Our just concluded Summer 2010 Mini/Major Auction was a major success, FAR beyond our expectations, with total sales of over $274,000!The total of all three auctions was $274,739! What makes this so interesting is that the world is in the throes of a major recession, the likes of which have not been seen in our lifetimes. And there were two major movie poster auctions from other companies in the past few months (one just a couple of weeks ago) which had remarkably disappointing results, with unsold items in numbers never before seen!
So what made our auctions different? Obviously, collectors are tired of the "old way" of doing business, where everything is "buyer beware", and auction houses are often a place filled with high reserves and items with undisclosed restoration, and they prefer to deal with us, because we stand behind everything we sell, and we are 100% honest, and we have REAL customer service. Also, auctions have kept increasing their buyers premiums until they now all charge 20% or 25% extra, and very few buyers like those, whereas we have NO buyers premiums whatsoever!
But of course, we went even further (as we always do in our Mini/Major auctions) and we gave a GREAT bonus t-shirt offer to everyone who purchased any ONE item from any of the three parts of this mini/major auction, PLUS we offered our most generous bonus offers ever to those who purchased just FIVE items from any of the three parts combined (you needed to purchase a total of five items from all three parts). We also gave great additional bonuses for every additional item up to 12 items (including three great
table books) so that those who purchased 12 items received $700 retail of great bonuses!
We had one sad occurrence in our Summer 2010 Mini/Major Auction, but it shows two important differences between OUR auctions and ANY others!After the auction concluded, the third highest selling item was the LAWRENCE OF ARABIA pre-awards camel style, for $11,800. The high bidder paid for the item and had it overnighted, but after receiving it said they did not agree with our condition assessment of the poster, and returned it. Based on the e-mail correspondence we had, I think that buyer remorse played a significant role in this quick cancellation, but I still did as I always do with these rare cancellations in our auctions, which was to tell the buyer to return it immediately for a full refund.
That is why the poster reads SALE CANCELLED in the list above, and why the $11,800 has been deducted from the total sales of the auctions. While it is certainly very sad that this occurred, it shows two important differences between OUR auctions and ANY others:
1) You are NEVER "stuck" with a purchase in OUR auctions! Other auctions hide behind a ludicrous "buyer beware" policy that borders on being criminal, for they often take that "escape clause" (which means every buyer is stuck even if the auction house made major errors in describing the item) and then use it to INTENTIONALLY mis-describe or over-grade items, meaning they have lots of unhappy buyers who have no recourse against the auction other than to refuse to deal with them in the future, and they are left with a sometimes very costly lesson of what "buyer beware" really means.
But in our auctions, we honestly describe EVERY item, and that means we can offer every buyer a chance to return any item they are unhappy with, so that NO ONE ever needs to feel "stuck" with a purchase they are unhappy with. Of course, we can't have people bidding and then canceling over and over, so we have to tell the very few people who have abused this policy that they can't continue to do so in the future, but this almost never happens in our auctions (and we have auctioned almost half a million movie paper items in the past 20 years!).
2) The fact that we are open and honest about everything that occurs in our auctions means that you both know that every price we report (after the auctions are added to our Sales Results Database online at
http://www.emovieposter.com/sales/priceguide.php) is a 100% accurate price, and that in every case the consignor was paid the price listed (minus our commission) in cash! Other auctions NEVER revise their reported results to reflect cancelled or unpaid for items (and they don't reveal which lots were bought back by the consignors or were bought by the auction house from itself) so you can't know if their reported auction prices ever happened! Many times people say to me, "You did well with this item, but Auction House X sold the same item for 50% more a couple of years ago", but there is NO telling that their reported sale was real or that any money changed hands (and if you look at their auctions after that reported high result, you often see that the very same item has been re-offered and has "sold" for half the previous listed result, and one must wonder whether that first "sale" never happened and a cancelled item has been re-sold).
You can ALWAYS trust our Sales Results Database to give you honest accurate results, so you can better gauge how much to bid on an item that is currently offered. And we will ALWAYS remove items that are not paid for from our Sales Results Database, even when it is a very high profile item like this one (and this is the very first $10,000+ item we have had cancelled, and we attribute that to our fanatical honest grading, which is true of everything we auction, for we have less than one in 500 items returned FOR ANY REASON, which is pretty remarkable given the vast number of items we auction!).
ATTENTION TO THOSE OF YOU WHO MIGHT HAVE "BETTER" QUALITY ITEMS TO CONSIGN TO USWe will have THREE more "special event" auctions in the remainder of 2010:
The first of these "special event" auctions is our Fall 2010 "Non-U.S. Only" Mini/Major Auction beginning at the end of September. NOW is the time for you to consign to this special auction. We held a similar auction to this in February of this year, and that auction had excellent results, and we have no reason to think this auction won't do just as well (in addition, it will be helped by the falling U.S. dollar, which always gains us lots of additional non-U.S. buyers).
THE DEADLINE FOR CONSIGNING TO THIS FALL 2010 "NON-U.S. ONLY" MINI/MAJOR AUCTION IS AUGUST 25th!The second of these "special event" auctions is our 11th Annual Halloween Mini/Major Auction beginning at the end of October. Every year for 10 years we have received exceptional results for horror/sci-fi items in this auction, and you have just a few weeks to consign to this special auction.
THE DEADLINE FOR CONSIGNING TO THIS 11th ANNUAL HALLOWEEN MINI/MAJOR AUCTION IS SEPTEMBER 29th!The third of these "special event" auctions is our December 2010 Mini/Major Auction beginning at the end of November (but closing in early December). You have a couple of months to consign to this special auction, but these kind of deadlines tend to creep up on you, so you might want to start assembling consignments NOW, especially because we are often consigned two of the same item, and we always auction the one we received first. This will be just like our just concluded Summer 2010 Mini/Major Auction, and we have no reason to think this auction won't do just as well!
THE DEADLINE FOR CONSIGNING TO THIS DECEMBER 2010 MINI/MAJOR AUCTION IS OCTOBER 27th!IF YOU HAVE ITEMS YOU THINK WOULD MAKE SENSE FOR ANY OF THESE SPECIAL AUCTIONS AND WOULD LIKE THEM INCLUDED (and they can be linenbacked or not linenbacked), THEN PLEASE CONTACT US BY THE ABOVE DATES! Please remember that we want items to have a realistic retail of $50 or more. Items of lesser value make far more sense for our "regular" non-U.S. auctions, where they are not in competition with lots of great posters. Please note that if you currently have consignments with us, we will NOT pull out those items to move to this auction. Those items will be sold in our regular auctions.
Given that eBay is imploding (and has declared war on its sellers!), and given that we have both delivered excellent results in our past several months of auctions, and given that we are the only venue where you can sell HUGE quantities of material (both in terms of dollars, and in terms of numbers of posters), then shouldn't YOU consider consigning to one or all three of the above special auctions?
