eMoviePoster.com

The highest single price on any item we ever achieved at auction was $97,100 for a King Kong one-sheet way back in 1994. Our second highest, six years ago, was $86,055, for a 1917 Cleopatra one-sheet. And in all our years of auctioning, we have "only" had 16 posters auction for $50,000 or more.

Yet other auctions regularly report results in the hundreds of thousands for single posters. So why is that? There are likely three reasons:

1) We have NO reserves on our auctions. It seemingly takes nerves of steel to consign an extremely valuable poster to a no reserve auction, because a $50,000 poster could conceivably auction for $1, but in actuality, when you look at ALL our 1,531,404 auction results you quickly see that the vast majority of very high quality items sell for record setting prices, and that very few ever sell for below a "low retail" price, so the fear of "no reserve" is mostly in the minds of the consignors, and NOT based on reality (or actual results).

This is clearly why many other auctions now regularly advertise some or many of their auctions as having "no reserve", like we always do, but one has to take such claims with a HUGE grain of salt (see below for why). But surely this perceived fear of our having no reserves has caused us to miss having some top consignments, but we would rather miss getting those than change our model from no reserves on any item.

2) Some auctions allow their consignors to bid on their own items! Most people are astounded when they first learn of this, but it IS legal in some states, if you declare it in the terms of sale (although it can be buried in the "fine print", which no one reads). So what seems like a sky high result may simply be a consignor "buying back" their own poster.

You might think, "Who gains when the consignor secretly buys back their own poster?" (and I say "secretly", because all other major auctions but us hide their bidders' identities, so you can't in any well tell who was bidding, or if the bids were placed by multiple bidders, or if they were real bids at all). But there IS a big gain to an auction when the consignors bid up their posters to sky high prices.

First, there is the chance that another bidder might get hit with "auction fever" and outbid the consignor, and then the consignor and the auction house get a very high real sale. But even when the consignor ends up the high bidder, the auction house gets a sky high result they can brag about (because unlike us, they rarely or never delete sales that didn't happen from their sales results). And the consignor gets back a poster that appeared to sell for a sky high price, and he can wait a while and offer to sell it at a discount to a sale that never happened!

3) Often the auctions own some or many of the items they are auctioning. So they can have an item they own APPEAR to sell for a sky high price to a phantom bidder (who doesn't exist), and because it is their own item, there is no one to pay auction fees to, and they can greatly benefit in both the ways described above at the end of 2) above. In OUR auctions, our posters are consigned, and ALL reported results are "real" (if the consignor is not paid in full, for any reason, we delete the result from our Auction History).

And of course this  "3)" above explains why we see posters that appeared to sell for sky high prices immediately offered for "resale" the day after the auction ends, and why so many of them return to the auction block over and over, appearing to sell for lower and lower prices each time, until they finally apparently actual sell, often at a fraction of what seemed to be the first selling price in one or more earlier auctions.

So as long as eMoviePoster.com insists on no reserves on any item, and refuses to let consignors bid on their own items, and only auctions items that were consigned to them, then you likely WON'T see results in the hundreds of thousands for any single posters in OUR auctions, but we don't mind that at all!

Eight years ago we commissioned master cartoonist Erik Andresen to create a comic strip about the above, and it is as relevant today as it was eight years ago! (click on it to see a full-size image that is easier to read)