In 1998, I, Bruce Hershenson, had a very successful two million dollar a year auction business, "Bruce Hershenson Vintage Movie Posters, which ran one giant "live" auction every December, and which issued semi-annual sales catalogs with fixed prices. But in 1998 I started to hear about this newfangled invention, "the Internet", which was experiencing exponential growth, and there were LOTS of movie poster auctions there, mostly through a site called "eBay", but quite a few on another site called "Amazon"!
I ran a few auctions on eBay, and I was hooked! Not only could I reach a lot of collectors I had never reached before (both in the U.S. and worldwide), but I also could use giant full-color images on my auctions, and I didn't have to pay an arm and a leg to print and mail catalogs to my customers. And eBay only charged me 2% commission, as long as I started my auctions at 99 cents each, which I loved to do, because even then I loved HONEST no reserve auctions, because it set my auctions apart from all the rest, which often pretended to have no reserves, but they not only often had hidden reserves, but they also mostly had buyer premiums, which turned most great buys into not-so-great ones.
I knew my website needed a catchy name, but what? The two most obvious ones, movieposter.com and movieposters.com were both taken, but that early in the game just about everything else was available. I thought and thought and finally decided on either "eMoviePoster.com" or "eMoviePosters.com" (because the "e" signified ecommerce, and it also was similar to eBay, where I had decided to solely auction, and both were available.
But which one to choose? I COULD have had both, but they each cost around $50 a year back then, and it seemed like a waste of money to get both, and I settled on "eMoviePoster.com". But soon after I realized I had made a BIG error! Why? Because a lot of people were easily confused, and would type in "eMoviePosters.com", and a crafty competitor website had bought the name, and had it redirect to their site, and so LOTS of people accidentally went there by mistake. For many years I have been correcting people when they post about loving "eMoviePosters.com", and whenever I said the name I had to say "Remember it is "eMoviePoster" with no "s", and believe me that got very old very fast!
But all that came to an end a few days ago when a good friend alerted me that the folks who owned "eMoviePosters.com" had put the website name up for sale! I rushed and bought it (at a premium price), because if I hadn't, one of my current competitors might well have bought it, so that THEY could then use it to deceive collectors and consignors, just as the previous competitor had done for so many years!
