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^ Homework.

This includes looking at the trading vs. wanting ratio for your pin on PinPics - i.e. a pin with 3 people trading and 250 wanting is a pretty rare pin - a pin with 250 people trading and 3 wanting is not. So having more desired pins will generally trade better.

Also, learn about popular themes and characters - Haunted Mansion, Tinker Bell and Maleficent are popular - Monstro the whale from Pinocchio or a dancing flower from Fantasia? Not so much. So having pins with popular themes and characters will generally trade better.

Check the trades and sales boards here to see what people are looking for in trade or sale value - see how much pins are actually being sold for.

Check secondary market sources such as ebay to see what pins you have are selling for and what pins you want are selling for.

Having pins with higher secondary values will generally trade better.

It's a lot to juggle when you're first starting out - when I started I kept a file of all that stuff and carried it with me for reference - but by having that info sorted beforehand, I could then jump in and start making good, informed trades right away. This is not to say that there won't be trades that afterwards you say 'D'oh! Why did I make that trade?' It's all part of the learning curve. But the more you know, the more your collection can grow.

You're welcome.

I know it can sound complicated and even cumbersome - and I'll qualify by saying the above info was how I approached the learning curve and it has worked well for me to keep all that info in mind when I'm trading. But for other people, just saying 'I have this pin, but I like that pin more - would you take this pin for that pin?' works for them. I guess I just prefer to know as much as I can and learning that info has helped me make a lot of trades.

^ That's where you need to take the other factors into consideration for trading - is it a popular theme or character? Is it selling high on the secondary market or not? Also, how recent a pin is can affect rarity/value. There are some older rack pins (open edition pins sold in the parks) that I've been looking for for almost two years and find very hard to trade for. They were common pins, but it's been so many years since they were released that there are few people left trading them. That's the other thing about PinPics - not everybody listed on there as trading or wanting is still actively involved in pins, though they may have been a few years back.

It can be a balancing act to figure it all out - and sometimes that just comes with time and experience.

Also, it's a funny thing, but some pins that are hard to trade for are pretty easy to buy on ebay. So sometimes just buying a pin is easier than trading for it. Given that you've said in the other thread that you're looking for Eve pins from Wall-E - your advantage is that these are all new pins, only a few may have sold out, and you might actually just be able to buy most of them directly. You might consider putting up a thread on the sales board listing the pins you're looking for and see if anyone can pick them up for you if you pay for the pin plus shipping cost.

Justl1keraven wrote:

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Jabberwocky wrote:

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So if you want it now, you may pay a bit of a premium for it. But six months from now you may get it at a lower price. If you want to wait that six months.

So are you implying that the Eve DSF pin will drop lower than its retail price? I mean, if it's sold out, wouldn't people pay more for it?

Eventually most (though not all) pins drop to or below retail price - it doesn't seem logical, but it is often true. If I had extras of that Eve pin for trade now, I would try to trade them sooner rather than later while the pin and movie are popular. But that's just my two cents worth.

LOL Pins are an investment like any other - sometimes they go up, sometimes they go down, but so long as you like what you have, you're doing just fine.