The following article was written for GoTo Auctions (formerly known as AuctionRover). The rights have reverted to the author.
What do Elvis Presley, Fess Parker, Wild Bill Hickok, dachsunds, and zebras have in common? They all have fans.
And why should auction sellers care? Because that's where the money is. Those are the people who are likely to bid on items which classic collectors and dealers would ignore, and who sometimes bid far more than book value for items they want.
The auction price of collectibles is often determined not by supply and demand, but rather by the buyer's motivation. Hence it is very important to get to know your buyers, what they value, what they are looking for, and how they use auction sites. This information can change how you categorize and describe your items, how you set your starting price, and can also help you build shopping and contact lists: items that you should go out of your way to acquire for resale, and the people to alert when you find those items.
A classic collector might focus on baseball cards. A fan might want everything related to moose, and hence pay top dollar for a Moose Skowron baseball card of a Rocky and Bullwinkle poster.
Classic collectors and most dealers focus on categories, and eBay and Amazon are organized along those lines, making it easy for them to browse. They compete with one another in both buying and selling. Within a given category, they may have their own vocabulary, their own criteria of worth, their own precise definitions of "condition," and their own fine-tuned sense of the value of any given item.
When you set out to sell an item in a category that you don't know very well, either as buyer or seller, tread cautiously. Don't presume that you know why people might buy what you have for sale and what they would be willing to pay. What to you may be small differences, might be crucial to potential buyers -- leading them to bid very high or not at all. If you understand what matters, you can set your opening prices more accurately, you can highlight the critical factors in your description, and you can word your descriptions in such a way that others know that you know what you are talking about and can take what you say seriously.
The people who deal regularly in the same category often operate like a community. Their endeavors, whether as buyers or sellers, tend to be social. They want a particular item, in part, because others want it -- as a matter of pride and reputation, or as a matter of the effect of supply and demand on price.
Fans, on the other hand, collect not because other people collect these things, or because they could ever resell them, but rather to be different, building a piece of their identity around their collection. A particular item might be of great value to them but no value at all to anyone else in the world.
You might be tempted to sell your collectibles at a relatively small auction sites dedicated to a single category. If you sell baseball cards, or depression glass, or old books, that might seem the logical approach. You might figure that at an eBay, or Amazon, or Yahoo, you would be lost among the millions of other items for sale. But keep in mind that fans would rarely go to a single category auction site -- since their interests cut across all the typical collectible categories. And it's the fans you want to attract above all -- the people who might bid ridiculously high and still be happy to "win" auctions.
You want to put your items up for sale where fans congregate -- the big auction sites -- and you want to make it easy for them to find the items of yours that match their individualistic passions.
First, let's take a look at the differing perspectives of dealers, classic collectors, and fans: What factors attract their attention? What kinds of items might they value and why? What should you do to try to get the best prices for the collectibles you have for sale?
Then we'll look at the kinds of things that you can do to encourage buyers to reveal their particular interests, so you can build relationships with them and perhaps arrange off-line sales of other items.
Other auction articles by Richard Seltzer
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