Critical Mass?

An email from AuctionBytes arrived this morning and somewhat derailed what I had been planning to talk about today. But I do want you to know that I spent both Saturday and Sunday trying to acquire stock to meet my weekly goal which is why I have been so uncharacteristically quiet. Saturday’s estate sale began in the early hours of a frigid morning and ended in dismal failure ten minutes after it started. When  the “best” book in the place is a fluff-and- feathers coffee-table book about Tibetan temples for $20 you might as well go home and drown your sorrows in dark roast coffee, which is exactly what I did.

Sunday, however, was the Incredible Shrinking Medina Flea Market which actually GREW a little, both in terms of vendors and patrons, and even in suitable merchandise. To my pleasant surprise, I bought something!  Actually, I bought six somethings, one of which, an antiquarian children’s book, I already took to the antiques mall. The others are two old children’s books, a scarce novel of the French Revolution by Swedish author and naval officer Henrik Af Tolle, and two pieces of ephemera – one on home décor from the early 20’s that’s really about selling linoleum (see top book in photo), and the other a 1940’s catalog of home goods. I am happy to report that all earned their keep. In fact, I was so thrilled to have found such goodies that I even sprung for a very cool crate with a cranberry ad on one side to contain my sprawling ephemera items at the mall.

Naturally, I couldn’t wait to take it over, so I processed the one book, shined it up a little, and off we went. You’d have thought when I opened the door to the antiques mall that it was 1968 at the old dance clubs in Cuyahoga Falls. The place rocked and rolled to the oldies music and  customers milled around in every aisle.  Except for the night after Thanksgiving we’ve never seen anything like it. But it gets even better – just like the night after Thanksgiving we chanced on someone in our booth actively buying something.  A lady from Pittsburgh took a dozen early Mary Roberts Rinehart novels I’d had online since 2006. I was so thrilled I would have danced with her had she been in the mood.

But then today AuctionBytes sent the results of their annual seller's survey of online venues and I fell back down to earth with a resounding  thud. Book sites such as ABE, alibris, etc, are not included, but ebay and amazon most definitely are. This year sellers were also allowed to submit the names of their various other small sites, though only a handful of the most popular were included in the final fifteen. This skewed the results a bit – but in the big picture it was only to a minor extent. Sellers were asked to rate sites for their ease of use, customer support, fees, and of course the biggie – profitability. The surprising part was that sellers favored a site I had never heard of called Artfire, naming it number one, and dropping last year’s winner, Ruby Lane, to the third spot. Amazon tumbled from fourth to seventh place while ebay slipped from thirteenth to fourteenth. Even bonanza, which had been a big winner last year in second place, wound up in fourth.

At first glance you might think, “What is this Artfire and do they sell books?” Yes, they do, as well as other vintage items, as does Ruby Lane, etsy, ebay, Bonanza etc… But before you rush to sign up it’s important to look at profitability, which of course includes fees.  No venue received more than 7.6 points out of ten points for profitability and the winner at that number was Webstores, again a site I knew nothing about.What’s interesting is that the high traffic sites actually performed worse than the small ones in profitability (due of course to fees) with amazon at 5.48 and ebay at 4.58. Before we jump to conclusions though we do need to consider that this is a relatively small, though exemplary, study with just 2800 respondents.

I checked out all of the sites I had not heard of, plus another one called Addoway that a bonanza friend is planning to move to, and found them eerily similar. While it’s likely  true that all of these sites have problems, as evidenced by the complaints even the best engendered, and that the larger the entity the more bitter the response is guaranteed to be, I also think that the overarching problem here has less do with the sites than the sellers. Make that the NUMBER of sellers. Whether you deal in books, jewelry, clothing, dolls, or anything else in the vintage market, yours is but one tiny voice crying out in the wilderness. As new sellers pour online every day in our jobless economy, each whisper grows softer and softer. This is because the vast number of listings in every category and on all but one of these sites are LOW END and identical, just as they are on the traditional bookselling sites.

Craig Stark, the editor and sage of Bookthink, warned of this problem months ago in his online magazine.The vintage market, especially in the book trade,which as we all know, is currently battling other forces of darkness, cannot sustain profitability for low end stock. CAN NOT. Just this morning a picker I very occasionally buy from called with a book that sells for $30 in fine condition. Even assuming that hers is as good as she says it is, by the time I paid her $8 fee, listed it, sat on it for what may be a very long time, and paid commission when it sold, it’s not worth the time, money and effort even though I found only a few copies online.

While it’s hard to say no to profit these days, however slim,  I did it and have no regrets. My goal, as you know, is to clear out all the low-end books and not replace them with similar stock. The fact that the AuctionBytes survey abruptly hurtled me out of the clouds today is a good thing. I offer it to you as a good thing too.We all need to hear this.

Check it out in detail at at http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y11/m01/i24/s01