The following article was written for GoTo Auctions (formerly known as AuctionRover). The rights have reverted to the author.
They have little interest in the "intrinsic" value of the goods they buy and sell. What matters is the supply and demand, the resale value.
They are both buyers and sellers. In some cases, they may do both online. In other cases, they may shop in the physical world for items that they know are in high demand at auction sites. Or they may grab a bargain at an online auction and resell it to a face-to-face customer.
They are very interested in the certifiable condition of everything they deal in. Your reputation for conservative descriptions of condition or for consistent grading is very important.
The level of their bids is restrained by book value. They won't get caught up in last minute bidding frenzies. They'd go out of business very quickly if they did. So don't expect to get high prices from dealers.
On the other hand, they are constantly in the market. The fact that they already have one of something doesn't prevent them from wanting to buy another and another, so long as they are confident of the long-term demand for such an item.
If you happen to have many of the same thing, and want to turn them to cash quickly, you should try to attract dealers to your auctions. Maybe you might want to use a Dutch Auction at eBay. As an alternative, you could offer just one item for sale, emphasizing the condition and resale value and mentioning in the description that you have quite of few of similar items. "Then if you get a dealer as a buyer, chances are good that he/she will be interested in negotiating with you off-line for the rest," says Simon Slade of SaleHoo.
Classic collectors aim to acquire just one of every item in the target set, in the highest available condition. But they will buy doubles of some items to use as trading stock, to help them get the ones they really want. When they bid on a mixed batch of items, often the price they are willing to pay for the lot is determined by what they are will to pay for the one item that they really want. And when they bid on a batch that has several different copies of the same thing, they are only willing to pay a little more than what they would for a single one. In other words if six 1958 Whitey Ford cards were on sale, they might be willing to bid two times what they would for one of them (planning to use the extra five cards for trading stock), but they certainly wouldn't bid six times.
Dealers wouldn't bid as high as collectors for a single item, but would bid far higher than collectors for a lot of several or many of the same kind, because they are thinking of resale, not keeping the items forever.
The collector who is close to completing a collection will pay top dollar -- far more than book value -- for the satisfaction of getting those missing items and getting them quickly. This is the one occasion when classic collectors might lose their heads and bid far higher than book value. Hence it is very important to learn which items a particular collector still needs. Then you might want to make off-line deals for those items at premium prices, rather than trust to the vagaries of an online auction. Or, if you know that certain collectors want this particular item, then put it up for auction and alert those handpicked collectors, so they don't miss the opportunity to bid.
Avid and dedicated collectors may sometimes try to negotiate off-line deals that include trading or selling as well as buying. Although their objective is to build their own collection, in their efforts to build trading stock in their roundabout tactics to acquire the hard-to-get items they need, they sometimes act very much like dealers.
Also some collectors might be interested in your merchandise only because it supplements, in an ensemble, an item that they really collect. For instance, a collector of old bottles may want matching bottle caps to put on top, for display. In that case, a bent or beaten up cap may do just fine -- giving the ensemble a look and feel of age and authenticity. Keep that in mind when you write your descriptions -- help those kinds of people to find what you have for sale.
This article and hundreds of related items by Richard is available, in plain text, on CD ROM My Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities (B&R Samizdat Express, 2002) for $29. That same CD also includes the full text of his books The Social Web, Take Charge of Your Web Site, Shop Online the Lazy Way, and The Way of the Web. It is available from Amazon and from our online store http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat, where you can buy an entire library for the price of a book.
Other auction articles by Richard Seltzer
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