eMoviePoster.com

It is an "open secret" with almost all longtime collectors and dealers that the vast majority of major auctions do NOT actually sell all they auction, but instead, a significant percentage of the items actually go unsold and are either returned to the consignors or are returned to the auctions' property room (because they were the auction houses' item before the auction), where they are kept for a year or two until they are brought back out for another auction, with the hopes of finding a "real" buyer the next time. This is even true of many items that supposedly had no reserve or met the posted reserve, because many auctions make secret deals with their consignors, and you can't even trust that their posted results really occurred (either that a sale was made at all, or that the sale occurred at the posted price).

But you will never see this in our eMoviePoster.com auctions! We only take consignments that truly have no reserve, and they all start at $1 (and yes, this does cost us some consignments, but often those same items go to other auctions where they don't sell, and often they then make their way to us).

What happens when the buyer in our auctions never pays? Three things. First that buyer (the person, not just that auction) is forever banned from bidding in our auctions, because we know that this is the ONLY way to ensure that just about all bidders are authentic bidders who will honor every bid they place (and in fact, we collect from over 99% of our bidders, both in terms of overall dollars and in terms of number of auctions, whereas all other auctions have FAR lower collection rates, mostly because their "bad bidders" can simply open a new account and start the process over.

Second, we remove the unpaid for result from our massive Auction History Database. That way, all those who use this database to check past sold prices can KNOW for 100% that the prices they see were actually paid to the consignors in every case, and that no results were cancelled or re-negotiated, as is true in all other online results databases. Third, we re-list the item (or return it to the consignor, if they prefer that). Then, when the auction ends, and the item is paid for and shipped, we add the new correct result to our Auction History.

In a small percentage of auctions, the original buyer of the item sends it back to us, and if it is within the last year, and the condition of the item has not changed, we use the same image (and condition description) when listing that item (to save time). And of course, there will then be two results in our Auction History for that item, because it WAS auctioned twice, and the consignor was paid both times.

BECAUSE WE ACTUALLY SELL EVERYTHING WE AUCTION (except for the less than 1% of items that go unpaid) THIS MEANS WE START FROM SCRATCH WITH EVERY AUCTION WE DO! This puts us at a perceived disadvantage to other auctions, especially with their major auctions, because often half or more of their major items are simply repeats from their past ones, either pulled off their storage room shelves or sent back from consignors wanting to try again with items that did not sell in the past.

We, on the other hand, have NO items to start with, so we have to assemble an entire major auction solely with consignments we received since the last one, and since we do four or five a year, that means we have only three months at the most in which to assemble the entire auction! But this gives us a great advantage over other major auctions, because ours are so much "fresher" than theirs, with lots and lots of items that have not been in our major auctions before, or have not been in them for many years (we DO get consignments sent back to us from people who purchased them from us, but they are usually ones that we auctioned between three to twenty years ago, because the vast majority of collectors wait at least a few years, and often many more, before beginning to sell their collection.

We have found that most consignors HATE to send their items to auctions and have them returned to them "unsold" because they did not meet the almost always too high "reserve" price (and often they are then still charged fees on the unsold items by the auction!). Lots and lots of these people have found that consigning to us makes far more sense (because while there are a very few disappointing results on "better" items, they are almost always offset by the better than expected results). And LOTS of these consignors now exclusively consign to us (they often say, "I just wish I had discovered you guys before I dealt with those other guys"). That is why we have 1,870+ consignors, FAR more movie paper consignors than ANY other movie paper auction!

Incidentally, the exact same thing (about starting from scratch) is true about our regular weekly auctions. You can't imagine the logistics of creating 3,000 auctions a week, and of course we must be sent around 30,000 items every month to make that happen, because we auction lots of sets and bulk lots. I originally started the Sunday auctions (our third set of weekly auctions) seven years ago, because we had just received two truckload consignments, and I knew it would take forever to auction them with two sets of auctions a week.

I intended to keep that third auction for "a year or two", until we had eliminated the backlog of consignments. But because we have continued to get a massive number of new consignments over the past seven years, I have kept the Sunday auctions running. But now, we FINALLY are close to getting completely "caught up" and if we don't get another massive consignment in the next few months, then we will likely end the Sunday auctions (but of course, we could possibly start them back up at a later date).

So remember, when you see a giant selection of ultra expensive items in others' major auctions, realize that many are simply repeats from their recent past auctions ("Round up the usual suspects"), and that many of those items will likely return to the shelf after the auction in over. But in eMoviePoster.com major auctions, EVERY item is newly consigned, and after the auction is over, EVERY item has a new owner!