eMoviePoster.com

I, Bruce Hershenson, have been collecting, selling, and auctioning collectibles of all sorts for 49 years! Over that time, I have seen many many collectors tricked (by a variety of methods) into thinking items were "worth" far more than they thought they were. Sometimes some of these collectors will buy for many years before finally learning their items true current retail value.

How does this happen? There are several ways that I have observed:
1) Almost all price guides for collectibles have very deceptive prices. They almost always have very unrealistically high prices on commonly available items, and unrealistically low prices on items that are almost never offered for sale.
     Why do they do that? Because the commonly available items are ones that almost every dealer has for sale, and if the price guide says, say, $10, then they can much more easily sell it for $5 to someone who thinks they are buying it for "half Guide price".
     The same works in reverse for items that are almost never offered for sale. If someone turns one up that would probably sell for $20,000, but the Price Guide says $10,000, then they might sell it to a dealer for $7000, thinking they are getting close to "Guide Price"!

2) Dealers with sky high prices that they never actually sell at. In every hobby I've been involved with, there are some dealers who have prices that are far over what anyone else charges. They almost never sell their items at those prices, but sometimes they will negotiate and sell items for far lower than their listed prices, but which are still far higher than what other people would have sold that item for. But collectors see those sky high prices and think they are reflective of actual selling prices.

3) Auctions that have "results" that are for higher than what other auctions or dealers sell those same items for. How would this happen? Because many auctions include "prices realized" that include many results that they have never occurred (perhaps the buyer simply never paid, perhaps the consignor bought back their own item, perhaps the auction house owned the item and there were no "real" bidders, etc). Those auctions never remove such results from their databases, and again, collectors see those sky high prices and think they are reflective of actual selling prices.

In every other hobby OTHER THAN vintage movie posters, I don't know of a way to get realistic actual selling prices for items you either are looking to buy, or own and are looking to sell. But in the vintage movie poster hobby, there IS a great way to find out realistic actual selling values! What is it? It is eMoviePoster.com's "Auction History Database" found at http://www.emovieposter.com/agallery/archive.html. Here you will find a completely searchable history of our past sales (as of this writing, 1,379,824 auctions, containing well over 3 MILLION items) including most of the images from those sales. Every item in this archive actually sold at the listed price (for much more on how that works, see Did You Know... that we delete all unpaid for items or canceled items from our Auction History database?).

So ANY TIME you want to know the "value" of virtually any movie or poster collectible, try our Auction History Database first. You won't find every single item there, but you will find most, and on many we may have auctioned them dozens of times, so that will also give you a lot of results to look at for many items. And seeing the number of results will also help you know the relative rarity of items, as well!

Now of course, YOU may not be able to match our "high" results (because we have tens of thousands of past buyers), and you might see low results where we happened to sell an item for a lower than expected amount, but overall, you will find that this Auction History Database is far and away the best way to quickly and easily look up what items are "worth"!

See also (regarding values and such):
Did You Know... that some movie paper items truly have "negative value"?
Did You Know... that in addition to auctioning more items than anyone else, we also auction LOTS of high dollar items, and we recently added a "top 800 results by year" section to our Auction History that gives visual proof?
Did You Know... that we recently also added a "top 800 results by decade" section to our Auction History, to go with our "top 800 results by decade" section?

See also (regarding details about our Auction History):
Did You Know... that we have a step-by-step tutorial of how to better find what you are looking for in our Auction History (and here it is!)?
Did You Know... that our Auction History database gives you some of the best and most accurate movie summaries and cast lists on the Internet?
Did You Know... that our Auction History database helps you find the absolute best movies to watch?
Did You Know... why we use "Film:", even with searches for actors in our Auction History and Auction Galleries?
Did You Know... that we now have over one million records in our Auction History database?
Did You Know... why there are missing images in our massive online Auction History database?
Did You Know... that we have been adding images of ultra-rare posters from pressbooks to our Auction History database?