Posted By:
warshawlawWhile I appreciate your willingness to address the issue, there are aspects to your contentions that I find to be either unrealistic or disingenuous:
"if we just had a straight 30% fee, as Rob suggests, how many of you consignors would give us your great items to sell if you were charged 30% on your selling item? Sure, the buyer makes out, but how about the consignor?"
This analysis is partially nonsense, partially misleading. The nonsense part is your assertion that the buyer would profit. The buyer doesn't "make out" at all. No one who bids real money on an auction is stupid enough to forget the BP when bidding, especially when it approaches 20% of the sales price. Take away the BP and bidders will bid higher for the item itself because the cost to them is the same regardless of how it is split up. The misleading part of the analysis is the assertion that the consignor would be screwed; that is true only if the auctioneer charges the same commission as the commission + BP, which he need not do if he simply wants to net the same money and normalizes the commission rate to achieve the same result; as noted in the above post to get to the same net for the seller as a 15:15 commission and BP the straight commission would be 26%. There is no mathematical reason for a commission + BP structure; the net can be structured any way necessary to achieve the same mathematical results.
"One of the best parts of our auctions is that we will take your entire collection and break it down to maximize your money. We can't sell every card, one by one, but we can break down a large collection to get the most money out of even the smaller items, by grouping them into lots that will sell for $500-$1000."
Actually, the way auctioneers lot lower value items is one of the worst parts of auctions for consignors. First of all, the math is wrong again. If ten cards sell for $100 each, or ten cards thrown together sell for $1,000, the commission and BP earned is exactly the same. Second, you cannot tell me with a straight face that packaging lots of disparate cards benefits the consignors. There are numerous dealers who make their livings buying these auctioneer-created Frankenstein lots and breaking them down on ebay and otherwise. Hell, I've purchased and broken down lots from auctions and made money on them too. I regularly watch auctions for boxing cards leave tons of seller money on the table because the auctioneers want to have lots that hit certain results per lot and throw all kinds of stuff together to do it. Tell me the lotting is done to save catalog printing space and costs, tell me it is to save labor on data entry or packaging (of course my response will be that you auctioneers already charge an arm and a leg for shipping and "handling), but don't try to convince me that throwing disparate cards into big lots benefits the sellers; we all know better.
"If we eliminated the BP or sellers fees, there would be no major auctions in the hobby and you'd have to go back to dealing with potentially "headache" sellers on eBay, exclusively."
Decorum prevents me from printing my initial reaction to this statement; suffice it to say it involved a two-word expletive. Do you really expect us to believe that a straight commission structure would kill off auctions?
Since the math is no obstacle, the reason for the BP structure must be something else. Given Mastro's recent decision to kick up the BP 2.5%, I see why an auctioneer would like a BP: it allows the auctioneer to act like they are charging a low commission but really not, and to structure their contracts and consignor statements in a way that avoids throwing the real cost of the sale in the consignor's face. I fell for the trick, I admit it. I signed a Mastro contract with a % commission (which I paid very close attention to) and the squirrelly "no less than 15%" BP language (which I paid little attention to), not thinking about how it could be used against me. I've also received a few consignor statements in my day. What they don't list is the total received by the auction house, so I never see in print that my $850 is really a $1,150 sale. Bottom line: the commission plus BP is just a psych game...
I have to tell you, the more I see, the more attractive it is to me to sell my stuff myself when I am ready to do it.