eMoviePoster.com

When people go to any other movie poster auction other than ours, they are often quickly struck by just how many EXACT repeats there are from previous auctions (and I don't mean just the fact that the same titles and sizes are represented over and over, but the fact that so MANY of the items in each auction (especially in their major auctions) are EXACTLY the same ones you have seen in their recent auctions (and in movie posters, you can quickly tell that something is the exact same example, and not another example, because the flaws match up EXACTLY). As you look through the listings for each newly listed major auction, you see so MANY "familiar faces" from recent auctions that you are reminded of Claude Rains saying, at the climax of Casablanca, "Round up the usual suspects"!

Now we can't speak for why this is true in the other major auctions (but we can verify that this happens over and over, because we have seen it with our own eyes), but we CAN speak to why this so rarely happens in OUR auctions. There are several reasons this is true:

1) All our auctions truly start at $1 with no reserve. So EVERY item is going to sell. The only question is for how much. And we NEVER make secret deals where consignors can "buy back" items at a reduced commission rate, or worse yet, while paying no commission at all. We can't stop consignors from having friends bid on their items, but if they do, then they always have to pay the full commission on the items they "buy back", which makes this never wise to do, and it is the best safeguard against this happening.

2) We also only auction consigned items, and we don't buy. We have to pay our consignors for all their items, less our commission, after every auction closes, so we would take a great loss if we reported a high result that did not happen, because we would have to pay that consignor. At most major auctions, the auction owns a lot of what they auction, so when they report a high result that never happened, they pay no commissions on their own items, so there is nothing to stop them from doing this and then they can relist those items in future auctions.

3) We are fanatical about collecting from our bidders, and we collect from 99% of them. If anyone does not pay, then we ban that person from our auctions for life (unlike every other auction, where the person can easily open a new ID, which accounts for their much higher "failure" rates). When someone is in the 1% of bidders that does not pay, then we cancel the item, remove the result from our massive Auction History Database, and then we re-auction the item, and the new correct result is entered in our Auction History Database.

Now 1% sounds like a very low percentage (and it is!) but when you have FIVE MILLION dollars of sales a year, as we do, it still amounts to around $50,000 of items a year. Which is why you WILL occasionally see the very same exact item come back to our auctions soon after it appeared the first time (but you can look at our Auction History Database and if that first "sale" is not there, then you know that the item was not paid for.

There is another time when we auction the exact same items, and that is when the original buyer of those items re-consigns them to us. But that mostly only happens after a few years or many years (because we have now been doing this for 25 years, a lot of our consignments have been coming to us from people who bought from us ten, twenty or more years ago, and have now reached a point where it is time to liquidate their collection (and they often turn to us, both because they know us so well, and because they had only good experiences when they bought FROM us, so naturally they turn to us when it is time to sell). Of course, sometimes a collector suffers a major financial reversal soon after buying items and needs to re-consign them just a few months later, but fortunately this very rarely happens.

Finally, there is one final reason our major auctions don't have a "round up the usual suspects" feel to them! This is because we make a giant effort to get "fresh" items each time, ones that have not been at auction before. Quite often we will tell potential consignors, "You might want to hold off on that item because we had it recently", because we put their best interests ahead of ours. With the other major auctions, you get the clear sense that "it is all about the money".

So if YOU have items you would consider consigning to our last two major auctions of the year, our 16th Annual Halloween Auction and our December Major Auction, remember that we DON'T want to "round up the usual suspects"!