Something funny went on with the Tribute and Custom auctions you're referring to. When I saw this Tribute auction list for $7000:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=140296449079 I knew the price was too high, so I thought it was a good time to sell mine, which I was going to have to do within a few weeks. I listed mine for $5000 here:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=180323562958 My Tribute is three years newer than the other one, and is also in like new condition. The other guy says in both his auctions that the guitar is in mint condition as has never been played. That's a strangely ambiguous phrasing, even though the rest of his auction listings show he's a native speaker of English. He's trying to imply his guitars are new, and he lists both a 2001 and 1998 guitar as new. The lie is so obvious that it's more a kind of wishful thinking than a deception. I've seen many auctions where people claim a guitar is new even though the rest of their honest description shows clearly it's not. Notice that he didn't use the word new in the auction title because eBay frequently catches and cancels auctions that misrepresent in the title, whereas you can get away with it in the listing's body until someone complains. Certain keywords, like new and mint, in the title invoke eBay scrutiny. You can't even say like new in a title. I'm currently getting around that (when it's a truthful, accurate description) by writing mintY or like newY in titles until eBay clamps down tighter.
A couple days after I listed my significantly better deal on the same guitar, both his auctions suddenly ended with Buy It Now's within six minutes of each other. See his other auction here:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=140296410778 And the buyers' id's were kept private, though that doesn't matter as much now that eBay anonymizes bidders to some degree. Considering all the circumstances, the two sales are really odd. I might have expected him to take down his Tribute until after mine sold at $5000 to then try to get $7000 on the same or less desirable guitar. My best guess, though, is that he got some kind of offer for a package deal on both, and they sold for *substantially* under the $7000 and $8000 that appear in the completed auctions, and he ate the higher eBay fees or somehow got them lowered by appealing to eBay that buyer and seller had agreed to a lower price. There's no way someone paid $7000 for a 2001 Tribute when my like new 2004 was available for $2000 less, unless they made a stupid and costly error. And in the last three months I saw an even newer Tribute, with the valuable upgrades of LED's and continuous wood back panels, go for $6600 on eBay, with one other bid at $6000.
So if you're looking for a guide as to how to price your Series 2, there's some more information for you.
