questions about Disney Pin Trading

[davis65]

My family was wanting to do the pin trading on our trip to WDW. this is aour first trip, but I've heard alot about how fun pin trading is and my kids talked about some of their friends doing it. My husband purchased 100 pins really cheap on Ebay. That means every family member would get 20 pins. Should this be enough for each person.

Here is what I was thinking about doing:
I was going to put 5 of the pins that we got from ebay per lanyard per day for 4 days. Then let every trade with 5 pins a day.
Then on the 5th day I would let everyone go through the new pins and maybe pick out a few that they would want to re-trade for new ones.

Iwas thinking that if I only put 5 pins on a day, then the lanyard probably wouldn't get too heavy to were it would hurt the kid's necks. Does this sound like an good plan, or should I do it differently?

 

[MomToAp1699]

Thats the exact same plan I had when I went.. I will say that it didn't work out as well as I would have liked.. We ran into a lot of times where all the pins we traded we really loved and wanted to keep and then had no traders left when we saw ones we still wanted.. Its sooo hard. Its easy to say well you just have to deal with getting the ones you had and deciding but there are SOOOO many pins to choose from.. When are you going? Do you have enough time to let the kids save up to buy some more traders>

 

[Paintedlady]

I've been wanting to get some pins for our upcoming trip as well, but have no idea what a good price is. Can anyone clue me in? Thanks so much!

 

[dmbfan]

My husband bought a TON ( over 300) pins from Ebay and he made out very well, with only about 15 pins that were not real Disney pins.

What we are doing is giving my son all the Mickey pins to trade for other Mickey pins as that is his big fan...and my daughter wants to trade tinkerbell pins...my husband will do the others...the kids had a blast doing this last year, but this year we have so many pins to trade they are super excited... Ok my husband tooo...me I am all about the fireworks and parades...

 

[davis65]

My husband got 98 pins off of ebay for $76 shipping and all. It came up to be .77 cents per pen. Since I was told that the cheapest pins were about 6.95 a piece, i figured that was one heck of a deal. I also got a couple of free one (just had to pay shipping) off of listia.com. It a site like ebay, except you bid with credits and not real money.

 

[davis65]

how were you able to tell if the pins were not real?

 

[dmbfan]

how were you able to tell if the pins were not real?

My husband said something to do with the Walt Disney mark on the back of the pin. If there is no marking saying walt disney world than it was fake.

He found this information on line.

 

[davis65]

so as long as they are real does disney accept any pin no matter if they are older or not

 

[MJAJmom]

I bought several bulk packs of pins from ebay for trading for my boys. Anything less than about $1.75 per pin is a decent deal.

My youngest who was 3 and 4yo on trips, just liked picking out the pins from the CM's lanyards. He didn't care about collecting, he was just picking "in the moment". My older son who was 5 and 6yo on our last trip, was much more into trading and understood it better.

I got a small zip pouch that I put several pins in for the first few days. I also wore a lanyard that had about 12 pins on it. DS6 wanted to wear his lanyard after the first few day, we put 8 pins on it (4 on each side) and it wasn't too heavy. They traded about 6-9 pins per day. Once he traded for a pin, he put it on his lanyard. We refreshed the pouch each night and put the pins he wanted to keep in our suitcase.

 

[Paintedlady]

Thanks for the ino! Off to peruse Ebay now. I'm keeping these a surprise from the kids.

 

[deerhart]

we took 20 pins per person last year, I have to start buying myself this year (we had all good disney pins).

They do have marks on the back (mickey ears with pin trading and usually a year with it and the disney copyright).

There are also pin trading sites that list just about ALL the pins and you can search it to determine if yours are real or not.
Try
http://pinpics.com/
you can register and store your collection, you can view my collection by searching for user name deerhart (or at least what I have up)

 

[WantToGoNow]

Just because they have the Mickey ears/logo, etc. on the back does not mean they are real. Scrappers look like the real thing but are not. That's not to say you/your kids can't still trade them. I looked all of my pins up on PinPics before we went and I knew I had 10 or so possible fakes. Most likely if you get them really cheap, they are fake. Why would someone sell what they paid $6-12 on for $1.15 or so.

That said, we took about 120 pins (that I got from Ebay) and me, my ds8, dd5 and my cousin's ds9 traded them over the course of 9 day. I also gave each of my cousin's 2 younger kids 5 pins each to keep - they weren't interested in trading (4 and 5 y/o's). The 4 y/o lost all of hers before the 2nd day of the trip was over.

 

[paul_toria96]

Thanks for the ino! Off to peruse Ebay now. I'm keeping these a surprise from the kids.

I have bought many from Ebay. We have traded at Paris for the last 2 years but this is our first visit to Florida for trading. I have so far 140 pins for 4 of us, but will probably get more as we are going for 3 weeks. Ebay seems the cheapest place to get them for me in the UK, even paying shipping from the states.

We normally have approx 10 per lanyard and then take off the ones we like at the end of the day and swap them for others. Don't forget to swap LE for other LE, they tend to be on a special board

Happy Pin Trading

 

[ferrytale]

I bought on ebay for our trip last September and had a great time trading and no one checked to see if they were real or fake - I was afraid of getting some fakes and having people turn the kids down but no one did, I am NOT a pin expert by any means. My nieces were really into it and just kept trading and retrading their pins. Most of the trading was with cast members, any CM wearing a green lanyard will only trade with kids, so they started with them until they got comfortable then worked their way up to asking the other CMs. My DS was only 4 and not as into it so my sister traded his for him. We all had a great time and let the kids make their own decisions as to which they wanted to trade. There are also pin trading boards that they put out at some of the resorts and different places in the parks(I know we found them at ASMu and in Animal Kingdom & Poly). Works the same way but there are more pins to choose from.
I had a couple of kids stop me to ask to trade which was fun, they were so cute, but their parents looked so annoyed that they were stopping to ask us to trade - don't know what the big deal was?!
Have fun!