Cost Of Auction House Catalogues

Over the last 3 years in Australia some of my Auction Houses have demanded that I pay for their catalogues and mailing cost because of their increased production costs. I refused to pay and no longer bidded at those auction houses.

One wanted $30 per catalogue(if I remember rightly)and 80% of the catalogue was made up of lots that were not stamps. I liked this auction house very much because the owner has no idea about auctioning stamps and the descriptions were terrible. This lost them most of their stamp bidders. I continued with them putting in res bids, only with very little competition coming my way. Picked up some very nice stuff very cheap but also got caught with some stinkers. I was expecting to get caught out every now and then but when I was told to pay for the catalogues some years ago and could not get the owner to see that I will not and you will lose me as a bidder. So ended our business relationship.

Last week I contacted the above Auction House asking them to sent me an email telling me when their auctions were listed on-line and that I did not want to be mailed a catalogue and that I also wanted to bid by email. In the past they would not eccept a bid by email or let me bid without a catalogue.

Received an email a couple of days later from them saying that they were delighted to have me on board again and were happy to meet all the conditions I wanted. So now I hope that there will not be too much competition at that auction house.

Also received a great reply from another back water auction house I had trouble with some time ago as well.

We now have 6 auction houses to bid at. At one time we were bidding at over 15 auctions. But now we are very happy with just having the 6 to work with for reasons that make good business sense.

Some times we just have to think outside the square to get what we want!

In all of my years of collecting, I have never paid for an auction catalogue and never intend to. I have been collecting since 1955.

Most of the auction houses will continue sending you catalogues as long as you bid on a previous sale, even if you lost that bid. I think the key thing is to continue to be active even if you make only one bid per sale and it does not have to be a winning bid either.

Chimo

Bujutsu

But its true that printing costs have gone up...we used to have a nice little magazine in Upstate New York called the "Stamp Insider" but it became too expensive to publish it....you can see it online though..which is better in a way because now anyone can access it !

have no problems with Auction Houses charging for printed catalogues to be mailed out - its an expensive exercise in today's world - however a lot nowadays have PDF copies on their websites that you can download and this is what I do

Here is a dynamic auction website to checkout. I've seen several Auction Houses in Australia here. Simply register and they e-mail links no charge. http://stampauctionnetwork.com/World.cfm


Paper catalogs are very expensive in low runs like a Stamp Auction house produces. However, $30.00 is a bit much -- it's to sort the players from non-players. Low print-runs, paper, 4-color ink, labor to scans, write-up and postage, etc., (perfect binding, size, quality paper, may cost US$15.00++ to produce. Everyone doing a catalog (no matter the industry) wants to go paperless. Just today I received an e-mail from someone discussing the cost of low-run printing; it use to cost the 2-cents a page to print (in the 1990's) their pubs -- it nows costs them $20.00/per page! Paper-Labor- Printing and Postage doesn't come cheap!

Everyone wants FREE. Nothing is Free. Those days are over.

Hal - thanks for the link

Interestingly a stamp dealer I do some business with sells old auction catalogues at $5 each. Some of them are 10-20 years old.