“The Street” has an article entitled “5 Completely Worthless Collectibles”. Beanie Babies, Hummels, Franklin Mint, Hess Trucks, and Thomas Kinkade – Precious Moments is in there, too, but you already knew that.
http://www.thestreet.com/story/10863800/1/5-completely-worthless-collectibles.html
Hilarious.
Gail
I got started with thinklinkr while they were still in beta, and I’m still working out how exactly to best use it for Gail’s Fine China and this blog. It’s one of those new apps that is really simple on the surface, but lends itself to a lot more.
Basically, it’s an online outliner that can include other contributors. Not fancy, but I can see taking notes, gathering research data on the collectibles market, interviewing…lots 0′ stuff.
Check it out: www.thinklinkr.com
Gail
Trying out yet another auction site – for buying, not selling. (http://www.QuiBids.com) Very interesting – you pay for every bid you make, so the effort is to find a strategy to bid as little as possible. Here’s what I’ve figured out so far:
Ditched eBay some time ago without regret, and now I’m about to close my AuctivaCommerce account, too. Auctiva is a good service, very feature-rich and reasonably priced, but way overkill for a small business like mine that sells mostly at antique malls and relatively few pieces online. It was also cumbersome to have an online store hosted in a separate place from my website, email accounts and weblog. Simplify, simplify, simplify.
Turns out, too, that PayPal has improved its “buy this” buttons to the point where they’ll estimate shipping cost from weight and zip code. So I can sell just a few things, one button at a time, filling out just one simple form instead of 6 or 7 pages on Auctiva. Paypal even has a built in shopping cart feature, so people can still make multiple purchases. Nice. Very nice.
It’s become clear to me that the best auction bargains are often at the end of the auction, not at the beginning. At the end, the bidding is just less intense – whether due to exhaustion on the part of the audience, or a thinning out of dealers, or a lack of any more cash on the part of the remaining people, or whatever. It didn’t occur to me that attending the end instead of the beginning deliberately might be a good strategy until I was forced to do so because of work. Coming in late, and fresh, really helped (I got a set of Candlewick cups and saucers for next to nothing in one, and several boxes of good glass at another), so I’ve started going late – very late – to auctions.
Now that I’m on the job market, I feel right at home, just like I would at an auction, only with those funny glasses that generate multiple copies of what the wearer sees. The people in possession of job openings have not one but dozens of recruiters casting around for bids. The job-seeking audience is huge, competitive, and bidding urgently, although in some cases it looks like the job owner is just kidding, or dyspeptic, or was drunk when writing the job requirement description.
It strikes me that the researchers in the audience are likely to be better at this than the engineers. After all, a bridge has to stand up to traffic first time out, whereas good research usually requires a very large scrap heap of failed tries. A job search is a lot more like the latter.
One of the things I don’t like about this business is retail selling. That sounds ridiculous – why even start a business selling china if you don’t do retail?
Well for one thing because packing china properly for shipment is an exacting, exhausting, frustrating chore. Because putting things up for auctions online is extraordinarily time-consuming. But mostly because customers can be a problem, and not just for non-payment. After all, if they don’t pay, I don’t send them anything – we’re even, no hard feelings. Nor would I complain about the people who report breakage. It happens no matter how well packed, and I send a partial refund immediately.
No, worst is the customer who gets a box full, tells you it’s all broken, fails to send clear pictures of the breakage, and then insists on all the money back. I can see from other feedback that this person has pulled this stunt with other sellers, and then smeared them up and down if there was any other outcome than a full refund. It’s unlikely everything in the package was broken, but this person knows darn well my reputation is worth more to me than the fifty bucks, and my time is worth more to me than the arduous process of proving a pattern of such behavior, so I refund the payment. All of it. And then feel sick for awhile.
But I don’t want to give up on selling, either. I was able to provide nearly an entire set of Noritake china at a very good price to a family who wanted it for a wedding gift. Many times I’ve been able to replace individual pieces from beloved heirloom dinnerware sets – and have regularly gotten thank you notes from those buyers. You can’t beat that.
I’m getting hints, however, that you can avoid selling directly to the consumer, but still keep in touch with them. It’s harder to make money than on eBay, but it’s do-able. Any consignment shop or antique mall, for example, takes the retail off your hands; they collect the money, deal with problems, answer questions, secure your merchandise, mail anything that needs to be mailed, and submit the sales tax to the state. You don’t even need a tax ID number. I can still direct previous good customers to them and help out my fellow vendors at the same time with good marketing practices. The couple of thefts I’ve endured at the mall are somehow not nearly as creepy as being cheated online by someone in direct contact with me.
And I can sell from my own website, where I can make my own rules and develop a smaller, but better customer base. Yet another possibility is selling directly to specific collectors or dealing with collector’s organizations. I don’t know enough yet to do that, but it’s an idea.
Finally, another venue I’m trying out is re-auctioning items at a higher-end auction house. Fingers crossed. First try this summer. The problem here, of course, is that the customer is kept at too great a distance, if not cut out altogether. That’s not what I had in mind. If the main point of this business is getting something no one wants into the hands of someone who does want it, another auction disrupts that process, or at least lengthens it. I think what I’ll do is put new things up either in the mall or on my website for a specific period of time and then take them to be re-auctioned if they don’t sell there. Rotates the inventory, too.
Stay tuned.
–Gail
I have a distribution list to several friends and colleagues that alerts them whenever there’s a good auction nearby. Just goes to show you how clueless I can be – some of them have never been to an auction and didn’t know what happened there. I promised them they’d never buy any overpriced junk in a department store again, and then I showed them the ropes, summarized below:
–Gail
Just got back from a gigantic information technology conference sponsored by Microsoft (TechEd, for those of you in the field). Educational from several perspectives, some of which don’t seem apparent to the typical attendee.
There are extremely few women in technology. I think we knew that, but I didn’t get the full force of it until I saw it in action. The only woman on stage during the entire keynote address headed up the entertainment – an excellent African-inspired percussion ensemble – and she did not speak words, only musical calls and shrieks. The technical session leaders were virtually all male (Carolyn Chau an exception), although there did seem to be a larger female contingent at the vendor booths. Among the attendees, maybe 1 in 20 was female. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the “Women in Technology” luncheon was standing room only, but unfortunately that wasn’t because so many women were there but rather because the room was not particularly large.
Now lest you think I’m about to start on some shrill rant about the evils of male domination, forget it. Despite scholarships, trade organization initiatives, spotlights, programs and downright begging on the part of some tech sectors, there still aren’t many women in technology (with the exception of biochemistry, which is about half women now). The innate ability exists, the educational opportunity exists, there are many welcoming open doors in industry, and still women usually spend their talents elsewhere. I don’t know why either, but it might be wise to look for some new angle on cracking this open.
It’s easy to see how Tech-Ed is like a circus sideshow, and the whole event is a giant marketing campaign, but how is it like an auction?
Think about it the next time you’re at a conference.
–Gail
Attended a very interesting auction yesterday (J. Pandur) – lots of good china and collectibles, good atmosphere, some great deals. Wacko prices, though – the sheer range was astonishing. Someone purchased an empty cardboard box for $400 just because it had a picture of Hopalong Cassidy on it. On the other hand, someone else walked out of there with about 20 antique windup wall clocks for $20 each. I was looking for bargains – and I don’t know much about clocks – so I didn’t bid very often, but I did get some blue Willow china, a few pieces of depression glass, and a cool metal condiment server with 6 etched glass carafes. Let an entire set of Noritake dinnerware go for $20 to someone else because I didn’t know the pattern and I don’t have room for it in inventory, though.
I go hot and cold on inventory. There are days when I think I should just buy good quality things as they come up and store them until the right person comes along to buy. Other days I look around and think “Enough! Let’s get this stuff out of here!” Some compromise, I suppose…6 months? A year? I was about to take all the big china sets to a high end auctioneer and get rid of them last week, and then someone ordered several pieces through the website.
OK. I’ll hold on to them a little longer…someone might need them.
–Gail