eMoviePoster.com

     Since 1989, I, Bruce Hershenson, organized 18 major movie poster auctions (10 for Christie's auction house, 3 for Howard Lowery auction house, and 5 mega-auctions held on eBay in 2001-2004) with total sales of over 10 million dollars! Between 1989 and 1999 I sold over 30,000 vintage movie posters and lobby cards through sales catalogs with sales of over 4 million dollars. In 2000, after some trial sales in late 1999, I opened eMoviePoster.com on eBay, which over the next 8 years sold over 17 million dollars on that site, in over 330,000 transactions.
      But by 2008 I was completely fed up with eBay! I could see that they were treating all small sellers terribly, endlessly raising fees and micro-managing every aspect of the auctions. Since I was auctioning over two million dollars a year there, and I was getting treated no better than any tiny seller, I correctly surmised that their master plan was to change eBay into a clearing house for a few hundred mega-sellers, and to slowly eliminate ALL the small sellers, so that they could fire a huge percentage of their employees and simply host the auctions for those mega-sellers, and perhaps make more money than ever.
      So in early 2008 I announced that after over 300,000 eBay auctions I would be leaving there forever, and I gave the above reasons. Quite a few sellers there told me I was right, but a much larger group told me I was completely wrong (I am sad to report that many of my predictions proved to be squarely on the mark and a lot of those sellers who remained in 2008 have long since left eBay themselves.
      I contracted with an auction host to hold my own auctions on my own site, which had been running for many years. But I planned keeping some eBay auctions running while I made the transition. Our first auction on our own site ended Thursday, Apr 17th, 2008. It was a special charity auction (for the benefit of a sick child) and it contained just 19 signed items. When that auction went completely smoothly, we knew we had a "winner" and we first switched our Thursday weekly auctions to our own site, to give us a chance to find and identify any problems.
      Once we felt certain everything was perfect, we moved our Tuesday auctions as well, and our very last set of eBay auctions ended Tuesday, Jun 3rd, 2008 (it contained 559 rolled non-U.S. posters).
      It is hard to believe how far we have come since then!  As of this writing, we've auctioned 357,401 items on our own site (if you are reading this on Sunday the 15th after 4 PM, then it is 357,855 total items auctioned!), which means we have now auctioned 52% of every single item we've ever sold through our auctions on our own website.
      That means we've auctioned more movie posters on eMoviePoster.com than on eBay, through sales lists, with Christie's, and with Howard Lowery COMBINED! And in 2004 to 2007 we averaged sales of $2,550,000 per year (and never auctioned three million dollars worth in any year, but in 2008 to 2011 we averaged sales of $3,325,000 per year (and auctioned three million dollars worth in EVERY one of those years)!  Obviously being tied to eBay was greatly holding us back!