eMoviePoster.com

Friday, October 29th, 1999 was a historic day for eMoviePoster.com! On that day, we added our very first eBay auction (we only added ONE auction, to make sure it worked). It was a window card for The Birds, and it sold for $196.50 on Friday, November 5th. One month later, we added 28 items to eBay, and each week day after that for the rest of December, we added around 25 to 50 items, so we had items closing every Monday through Friday for the rest of December.

We continued in that fashion until Thursday, March 16, 2000, when I had an inspiration! It occurred to me that we could have auctions just one day a week instead of all five, so that our bidders would only have to sit at their computer ONE night a week instead of five. So on that day, we had our first test auction with 212 items that began on Thursday, March 16th and closed a week later.

We continued with our daily auctions, but we assembled 439 items in addition, and we began those in our second test on Monday, April 3rd, and those items closed on Monday, April 10th. We did the same until Monday, April 24th, when we had our third test set of auctions with 365 items. All through this time, we were still having our daily items, with around 10 to 50 per day.

Finally, on Tuesday, May 23rd, I took the plunge and eliminated the daily items, and went to solely once a week auctions. After having tried Thursday and Monday, I settled on Tuesday, figuring that Monday was bad because of Monday Night Football, and Tuesday was the best night, because it meant that we would have three days after the auctions closed to get the orders shipped before the weekend. Our customers quickly told us they much preferred the once a week auctions, and we switched to that format for the remainder of the year, auctioning mostly between 400 and 700 items per Tuesday.

But back to that first Tuesday auction from May 30, 2000. There were 139 buyers of those first 351 items we auctioned that day. We just checked, and of those 139 buyers, ELEVEN of them are still active buyers (some have bought in the last two weeks!). We feel that having loyal customers over a 15 year period deserves some reward, so we are sending those eleven buyers two special gifts, which we think they will much appreciate (if you are one of those eleven people, you will receive notice of what you are getting on Monday, and if you are not, then we don't want to make you feel bad by telling you what incredible gifts we are giving them!). But know that we very much appreciate having such loyal customers (because thousands of you have been buying from us for a decade or more)!

Of course, all of you know that we continued with our Tuesday auctions over the next many years, and during that time, we steadily increased the number of items we auctioned each Tuesday, with many auctions of 999 items, and almost all auctions were between 500 and 999 items. On April 19, 2007, nearly 7 years after our first Tuesday auction, we added THURSDAY auctions which were the same format as our Tuesday auctions, but they were clearly a "secondary" set of auctions, with "only" around 300 items each Thursday.

But by June of 2009, our Thursday auctions had grown to be the equal of the Tuesday auctions, with 500 to 999 items in each set each week. So on Sunday, June 21, 2009, we added SUNDAY auctions which were the same format as our Tuesday and Thursday auctions, but they were clearly a "lesser" set of auctions, with "only" around 300 items each Sunday.

That brings us up to the present! Our Sunday auctions have continued to grow, and they are now mostly equal to the Tuesday and Thursday auctions, and we auction 999 each time we do folded items, and 850 items each time we do rolled items (because it takes much longer to pack tubes than flat packages!), and our three auctions have the same number of items. We have held 673 Tuesday auctions, 344 Thursday auctions, and 219 Sunday auctions, and altogether, we have held 907,581 separate auctions (and that counts only the number of auctions; if you count the number of ITEMS, it is surely well in the millions!).