eMoviePoster.com

I (Bruce) started collecting comic books in 1959 at the age of six, and by the time I was 13 I was actively buying and selling old ones, as a way to get enough money to grow my collection (my sole "other" income was my $2 weekly allowance from my dad!). I started going to collectible shows a couple of years later, and by the time I was 17, in 1972, I was living on my own, supported from the income from my mail order business. Over the next three years, I co-organized a four day comic book convention at a major New York hotel (the 1972 EC Fan Addict Convention), and I published several major fanzines and comic books, including the first ever full-color reprints of classic comic books.

But one thing I never did was own an auction business or participate in them. Why? Because the few times I did, I was astounded that the auctions used the concept of "Buyer Beware", which meant they took NO responsibility for what they sold, and with that, they could drastically mis-describe items, and afterwards, say "Sorry, all sales are final". At that time, and over the years since, when I would ask about that, other collectors would tell me that when you buy at auction you have to accept that you can't have good customer service, or reasonable shipping, or honest condition descriptions, because "that's how auctions make their money", and "that's the way they have always been run".

It was not until 1989, after I had spent years as a professional poker player and as an options trader on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange that I re-visited the idea of running my own auctions. I started by organizing six auctions for Christie's Auction in New York City, and even though I handled almost every aspect of each auction, there were some aspects out of my control, and so I left Christie's (even though the auctions had averaged over a million dollars each), and I went on to co-run three very successful auctions with Howard Lowery, the legendary California animation auctioneer.

 But I still longed to completely run a NEW kind of auction, one where I would provide EVERY customer (no matter what they spent) with great customer service, reasonable shipping and honest condition descriptions. I reasoned that if I did that, then I wouldn't have to run super-expensive ads (like the major auctions did) because then new bidders would constantly find my business through word of mouth from existing customers, and that would allow me to instead spend the money I WOULD have spent on expensive advertising, fancy showrooms and color catalogs on giving great customer service, eliminating outrageous buyers premiums, sky high shipping, and so on!

And did that ever work out! We do virtually NO paid advertising of ANY kind (just a few ads in publications and on websites run by friends of many years) and yet, our customer base (and our yearly sales totals) keep growing and growing, and growing. We recently sold to our 40,000th customer, and where we once were very happy when we first hit two million dollars of sales in a single year, we have averaged five million dollars per year each year for the past three years (and those are all absolutely "real" sales, unlike many other auctions).

Speaking of other auctions, we think that those auctions who treat their customers poorly are "penny wise and pound foolish". They may make some extra customers on that ONE transaction, but they surely have few repeat buyers and terrible "word of mouth". We treat every customer exactly the way we want to be treated when WE are buying items over the Internet, which surely explains why do we continue to grow in total sales and in the number of satisfied customers year after year.

But there are other reasons as well for our 26 years of continuous growth. Many collectors have been buying from us for 10, 20, or more years, and when they are considering SELLING their collection, that means they KNOW 100% for sure that we will treat them the exact same way as a consignor as we treated them when they bought from us.

They also know that we alone among all major auctions can and will sell their ENTIRE collection, not just the best items. And they know that we alone can handle a collection with LOTS of items. We recently have successfully auctioned a collection with 20,000 items in it, and others with a similar number of items. We also charge the lowest commissions of ANY major auction house, at every single price level, and we get higher prices overall (for like items).

This has given us FAR more consignments than ANY other auction (over 400,000 items per year the last few years). Other auctions have to mostly BUY the items they auction, which means they are "on the opposite side" from the people they buy from, meaning that they must pay as low a price as possible so they can make a bigger profit. We, on the other hand, ONLY take consignments, and never buy, so we are "on the same side" as our consignors, meaning that we only make more money when they make more money, and isn't that a far more fair arrangement for everyone?

The best part of what we do, and how long we have successfully done it, is that in addition to not having to find new CONSIGNORS (because, as stated above) we get plenty from our past buyers from the past 26 years, but we also don't need to find new BUYERS, because of our great word of mouth that new collectors hear from older collectors when they first enter the hobby. We return this massive advertising savings to our customers in the form of no buyers premiums, fixed price shipping, and great customer service. And we promise to never change how we do business!