We try to bring the auction experience to the homes of our buyers and consignors.
The majority of our items are listed using our free listing plan. Listing with
this plan means that bidding on your item will start @ $29.99, this generates
a lot of interest in the first few days resulting in more active bidders. As
the auction comes to an end, these active bidders end up in a bidding war, thus
driving up the price of your item. If you wish to price your items yourself,
there is a $10 dollar prepay due when you drop it off. When you stop by the
shop with your item, we will give you a free appraisal of its value based on
recent similar eBay sales. Based on that appraisal we can determine the best
way to sell your item.
We consider eBay to be very close to a perfect market in terms of supply and
demand. There is simply no other place that you can go to find such as vast
number of sellers and buyers at any given time, because of this it is one of
the few places where you can put an item up for auction with a low starting
bid and count on realizing its fair market value. A lot of consignors are initially
hesitant to start their items at $29.99 with no reserve but this allows the
eBay buyers to determine how much they are willing to pay for an item. For this
reason common items that are in greater supply will sell with the market average
because of lower demand, whereas the bidding rare items will skyrocket because
the buyers know they are hard to find.
Buyers usually find items on eBay by making a specific search, as in “Herend
porcelain” or “Tiffany sterling”. Therefore the items that
we have the most success selling are those marked with specific terms because
it allows us to optimize the listings in order to appeal to the hard-core collectors
using eBay. There are many exceptions to this rule that require a trained eye
and we usually tap our friends in the industry when we need help identifying
a piece we think may be rare or valuable.
The beauty of eBay is that the market is so large we can rely on bidders to
recognize items that we otherwise could not identify. We are good at generalizing
and design our ads to allow the specialist to accurately identify pieces. This
involves including a lot of photographs and taking accurate measurements and
answering very specific questions from bidders. We recently sold a pair of German
WWII binoculars for $660 without knowing any more information about them. Of
course, the more specific that we can be about an item, the better it will sell.
For this reason we encourage our consignors to supply us with any additional
information or provenance that they might have regarding their items when they
drop them off.
Our consignors seem to find that there are two major benefits to using our
service. The first is that we can gain higher values for items because we can
sell to our local customer base as well as eBay’s 220 million registered
users. The second major benefit is that we handle the whole process from research
to shipping, rather than spending your time sitting at a computer and standing
at line in the Post Office, you are free do other things.
When your item sells, we charge a sliding scale commission on a per item basis.
It includes all eBay and PayPal fees which can run between 5% and 15%, so there
are no hidden charges that will show up on your invoice. Below is a table of
our commissions:
