It's called Ripping you off..

Okay, good to know. Looks like I'm gonna be f'ed regardless.

You guys state side likely don't see the same shipping fees as I do, in fact, I can almost guarantee you don't.

This Mays, not that I'm in the market, is currently at $1,186.00 and already shipping is almost $200.00 dollars!!

And some wonder why I won't purchase from those who use Global shipping.:confused:

That aside, which is hard to believe, Christie's is still cheaper than E-Bay's Global shipping. :confused:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/142163180343...%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

For comparison, I won an item in Leland's last night, an oversize 22" X 28" and approximately $2,500 value. I had my invoice within an hour of auction closing and my shipping cost is $45.00. Can't beat that!

I am sure shipping is a product of the fact that people use Christie's all the time for items worth a hell of a lot more the $1,000 or $10,000. I don't think I'd want an original Andy Warhol shipped to me for for $159.00. They are not going to revamp their shipping department to deal with one auction.

I think they charge tax on all sales out of NY and other states regardless of how it is shipped or picked up. I picked up 2 items and they charged tax. All was forgiven though because their free coffee bar in the lobby was open.

Steve:

Their policy is items picked up in person at their sales charge that state's sales tax. For all others that have their items shipped to them, sales tax or not depends on whether Christie's has a presence in your particular state. If they do, you pay tax, if they don't, you don't pay tax.

Wow, that's nuts. I won a couple large lots from Lelands last night for roughly 350 photos and it was $75 for shipping, handling and insurance.

Just in case anyone is still figuring out how it all works. If you decide to have someone pick up the items and ship them to you (got my niece to do it!) instead of paying the insane shipping fees they charge you NY sales tax instead of your own states tax (if applicable). In my case since I had already paid 9% CA taxes I actually got a $2 refund from the difference. lol.

If you live in a state where Christie's doesn't have an office and would therefore pay no tax you're screwed and would have to pay their shipping/handling fees.

Well, once the value of your winnings reaches five figures, paying the 9% sales tax will end up outweighing the shipping costs in almost every case. Bottom line is that you will still be better off paying the shipping costs than picking up in NY. Unless you live locally, you would still have to pay some sort of shipping and insurance costs in addition, anyway.

The major reason for the shipping cost being so high as compared to the sports memorabilia AH's is the fact that Christie's makes it mandatory that shipping is done overnight (mainly via FedEx), as far as I know. Their thinking is that it gives the shipping service much less time for something to go wrong than standard ground which could take several days, maybe up to a week in the U.S. Again, as others have mentioned, their primary lines of business focus on much more high-dollar items than we see in the sports memorabilia business so this shipping process must work well for them in the majority of their endeavors, otherwise they wouldn't do it.

Surprisingly, with all of the talk on the board about high shipping costs, very little has been mentioned about the 25% BP, which, as far as I know, is the highest ever charged for a sports memorabilia auction. Their catalogue indicates that the 25% BP is their new policy going forward for all of their auctions. I'm not sure how that compares to their other auction line markets such as artwork, real estate, etc. so I can't speak to that.

My take on that aspect is that the high BP really doesn't effect the bidders/buyers in the auction, but instead, the consignor(s). In order to compensate for the extra 5% or so BP, the bidder just goes 5% lower on their bid, same bottom line, bid amount + BP. Thus, the consignor(s) lose that 5% from their net payout as the amount is moved from final bid amount to BP (i.e.-the auction house).

In this case, the way I understand it, the Baseball Museum was the only consignor of all items in the auction so none of us on the board (or anyone else) lost that extra 5% above the more traditional 20% BP range. Furthermore, it is my guess that the Baseball Museum shopped their consignment around to various sale avenues and certainly would be offered not only 0% consignment fee, but a portion of the BP as well. Maybe the agreement was somewhere between 5% back and 10% back so, in order to achieve a similar bottom-line as other sports AH's, Christie's then had to charge the 25% BP.

For this reason, I don't see this one case as an opportunity for other sports AH's to start pushing up their BP's towards that 25% level, at least not any time in the foreseeable future, in my opinion.

My niece ended up shipping the photos for $11 and NY sales tax was $2 less (which strangely they said they wouldn't refund). Ok by me. Saved $375+ dollars

I hope your returning the favor to your niece this Christmas!

I received my winnings my Christies yesterday. Just thought it'd be interesting to how where my $179 shipping cost for a single ~7x9" photo went. The $179 shipping was broken down into $144 for courier cost and $35 for insurance. My photo before BP was $1000, and the BP was $250, so the BP + shipping was $429, which basically added 43% to the hammer price of my winnings, which is the highest I've ever seen.

I paid via credit card 8 days ago (a nice feature of Christies where you can charge your CC up to $50K), and my card was charged 3 days later. As you can see from the first photo, the package was shipped two days ago via FedEx Priority Overnight, and I received it yesterday.

As you can see from the pictures, the packaging was done extremely well, obviously, the best I've ever received for a single photo. The cardboard was very thick, and you can see that Christie's is used to shipping very expensive flat items. Obviously, my photo arrived in perfectly good shape, and I'm very happy with the packaging. However, I still would have preferred the trade-off for the shipping cost being much cheaper, and being done using ground shipping as most of the other auction house do it. Still an interesting experience.