Hi Guys,
Thanks for the comments and questions. I will try to tackle a few issues here:
There are not two types of auctions, but there are both fixed price listings and auction listings. We give you the option to look through all of them combined, or to separate them. When you click on the "Fixed Price Items" tab or the "Live Auctions" tab, the default is set to show you all items in those categories. You can then click on the refine your search buttons to the left to see only specific genres/countries/ or sizes in those categories. So you could click on Fixed Price Items and then hit the "One Sheets" button to the left to filter out all other sizes.
If you would like to only see James Bond one-sheets, you can use the advanced search tab at the top to be able to combine different search criteria (so you could click "one sheets", "James Bond", "1990-1999", and "United States" to only see those results. Which right now would only be the Goldeneye one-sheet. (Which is NOT listed in the stills/photos section but properly placed in the One Sheet section. The stills/photos tab is highlighted right now showing that it is a new tab and stays highlighted no matter where you are looking on the site at this time).
If you list an item for sale at a fixed price, yes it just goes right up. If you would like to list your item for auction, we usually have weekly auctions but this special January auction is superseding them and is the only auction right now (and there is our new Stills/Photos category also).
As for asking questions about items, unfortunately the only way to do that right now is the "contact us" tab i the upper center of the page. We are working on being able to do that from individual items.
Not sure why there are still two facebook/twitter links right next to each other, I know we have asked the programmers to remove these and will ask again.
As for listings and the fees, we absolutely have the lowest per item fees you can find (even when taking into account the fact that you must ship a sold item to us), and I will show this with an example from our recent sales archives.
Six-sheet for Viva Las Vegas
We sold this for poster earlier this month for $1150. Our fee for this was $115.00, we also charged a 3% merchant fee of $34.50 and our consignor got a net of $1000.50.
IF, Bruce or Heritage had sold this poster for the same price (and that's a big IF, as Bruce sold a copy last year for $550.00, and Heritage's last sale was for $717.00), their commissions would have been as follows:
Bruce $1150 sale - $230 (20% commission) = $920 net to seller
Heritage $1150 sale (which equals about a $962 hammer before buyer's premium) - $188 buyer's premium - $192.40 seller's premium = $769.60 net to seller
Cinemasterpieces $1150 sale - $287.50 commission = $862.50 net to seller
So in this example you would receive anywhere from $80.50 to $230.90 more than you would from the same sales price with another seller (8% to 23% more money in your pocket). Which leaves ample room to help cover the cost of shipping the poster to us.
And of course it goes without saying that you would still have to pay to ship this poster to the above sellers also! I think people forget that all the time when mentioning that they have to ship posters to us. I am pretty sure you have to ship posters to Bruce or Heritage also when they sell for you.
Where you can save shipping dollars with Bruce is when you ship him a large box of $10-20 posters for his auctions. And I would think this is probably what Charlie is thinking about when talking of a crap load of stuff he wouldn't mind listing at 10% is that he can just ship them all at once.
Absolutely true. We do not have 20+ employees and are not set up to process a large number of $25 posters. So if you have a large box of stuff you just want to dump and don't care about the price then you are probably better off sending them to Bruce.
But a couple of key points about that:
1) Remember that Bruce sells almost half of all his items for $15 or less, and that's after factoring in all the great items people send him. So if you send a box of low-value items, your percentage is likely to be much higher. 2) for a $25 poster, Bruce keeps $12.50. If you sell a poster for $25 with us, once you factor in shipping a single poster to us plus commission, the price you get is probably very close. But the key difference is that YOU get to decide if you want to accept $25 on your poster if you do a fixed price listing with us, not a $1 auction where you hope the price gets up to $25 so you can get $12.50
2) You are welcome to list 50-100 (or whatever number you would like to list) posters at your price and then send them to us in a large box(tube) where we will keep track of them for you, ship them out when sold and just send you a check every month. We already have a couple of consignors taking advantage of this service. That way you only pay to ship a single package to us like you would any other auction company but can still take advantage of our low rates.
The idea was that you don't have to ship a poster to us until we have a confirmed sale. NO OTHER auction/sales company allows you to do this. It's a huge advantage for part-time dealers (like Ari) who can list a bunch of items with us and still carry them to local shows/markets and offer them to customers. You don't have to be missing the inventory and missing out on potentially selling the piece yourself.
Or if you are a collector and have a piece at home you would sell for $XXX amount, but don't want to send it off to an auction house, risk having it damaged and coming back unsold, you can list with us and not ship it to us until it is confirmed we have it sold for you.
But if you have a bunch of stuff you would just like to auction off and are unsure what to do, call us and talk to Peter we would be happy to try and help you out (even if the best idea turns out to be not using us).
