Notice: Start Price Adjustment – March 31 2022
Our starting price per lot is going to 3.00 per lot:
As of March 31st 2022 we are increasing our START PRICE from 1.00 to 3.00 for each lot.
- Reason 1: The labor costs involved just in time for making the listings (Photography, labeling, racking, photo processing and typing the listings) this all works out to about 3 dollars per lot on average. Most people don’t really consider this but a lot of work goes into putting up an auction together. Lot of work goes into making things run smooth on pickup days as well. The buyers premium at this time only covers the overhead costs (Warehouse space, Computer server costs, Utilities, ) but it is not enough to cover all the expenses.
- Reason 2: With consignor items our consignment rates will include a 3.00 minimum listing fee to cover the cost of the labor (No profit just cost of labor to make the listing) so if the consignors item sells for 3.00 they do not owe the auction anything for the work done to make the listing for them. If the item does not sell at all they still owe a 3.00 listing fee but this stops most consignors from bringing in low value items that run the risk of not selling.
- Reason 3: Removing anything that causes a loss is only beneficial for everyone in the long run. When an item only sells for 1.00 we (the auction house) loose money and we all know that is never good for business. For a business to survive a profit is necessary but to get to a profitable level you need to make sure your not loosing money anywhere along the way (Business 101). We always like the bidder to get a dam good deal and we want the consignors to get a fair price for the items as well and not owe us for selling an item they bring to us.
- Reason 4: We often are the consignor and that means we purchased the product we are selling and to get the better quality stuff it is much more expensive then the department store returns that a lot of others sell. We try to get overstock and damaged freight where most items are still new and the boxes are little distressed. We also spend about 40 hours each week sorting our stuff and testing a lot of it to make sure it is good (where many auction houses just sell it as is). So when an item we purchased sells for 1.00 we not only loose the costs in producing the auction listing we loose the money we paid for the item as well and yes that brings bidders back so selling some stuff at a loss is part of the business but mitigating the loss be at least covering the labor costs on these items should not make anyone feel like they are getting less of a great deal.
- Reason 5: The owners currently do a LOT of the work in the day to day operations. As with most small businesses the owners do a lot of the work for less pay per hour then most employees would make. That is until the business becomes self sustaining. It take 3 to 5 years to for most business to reach that point and covid most certainly has made that a challenge. We still do all the sorting, computer programming, pickup for when you come get your stuff, storing your items if you cant pick them up any week, answer all the support tickets, do the newsletters and advertising, arrange the transport and purchasing of products, organize the consignments and payouts to consignors and much much more, basically run the show here and its a lot more work then it looks like from the outside looking in. We would like to hire staff eventually to do some of these things and are working our way to that goal (SLOWLY) and we don’t want to overwhelm our bidders and consignors with really big changes all at once so we decided we are doing this in baby steps to reach our end goals and this is the first step. With inflation at 6% this year this step will barely cover that 6% but its a step in the right direction and will help with loss prevention. We feel this is a acceptable increase and a step towards our future goals.
Notice: Bid Increment Adjustment – March 31 2022
Our BID INCREMENT is going from 1.00 to 2.00 per bid:
As of March 31 2022 we are increasing our BID INCREMENT to 2.00 from 1.00 per bid. This means that when you place a bid it must be at MINIMUM or 2.00 above the current price. So if the item is currently at 10.00 you must bid 12.00 or more. The system will no longer allow a bid less than 2.00 to be placed. Proxy bids can still be made so it is possibly still to win an item by a penny so creative bidding is always an option. This means when you set a proxy bid you may want to consider a bid that is not a round number. Instead of bidding 10.00 it seams to be more beneficial to bid 10.01 or even 10.31 as statistics show that more bids are won this way for much less than the 1.00 minimum bid amount. We call this creative bidding.
- Reason 1: This increase should not raise the overall sale prices just cut down on the server loads and keep things running smoothly. This should decrease the number of bids placed on each item (especially on auction close with our SOFTCLOSE system running). This will help keep the web server that runs the auction website running efficiently
- Reason 2: This should stop the higher value lots from “Creeping” the bids. “Creeping bids” is when someone waits till the very last few seconds and places a minimum bid, on a non softclose system this is called Sniping but on a soft close system it is referred to as stalling the close or creeping the bids. Even 2.00 is low and wont really discourage creeping but it should reduce the bids by 50% and therefore reduce the softclose time in half. Creeping bids also frustrates bidders more than it benefits them as it causes bidders to miss other lots closing and it causes unnecessary web server load issues that slow down the website. Many auctions have bid tiers to prevent this, our software at this time does not have the ability to implement tier bidding (meaning once the price hits a certain amount the minimum bid increment goes up) we may implement tier bidding in the future but at this time we are going with increasing the minimum bid to 2.00 per bid to see if that helps with the server loads.