KEH (keh.com) has been my go-to place for used gear for many years now. I always felt their prices were generally fair- perhaps a bit higher than Ebay but you're paying for reliability, accuracy, and a warranty. Unlike typical vendors KEH didn't have sales. They just reliably offered market-conscious prices month after month, year after year. The price on a particular item in a particular condition would decline in small steps if wasn't selling or might go up in small steps if it was selling well. It was interesting seeing their prices for particular items or classes of items go up and down over time as indications of changing market conditions for photographic equipment. You can tell if a particular item is a collector's item (prices vary greatly with cosmetic condition) or a user of little interest to collectors (bargain-condition units cost almost as much as nearly new ones).
Rarely KEH seemed to misprice items, either too high or too low, but nobody is perfect and rarer items can be hard to price with any precision. KEH can also get tripped up now and then when manufacturers clear out old models at fire sale prices, leaving used units of the same model overpriced for a time at KEH. Still, these sorts of incidents were very much the exception.
More recently KEH hired new marketing management which has tried to aggressively promote items on their site through sales. At first I was surprised by the substantial savings available at times, but then I noticed prices going up just before the series of sales that occurred during the recent holiday season. Some items went up by as much as 10-15%, including manual-focus supertelephoto Nikkors, as well as rarer items that had languished for months and which had previously had their prices cut without selling. Now they were more expensive, so if they were purchased 'on sale' the reduced price wouldn't be all that much lower than it would have been originally. The promised savings were partially illusory.
As of today several items have now been reduced back to their previous 'pre-sale' prices. I don't have comprehensive data, just some spot checks on a few rarer items that hadn't sold before the sales and still haven't sold as of today, and a quick glance at a few other Nikkors. I take this to mean that the sales are over for now, or else the higher 'normal' prices seriously suppressed customer purchases outside of advertised sales. I'd hate to see KEH get on the usual retail treadmill (think department stores) of high normal prices with periodic sales to get the costumers buying. One can usually wait to buy a common camera or lens, but when rarer items pop up you really need to grab them right away (if you truly want them and can stomach the price), not wait for a sale.
I understand if a vendor wants to promote their site by changing prices, and KEH certainly got rid of a lot of inventory during the sales period. In the short term their new approach appears to be a success. Still, for years I trusted KEH to mark their items to market, based on my lengthy observations of their pricing methods (though I would still compare used to new prices before making a decision on which way to go). Now I can no longer automatically give KEH that trust due to these recent manipulations, and I'll have to verify prices routinely. I actually delayed a couple of lens purchases during the last month until an applicable sale happened, because I didn't want to pay what I suspected was a somewhat inflated price. Has anybody else noticed this issue?
