Siegel Changing Auction Platforms

mootermutt2010 - I hope what you want is not what I REALLY want! It is a little spooky that I have exactly the same feelings as you do on the other points in your post.

I am going to be participating in the next two Siegel auctions on SAN, partly live, and partly through SAN agent bidding. I see no need, or advantage of moving to the Siegel site unless "live" bidding there is on equal footing with floor bidding.

If the auction houses are going to make it difficult to do provenance on stamps, I suggest we use the forum to inform each other of earlier sales, missing certificates, and description changes.

This situation is another chapter in the ongoing saga of, "as your money flows". Everyone wants some of it to stick in their pocket as you try to complete the historically simpler transaction of goods moving between a willing seller and buyer at an agreed to price. Net results the "middle people" wind up financially better than the two principals involved in the transaction. And so it goes.

As far as provenance goes, if bidding on Siegel the provenance for a stamp previously sold by Siegel (many of the stamps are Siegel repeats) is as easy as using Powersearch or links within the lot description. Other than that one can just use their SAN account and do a search. The missing certificates and so forth were never really issues very solvable by the provenance feature from what I have seen thus far.

I do not see much really changing other than the site that I bid on for Siegel lots.

I have been live bidding on Cherrystone, Rasdale and Old Louis (for Russian material) using their own platforms and the experiences are frankly better than SAN in some or many ways depending. Old Louis in particular is the Gold Standard IMO and I wrote about my experience in a separate topic. For a small auction house it is an amazingly well done site with an abundance of great features. I said in my other thread that I wish all houses did as well as Old Louis. Very modern and VERY easy to use.

All that said I still love SAN. I have been using it since the beginning and like Scott albums it is a warm blanket for me in many ways.

Auction mobility certainly looks good. Nice big images, simple interface. I can't imagine any one tech savvy or not having any difficulty with it.

No "pass" button could slow things down until they go countdown

How do we know that their is no "pass" button?

Anyone have any luck using the mobile version? They clearly have one, but it won't come up on my phone.

I had the same comment/question.
I only placed one bid today, but did not off-hand notice any pass capability. I may have missed it.

Because I bid and there wasn't any

It sounds like the new countdown system will ultimately be like the one that Emerald Ventures uses for their weekly auctions. It works well and is completely automated. Bids that come in during the last 60 seconds extend the auction for an additional 60 seconds, so there is no sniping.

For example, if someone bids at the 0:37 remaining mark, the clock jumps to 1:37 remaining. Bids then made prior to the clock reaching 0:59 remaining do not further extend the timer, but once it falls below 1:00 again, a bid will extend it by a minute again... lather, rinse, repeat.

So it's quite possible to have an earlier lot ultimately closing long after lots that followed it in the listings if it was a lot with a lot of last-minute activity.

Of course this assumes that Siegel's system will work in the same manner, which it very well may not.

Yahoo! Auctions implemented that and the buyers hated it and left, they shut them down about a year later.

On Cherrystone live it is only 7 seconds that gets added. Works fine. 60 seconds is crazy long.

I agree that 60 seconds is too long. 7 seconds seems a bit short though. I think 15-20 seconds would be sufficient.

Rasdale uses 7 seconds and if you're high bidder it seems like a lifetime.

Yup. It feels like a longggggg time but not as long as the "Trepel" pause. I was the high bidder on a gorgeous 292 at Siegel last year, at least I thought that I was as I listened to Scott call the auction. My bid was not exactly low but Scott was not happy with it because he would not hammer it down. I started watching the clock and a full two minutes plus went by with Scott poking and prodding floor bidders and talking about how nice the stamp was and that it was worth more than my bid and so on. My blood pressure went to the red zone and then somebody finally started bidding and it ended up going where I did not want to go and I lost the stamp to a floor bidder. And you know what? It left an extremely bad taste in my mouth. I hope that it was worth the extra $ to Siegel because I throttled back on my bidding with them. What really irked me was that prior to that lot he was flying along and complaining about the amount of lots to get through and that bidders needed to use the Pass button, blah, blah, blah. My rant.