Irritating auction practices

This is what I done for years now. I keep a 'master' spreadsheet which has all the major auction houses I use, calculates the bid + the buyer fees and then the total amount from original currency to Dollar depending on current exchange rate. It means that I always know precisely how much I will be bidding.

 

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Don't forget eBay. An auction (sometimes) with be no buyer premium.

 

Thats a walk away for me.

 

That's a pretty neat idea. Can you share a blank one?

 

Heritage may do some things right but they do some big things wrong. Without rehashing why I dislike slabs, here's a major problem with slabs: images. It's hard to take good pictures through plastic. That's not my main problem with HA though-- it's having to click so many times just to see one coin! Don't they realize how many thousands of coins come to auction and stores every month and how time-consuming it is to look at all of them?

The primary reason I don't browse HA is that I don't have time to click on each listing, and then click on each side of the coin, then fiddle with the enlargements. Plus, it is extremely annoying to see the reverse at whatever degree of rotation it appears in the slab. They square up the image using the slab, not the coin's orientation. Bah.

Edited to correct what I said about Heritage's images: they do crop and rotate the coins, but you still have to hover, click, click, and fiddle to see the coins. Joined obverse and reverse images are preferred. I was thinking of a different slab-happy auctioneer when I wrote about the lack of correct reverse orientation.

 

Many of the big consignors pay no consignors' fee or even get a percentage over the hammer price. It depends on what you can negotiate.

 

Am wondering how you buy coins at all, as all auctions that I am aware of have buyers fees. If one buys at retail, one is paying the cost + the buyers fee + the dealer markup.

And indeed everything is negotiable (I'm not going to make a list but one has to use one's imagination and then some). It's not just about price: positioning and promotion can also be discussed - the "three Ps of marketing", and if you choose to focus on one ("I need awesome three dimensional virtual reality photos of my coins") then don't also expect to see those images beamed on the side of the Empire State Building and be charged no commission at the same time. One should be aware of one's negotiating power before starting. If consigning a few coins into a multi million dollar auction, and one decides to try and negotiate terms, the dealer may well suggest you try another vendor. Unless one's consignment forms a substantial part of a sale, I wouldn't bother; for one thing you depend on happy dealers to sell your collection going forward so trying to nickel-and-dime them at the outset may not play well later.

 

High buyers' fee kill the auctions for me. Yes, you can use your calculator and figure out what you want to bid, but there seem to be a few people who ignore the fee completely. They bid as if it's not even there. That can drive the prices through the roof. Add sales tax and shipping to that, and you can be 40% over the hammer price for U.S. purchases.

Some of these people who ignore he buyers' fee seem to think that buying at auction "protects" them from over paying. They think because someone else bid X that they are okay with paying X + the next increment. They aren't. You can easily over pay at auction when you are up against people with more money than brains or restraint.

I prefer buying coins from dealer directly and avoiding auctions. Not every coin that a dealer offers was bought by him at auction. Therefore it is not true that you are paying all the auction fees plus the dealer mark-up for all the coins they sell. Dealers, who stay in business, are constrained by the market.

Some items simply don't show up at the shows. That's when you have to go the auction route.

 

I view the shipping fees as a wash. If I buy the item at a show, I had to spend money to get there, sometimes a lot of money when you have airfare and lodging. If I pay for shipping, I don't have the travel fees. Therefore I don't consider the shipping fees when I place bids.

 

Over the long run, well-bought coins at auctions typically come in at 20-30% less than the cost of well-bought coins at online retailers. I have long records of both. My cheapest sources of supply are however other collectors, with whom I often trade on an "at cost" basis thus eliminating commissions, and smaller not-online dealers at shows who may have bought direct from collectors or from obscure and under-priced auctions. Consistently my most expensively bought coins are those from online retailers such as on VCoins. I almost always take a big loss when reselling such. One needs a mix of sources of supply to keep one's edge, and so that one has comparative data to know what a good price is. If I didn't buy from all four of auctions / retail / collectors / shows, then I wouldn't know what I've just written. Sometimes I DO buy online retail because someone has something special one needs. Then one needs to pay the price.

 

This is an easy answer. Andrew McCabe is a high end collector only interested in the finest and the most rare. furryfrog02 is a relatively new collector on a low budget interested in coins that he finds appealing but not necessarily the one the professional crowd considers worthwhile. There was a time that many of us sought 'beginner' coins when we were beginning but today we see more people who start by buying the most expensive coins first. Old-style beginners by coins from different sources than those who goal in collecting is to build a collection that will merit a sales catalog with our name on the cover.

No. There are dealers who buy collections that the major houses would not touch and sell to those of us in it for the fun rather than the profit. My favorite class of these dealers often have coins that are still in flips from a previous dealer who thought he could sell the thing for twice what it was worth but ended up dumping the unsold remainders for less than (often a lot less than) they paid just to get the cash out. This is not a way to get the coin you want when you want it in a grade that will make other collectors envious and assure ten auction houses contact your widow before your body is cold. It is a way to get coins you can enjoy and assure that your widow will recover no more from your coins than she will from your stack of used computer books on Windows 98 that cost you good money when you were learning 'tech' twenty years ago.

There is nothing wrong with either hobby but it shocks me that we have so many people who think their answer is the only answer. There are a million different ancient coins and almost as many approaches to their collection. I know some of you spent 100 times as much on dinner last night as I did but that does not mean you got 100 times as well fed or enjoyed your Kobe beef and Pappy Van Winkle bourbon more than I did my spinach salad and kefir.

We manage.

 

Agreed. And as others have noted, these fees can get astronomical. I used to watch a few collector cars programs where one-of-a-kind vintage autos show up at prestigious auctions around the country. In many cases, the buyers of these cars pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in such fees for cars won at auction in the $Millions. Well I guess it's OK: if you can afford to acquire such a thing then you should be happy to pay someone for the privilege of bidding, I guess well, not really.

Better that the seller incur all such fees—a membership fee, a product entry fee and a commission on the sale price. By jove, I think such a place already exists and it's called eBay.

 

I concur with @Valentinian 's point that the buyer's commission should be easy to find among the auction house's terms and conditions, but I don't understand various posters' concern that this commission is excessive or exists at all. You simply take into account the commission, the PayPal fees, the currency exchange fees and postage when buying the coin. For auctions in Europe, the final price I pay as a US collector is typically 1.5x to 1.6x the hammer price. A coin that hammers for 80 Euro will cost me, when all is said and done, about $120-125. Too expensive? Then don't bid.

After a while, you learn to interpret a given seller's photos, too. Many auction houses use high-intensity, diffuse light to display the coin's details, washing out the color of toning or patina. After a while, you get to where you can anticipate what the coin will look like in hand.

Savoca's photo:



My photo in natural sunlight better conveys its actual appearance:



Pegasi's photo:



My photo in natural sunlight:



Frank Robinson's photo:



My photo in sunlight:



My only real complaint with any auction house is that shared by @TIF earlier -- that auction companies that sell a lot of slabbed material (Great Collections, Heritage, etc) should make it easier to see the COIN, not the label on the slab (which I could care less about because the empty slab and its label will go into the trash can about 5 minutes after the coin arrives in the mail).

As with any endeavor, there's a bit of a learning curve when it comes to buying at auction and some lessons are (best?) learned the hard way. Auctions are a good way to buy coins but you have to familiarize yourself with how they work and anticipate what the coins will cost beyond the hammer price and anticipate what the coins will look like in-hand.

 

Attached here is perhaps the most simplistic version one can make. On Column A Line 2 I have entered the amount plus the buyers fee. Line 3 is where you enter your local currency amount you want to bid. Column B Line 2 has the current exchange rate from different currencies (if applicable, otherwise leave it at a value of "1"). Line 3 has the total amount it translates to in the end.

I exclude shipping and other fees from this (though one can easily add columns for postage, bank fees, etc) but I always round the numbers up to account for those fees (if a buyers premium is 17.5% I round to 18, exchange is 1.159 it becomes 1.2).

Its super easy to use the same formulas to add lines for an infinite number of auction houses. This is how I personally keep track of what I am bidding.

And my answer to all the other posts about this topic, I simply bid what I am willing to pay. I dont worry about what others are paying and as long as I have a pretty good idea of the hammer+commission+postage and am happy with the amount, then I bid.

Oops! CT does not allow an .xls extension to be attached to a thread. I took a screen shot to show what the formula is that I used in the relevant cel. If you know what that means, that should do it. Otherwise PM me with your e-mail and I can send it that way.

 

It doesn't solve all of the issues but they do have a relatively recently introduced feature on non-mobile browsers where if you hover over the lot image, it'll pop up both the obverse and reverse.

 

eBay isn't an auction house, it's an online bidding platform. Buyer's don't purchase from eBay, they purchase from sellers using eBay as their platform. Buyers therefore pay eBay nothing.

 

The most irritating auction practices I've encountered were:

1. Auction house losing the lot advertised, and sending me what they thought was a reasonable substitute (without asking first whether I'd be satisfied with the substitute). It wasn't.
2. Auction house describing and photographing a lot, then telling me, after I'd won, that the listing was accidental - would I like a different item instead? No thanks.
3. Auction house holding a sale in GBP£, but then invoicing in Euro because they didn't like the drop in GBP£ following the Brexit vote.

All of the above happened to me in dealings with a single firm mentioned elsewhere on this thread.

 

Everyone against whom I am bidding is paying the same buyer's premium, so I don't have a problem paying it as long as I have a clear understanding of what it is. I remember when there were no buyer's premiums. Those days are gone. The premium amount should be up front and obvious though. I have never had much trouble finding it when I really want to bid on a coin, and I usually calculate a default of 20% while considering the coin and what it might be worth.

I must say that I buy nearly 80-90% of my coins through auction houses. I have found that those coins that I purchase outright at shows or online, generally are at higher prices than coins of equivalent quality I see in ACSearch plus a 20% buyers premium.

As for the sites that specialize in slabbed coins, as logical as slabbing is in today's market, I find it exhausting and esthetically uncomfortable for ancient coins so I just avoid the sites. Most of the really good coins are elsewhere.

 

I used to buy coins from many sources but now I tend to buy mostly from auctions. I like auctions because they give me some time to research the coin and determine whether or not I want the coin. Once I decide if I want the coin I then determine what I am willing to pay for it. After that it is simply try to stay up during the auction and make my bids. However I will say that if a coin is beyond a certain dollar value, I will usually not attempt to purchase it unless I have seen it with my own eyes or had someone whom I trust look at it for me. I rarely break this rule.