eMoviePoster.com

We have always known that we started auctioning on eBay early in May of 1999, but our records from that time were in a very primitive Microsoft Works table that we soon abandoned, and a few years later, when our computers were being formatted, we THOUGHT the file with those sales had been accidentally deleted (we now back up EVERYTHING in several ways, to prevent this from ever happening again). But we just came across that table among some super-old files, so not only are we now able to add our first 1,906 Internet sales ever (from May 7th, 1999 through the end of that year) to our Auction History table, but we also can right now share with you some interesting information about how we began on eBay!

Our very first auctions ever were on 5/7/99, and they were three "test" auctions of linenbacked one-sheets at $49.95 each, and the three posters sold to three different buyers for the minimum bid (none of those three buyers from May 7th, 1999 are still current customers). We added five auctions on May 10th, five auctions on May 11th, and seven auctions on May 14th, and those started at a variety of prices, all well under the retail value of the posters, and all sold (at that time, I solely auctioned posters that I owned personally, because I knew that at first I would be selling for under retail, sometimes "giving" the posters away, so I wanted the loss to be mine and not that of any consignor, and it was not until 12/6/1999 that I first ran an auction for a consignor that was not a poster I owned myself).

You can see a chart of those first 20 auctions below:

The first of the posters that were auctioned on May 10th was bought by one of our current customers (in fact, he just had an order shipped last week!), so we are awarding him an Ultimate Bonus Offer (containing books with an original retail of around $500, plus a coffee table book that retails for $50 or more, like Graven Images!), for being our longest term current online customer (he has been buying from us on the Internet for 14 years)!

Starting on May 17th, we began adding around 10 auctions per day for four days each week, and over the next few weeks, we began adding around 50 auctions per week. Over the course of the rest of 1999, we kept upping our pace, and by the end of the year, we had auctioned 1,906 items! It is also interesting to note that not all of these items were auctioned on eBay. Four of those items we auctioned on May 11th were auctioned in AMAZON auctions (yes, back then, Amazon had auctions just like eBay's!). But the Amazon auctions never really took off, and we quickly saw that the eBay auctions were far superior, so only 70 of those 1,906 auctions were on Amazon. Over the next three years, we saw really substantial growth, as seen in the chart below:

Of course, those numbers are dwarfed by our 2012 sales of 110,628 items for a total of $4,072,951 (and our very similar numbers for our first half of 2013). You can find sales results for all the years from 2002 to the present at http://www.emovieposter.com/sales/postersales.php. But the above 1999 sales are how our online business began, and I thought many of you would enjoy seeing this information (and I know that some number of you have been customers of ours over this entire 14 year period, and I thank you very much!).