Time Is Now / 25

Bargains on eBay seem increasingly rare these days. But sometimes you can pick one up as a result of a seller making some basic listing errors.

Let's just say, for example, that you were selling a marble red vinyl copy of the late 90s straight edge compilation 'The Time Is Now' 7". You'd probably be pretty keen to mention somewhere in the auction that this particular version is numbered out of only 25 copies, right? I mean, completely failing to mention this at all would be a pretty basic error, don't you think? It could only be worse if you also somehow also failed to take a photo of the numbered dust sleeve which clearly shows the #/25 written in thick marker pen. I mean, you'd be completely missing the main selling point of the record. Pretty much the only other mistake you could make would be to not show the vinyl at all in main listing photo and instead opt to show only the (crappy) photocopied sleeve. Thinking about it, I reckon that if you made these mistakes then you're really not going to do a very good job of making the record seem as attractive as it really is, and you're probably going to lose a lot of potential bids. On the positive side, however, you're pretty damn likely to make someone's day as you leave the door wide open for a person who knows exactly what this thing is to win it for a really low price. Someone like, for example, me.

I guess this whole disaster could only be worse if you then saw someone else sell their copy of the same record about two weeks later for about three times as much just because they took an extra photo and mentioned that there are only 25 of these things out there.