I was at a book auction in
Yorkshire yesterday to obtain more ephemera and postcards to
resell on eBay when suddenly I spotted several big changes taking
place at my favourite saleroom in the year or so since I last
attended one of their auctions.
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The biggest change, the one
that made me feel certain I’d never visit this auction house
again, was the sight of bids being taken over the Internet,
compared to usually bids being made by people in the room or by
telephone to auction representatives.
My problem started with four or five hundred book lots that
typically precede postcard sales, during which time I grew ever
more edgy as prices reached way beyond auctioneers’ estimates, all
because of people bidding online. Internet bids came in from all
over the world for some of those books and led to long delays
after room bids finished and auctioneers waited for last offers
from online bidders. Sometimes it took minutes between a final
room bid taking place and the auctioneer deciding enough time had
elapsed for online bidders to share in the action. Those few
minutes are like waiting for paint to dry and if I didn’t have
blood pressure problems already I certainly would after
yesterday’s new Internet bidding experience. In short I lost
several books I really thought I’d won only to be outbid a few
minutes after placing my final offer.
Worse was still to come, because my main worry was losing
postcards I was desperate to have to some plonker in some other
country who has just discovered my favourite auction house, the
one responsible for almost my entire eBay income.
As it happened I need not have worried about all this new-fangled
technology because few bids were actually placed for postcard lots
by online bidders, which was very strange given some amazing
international postcards and ephemera lots were auctioned on the
day.
The reason, it turned out, that people are prepared to bid for
books and many other individual products online, even at two or
three thousand pounds a time, was solely because one item or a
tiny bundle can easily be displayed in the auction catalogue both
on and off the Internet. Bidders get a good idea of the condition
and appearance of a solitary item, or a few, from a quality
photographic illustration. For postcards, though, where hundreds
or even thousands exist alongside one another in albums or boxes,
there’s no way for auctioneers to display more than a tiny handful
of the contents of individual lots. It simply takess too much time
and hosting space to photograph and illustrate more than ten or
twenty postcards each time. Much the same time and energy goes
into illustrating big bundle auction lots in tea chests, for
example, which will almost certainly be safe from online bidders.
Unexpectedly, my day ended well, not just because I got all the
postcard lots I wanted at much less than I was prepared to pay,
but because the last thing I saw of auction staff was a lot of
flapping over telephone complaints from online bidders whose
offers still failed to meet the two minute waiting period before
the auctioneer’s gavel went down.
There’s no doubt about it: Internet bidding is still very slow and
very uncertain. And long may it continue.
Which brings me to two things you can learn from my experience:
* If your chosen lots are individual items with good quality
catalogue illustrations, expect lots of online bidders and be
prepared for auctions to sometimes last much longer than in
pre-Internet days. Yesterday’s auction, for example, with 400 plus
lots, would normally begin at noon and end about 4.30pm and not
6pm as actually happened.
* If you’re not prepared to travel far, and you don’t want to
spend hours waiting for absent bidders to make their offers
online, if you’re happy with the illustrations provided for goods
you’d like to buy, try telephone bidding instead.
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