel free to use this Pricing Guide to help you decide on a sale price for your n-scale item. Let us be clear. The following is only our suggestions on how to arrive at a sale price. Sellers should feel free to set any price they like, even ones significantly higher or lower than our guidelines below.

Important things to keep in mind when pricing an item:

When deciding on a price, it is very important to note the condition of your item (both the product and its packaging).

Buyers and sellers use a standard and accepted Grading Scale [C-10 (Mint Brand New) to C-1 (Junk)] to denote the condition of a product and its packaging.

Look here to understand the Grading Scale, courtesy of one of our curators, used to denote product and packaging conditions.

Some General Rules for Pricing Items

Sometimes, deciding how to price an item can be confusing and time consuming. Clearly the easiest way to come up with a price is to understand the current 'market' for that item. IE If you know what buyers have recently paid for a specific item, then you can get a better, more realistic idea of how to price your item.

TroveStar endeavors to make pricing an item as easy as possible.

TroveStar provides users with a fast and easy way to get pricing data on any item that is listed in the TroveStar N-Scale DB and that has sold on e-bay or the TroveStar Classified Section (good reference sources for pricing).

Text such as 'One of these is for sale on eBay right now for: $8.00' may appear above an item image on individual train pages. For example, on January 20, 2017, if you visited the TroveStar page for Atlas - 3526 - Stock Car, 40 Foot, Cattle - Wabash - 15258, the following text 'One of these is for sale. . .' would appear.

When you click on this 'One of these is for sale on eBay right now for: $8.00' link, it will take you to a TroveStar page that lists sales results [by source (eBay, TroveStar Classified)] for that item.

TroveStar does a pretty good job of finding relevant items, but sometimes this is not the case. This happens especially when the TroveStar engine finds a lot of items for sale or the manufacturer uses the same product code for two different items. Also, sometimes different varieties exist due to Blue Labels.

Only pricing data on an item that matches your item (and its condition) should be used

If data / closed transactions (actual sale prices) exist for an item, then the highest sales price can be used.

Prices based on no closed transaction / sold items, but items are for sale (there are active listings):

Use a price that is below the lowest price.

If the lowest price is $20.00 or less, then you can subtract $1.00 from that price.

If the lowest price is $25.00 or more, then you can subtract $5.00 from that price.

If there are both closed transactions and active listings available for an item, then you can choose a price between the highest closed transaction price and the lowest active auction price.

If there is absolutely no pricing data available to you, then you can follow the general rule of thumb and price cars that are less complex to make and cheaper than those that are more complex / costly to manufacture:

In determining a price, rarity is more important and sometimes published price guides like N-Scale Reference Guide. by Jack Armstrong with Bob McAllan can be helpful.

Questions? Comments? Please feel free to contact us at admin@trovestar.com. We are happy to clarify anything via e-mail.