I'm guilty of having flat shipping charges, but it isn't to make money from the buyer. In fact, over time I've lost money on shipping. For large and international packages I usually get a real quote. But for most purchases mailed priority mail in the US, a flat rate of $4 for a boxed game and $3 for a zip or flat tray is right on, unless it is a biggie. I checked my records and in my last auction using a flat rate system, I actually spent $11 more in shipping than I charged. The total proceeds on the auction were about $800, so no big deal. If the charges seem reasonable, then it is just a simplification for those of us who sell without having a mailroom to package and ship for us. Reasonable charges would be $3 or $4 for one boxed game and $1 for each additional game. Anything more probably is an attempt to pad the margins.

I live on the east coast and can seldom get the weight of a single game down to where $4 will suffice to ship to the west coast, Arizona, or (for some odd reason) Texas. Granted, if one ships using a simple brown paper wrap, or between two slices of card-board wrapped in paper, this cuts down on weight. But, having had bad experiences on the receiving end of such packages, I prefer to receive games in a protective outer box, and tend to assume the buyers for any items I sell feel Uewise.

From the midwest, your cost estimate may be closer to the mark. But if you fiddle with the UPS shipping calculator, you can see that getting a package of any real weight from one end of the country to the other is almost impossible at $3 and difficult at $4. Not every $5 charge for a single game is padded.

As far as tactics, how would you handle the sequencing of checks if the seller wants to use exact postage pricing? For example, the price is -set and the buyer forwards a check for the bid. The seller ships the item and thus determines the cost. Would it be acceptable for the buyer to then send another check to cover the postage? Have any of you used the honor system in which the seller ships when the price is determined and upon receipt the buyer sends a check for the bid and shipping?

My questions are driven by the fact I am unsure about postal rates to various zip codes. It would seem that the seller would not know the actual amount until the package is actually weighed. Along the same lines, do any of you use the services of businesses who would pack, wrap, and ship the games for a fee? Would the extra cost in this be offset by the sense of professionalism and security?

The typical way things work once an item is won:

Seller emails buyer telling him he won, asks for snailinail address and specifics of how the buyer wants it shipped. In some cases the seller wants to ship a certain way for all packages just to make it easier. If the seller knows how he will ship before the auction, it is sometimes helpful to list that in the rules.

Buyer emails snailmail address to seller, and voices any handling requests.

Seller packages games, takes it to post office to check weight and figures out rate (those that sell lots of games will typically be very good at estimating the price and giving a quote quickly).

Buyer sends payment and emails that the check has been sent out.

Seller receives payment. If it's a check, you should wait for it to clear (this waiting period is also usually mentioned in the rules section). Email buyer that payment was received.

(I would like to mention here that I never wait for checks to clear, and discourage money orders because they are a nuisance to obtain as well as an additional cost. I have been buying and selling items on the Internet for over five years now, to a total of almost $20,000, and in all that time I have received only two bad checks. The first one was my first sale, for $10, and I was suspicious from the start. The second was a mistake on the part of the buyer, who made good with alacrity when I notified him. -ed)

Once the check clears, ship the game and email confirmation..

When the buyer receives it, check the contents. If there was damage and it was insured, contact the seller (I believe the shipper has to fill out the paperwork, but I'm not sure). Otherwise email the seller to close the loop.

On the point of shipping in general:

I prefer to not have my mint copy of a game arrive in mangled condition if it can be avoided. The first solution is to properly package the game. This means more than just wrapping the item in brown paper and sending it off. I've seen people that charged exact shipping, but wrapped the game in bubble wrap and put it in a box filled with styrofoam (needless to say, I was very happy with the condition and service and buy from that person often). On the other hand, I've paid $5 for a book wrapped in brown paper, sent uninsured, which arrived damaged. Not that I'm down on first-time sellers, but I've noticed those that auction games regularly have great service and treat you right, probably why people keep buying from them. Second, insurance is a good thing. Not only does it protect you in case of loss/damage, but the Post Office seems to take better care of insured packages.

I never ship a game wrapped only in brown paper. I always send the item inside another box. I wrap the game in either cling wrap, to keep the box top from coming off, or in a trash bag. This keeps the box together, protects it from scuffs and, if the counters are loose and any should fall out of the box, they are probably in the bag, not floating around in the box.

(Counters should always be bagged in ziploc baggies -ed)

I have won items in the past that were shipped simply in brown paper and were damaged. One even had a very large hole in the bottom of the box. If you do not insure, your only recourse is the seller. In this case the seller told me to go fly a kite, it wasn't his responsibility. Shipping UPS includes insurance. As a seller, be prepared to make whole on USPS damage, if for no other reason than to protect your reputation.

Here are some tricks that work for me:

My comments on auctions come in two forms: as a seller, and as a buyer. When selling, my goal is to get rid of unwanted games at a decent value.

When buying my goal is to get games I want dirt cheap!

Now I know who to blame for all that sparn I receive. Never use full email addresses- in bid updates. Most bidders can recognize their email address when it has been truncated, but the spambots can't.

Great piece of information:

I'll shorten up my auction. I did not realize that spamming may take place from the stuff I send.

In a couple of auctions I have offered discounts (20% or so) to bidders who place bids in the first few days, if they end up having the winning bid at the end of the auction. Of course, since nobody else had ever done it before (so far as I was aware) it also added some novelty to the auction.

From personal experience, I think if you keep your auction to under 100 games, it's still fatrly manageable. But you also are more likely to have someone find that game they are looking for in a shorter auction post. Of course, if you have a lot of games to get rid of, you don't want to take forever to do it. You could break your auction down into smaller groups of related games, but please don't break items into individual posts.

One time I traded away something while my auction was in progress and it was immediately pointed out (by John Kula, as I recall, who is always a good source for auction advice) that this wasn't a good idea, which I came to agree with after thinking about it.

Some more things I like to see in an auction:

What did you mean by posting full email addresses so that competing bidders can work out side deals or trades? This smells like collusion, or something to that effect. Is that what you're saying?

You bet. What's wrong with a little collusion (as you call it) among friends? Sometimes I already have a copy of a game I am bidding on and might be trying to upgrade to an unpunched copy. By contacting a competing bidder, I can arrange to swap a punched or damaged copy instead of getting into a bidding war with someone who only wants a copy in playable condition. Most often I will only contact a competing bidder if it's someone I am acquainted with because sometimes one or the other of us will have a more compelling reason for wanting the game and will drop out of the bidding in exchange for similar consideration in the future. Don't get me wrong, in the vast majority of auctions I just bid what I'm going to bid. But sometimes it's handy to be able to contact the competition.

I find this to be extremely unethical. The seller deserves the fruit of the game, not you. Now, granted the example I'm about to give is taking it to extremes somewhat, but it still falls under what you're saying: if I have a game that would probably go for $50 if bid on until completion, and you contact the next highest bidder and say stop bidding at $30 and I'll give you $10, then the other bidder has made $10, you've saved $10, and I've lost $20.

Much as you wouldn't want the seller artificially inflating prices with a dummy bidder, you also shouldn't want the bidders in your auction colluding to keep the prices low. How would you feel about the following scenario in one of your auctions: two people are bidding on items. They contact each other and say I'll stop bidding on X and let you have it if you stop bidding on Y so that I can have it.

Why you feel that open communication is an ethical issue is not clear to me. The ethics of buyers in a marketplace are simple: try to get the best deal possible. Since I think very few of us here have unlimited money to spend on this hobby, it's only natural that we want to economize. Most of us are in this for fun, and it's not fun if you get into a mindless bidding war with another gamer and bid something up well above what it is worth. I'm certainly not not talking about getting together with every bidder in every auction I am in to keep bids artificially low to rip-off sellers.

I just mentioned that there are times when it can be a good idea to contact the opposition, and I think any successful bidder here would agree with me. I don't think anyone in the news- group supports buying off bidders. But if two people are looking for a game and both of them end up with a copy through their own negotiation during an auction, that's not unethical. Neither is two friends agreeing not to get into a bidding war with each other.

An artificial bidder is a fraud, and that is clearly unethical, but communication between buyers is part of an open marketplace. And frankly I don't expect any bidder in my auctions to be concerned with what I get out of the deal. If someone bids the minimum, then I've gotten what I've asked for. And if two bidders stop bidding for less than a game is worth, more likely than not someone else will jump in and bid on it anyway.

If a person can't understand why colluding with another bidder to artificially set the prices paid on the so-called open market, is, by definition, unethical, I think that's a real red flag. When I run an auction, I am trying to recover the money which I have invested in my collection, as well as passing on games to parties who will at least theoretically appreciate them. I'm not doing it to provide fun for bidders, and I really don't care if other people seem bent on bidding games up beyond any specific gamer's fun threshold.

And just who is empowered to tell us what a game is worth, anyway? The definition of an open market is one free of controls which benefit either the buyer or seller. But in any event, it is far more common for a buyer to virtually steal games at prices below 40% of original retail on this group, than for a game to be bid out of one's price range. Collusion on bids seems needless to me; wait three weeks and the game in question will be back on the block again somewhere. Despite this, if I am ever confident that a person participating in any of my auctions has colluded with another bidder to keep prices down, not only will that person be barred from any further participation in my sales, but I'll do my very best to alert other users of the group to this practice.

Finally, I also wanted to note that while some auctioneers do seem to pad their postage expenses, I have frequently undercharged my customers, and very few of them have ever felt the urge to send me the balance when the amount of postage on their package exceeds the amount they have paid. Apparently, this is only an ethical issue as it pertains to sellers, not buyers.

The one time I contacted another bidder was when I was participating in multiple auctions. There was a game available in both auctions. I hedged my bet and bid in both. I noticed I was competing with the same person in both. Since they were of comparable quality, we quit bidding against each other in both auctions and each got a copy of the game.

On the issue of postage, I think that computing exact charges, although somewhat more work for both buyer and seller, is the only proper way to do it. I must say that I don't ever recall being undercharged for postage. I do recall being overcharged.

Collusion can only be accomplished if the market can be manipulated in some way. Thus it is more likely that sellers would be involved rather than buyers (the sellers get together and set the minimum bid for a certain game). While it is not unthinkable that this would occur, there are a few points to consider.

First, the market consists of many buyers. If a bidder contacts all the other bidders on an item, there still remains the possibility of a new bidder coming in and upping the ante.

Second, the bidder must be able to offer something that the other bidders would value more, or it must at least be a good deal for all the bidders for it to work.

Third, if they bid at least the minimum, why should the seller care. If the seller feels the game is worth more, he would have set the price higher.

Fourth, in real life auctions, deals occur all the time. Lesser items are typically sold in lots. If I want the set of plates in the box and another bidder is tying for the silver in the same box, it makes sense to work out a deal and only get what we want. In the same way, if I already own a game and want a better copy of it, it makes sense for me to try and sell my copy off to one of the other bidders that only wants a playable copy. They get the game cheaper, I have more money to spend and less competition. The market will basically manage itself. If the bids are very high, other people not involved in the auction may contact bidders and offer to sell their copies at that price.

I realize now that it may not be feasible for larger auctions to charge exact postage. Stating the flat rate up front is better than getting surprised later on.

Please stop numbering your items - never understood this. Why? For that professional look? For people to bid easier? Someone explain this to me. As for listing your games, any order is fine with me - by company, alphabetically, price - but the display I prefer by far is with the game title in all caps, and everything else underneath it.

I usually start with a short intro, some general comments (like rules at the bottom) and then the list of the items. It really makes reading the post easier. Nothing distracts me more than having two pages of rules for a ten game auction. A new suggestion: since many of us use different Internet Service Providers and not all have similar uses of space, to avoid the shortened and chopped line's that make reading posts difficult, when preparing your post, keep your margins wide. Yes it makes the lines shorter and creates more lines in the post, but if the lines don't wrap and get chopped off, it sure does make reading them easier. I suggest preparing them in a text file before sending them on, using a monospaced font so if someone else uses a monospaced font and you have columns or such, they will line up.

I've run auctions with as few as 30 games and as many as almost 200. Running the auction isWt too difficult at 30 or 200 if you are organized. Where I have problems is fullfilment. If I have too many games, that means too many buyers, which means too many checks arriving at once and I get behind on shipping. Since shipping is the thing that can affect your net reputation fastest, determine what number of games you can safely give good fullfilment with and go with that number. For me, after some experience, I consider it 50 items.

I number the auction items for my benefit. I use other programs to manage my auction and the numbering system allows me to keep organized and ensure games and bids align.

I think the general practice used by most people is that the new bid simply starts the days-between-status-updates clock running again. And if no new bidders are allowed at the Going 2 stage, moving the status back allows new bidders, which defeats the Going 2 protection for early bidders.

That was why I stepped back one, to keep the clock running. But since I've learned that this practice is the norm in the future I'll not do this. Generally I do updates to the newsgroup Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I also learned that two a week is sufficient so I'll probably go to Monday and Thursday, or Tuesday and Friday, updates. Assuming a Tuesday and Friday update schedule, if a game gets a new bid after a Tuesday update, it wouldn't advance until the next Tuesday update, otherwise it would advance on Friday. This should make my life easier as a seller without sacrificing anything in service to the bidder/buyer.

I disagree that the general practice is for people to not reset the Going state on a new bid. I've only been actively bidding for about 2.5 months, but have been very active in a large number of auctions in that time. My experience has been that auctions treat new bids as follows (approximately): half or more reset all the way to Not Going; a third or less reset one step; and one-sixth or less leave the status as it was before the bid. Actually, I've only seen two auctions that didn't reset the status at least one step, so I'd claim that it is almost a rare policy, rather than being the usual policy.

I personally prefer the reset one step policy, both as a bidder and a future auctioneer. It seems a fair policy to me, both for the bidders and the auctioneer. It also doesn't prolong the auction interminably, like the reset-all-the-way policy tends to. I also lean towards a policy of locking out new bidders on an item, once it has reached Going 2, to encourage people to bid early and help get the auction over with faster.

If the item has only one bidder when it hits Going 2, you may as well declare it Gone with this rule. Granted, this speeds up that particular item considerably, but it comes at a cost of delaying the move to Going 1, Going 2, Gone for a few updates to guarantee propagation of your auction's post. I prefer moving to the Going 1, Going 2, Gone phase on one date, and setting a later date on which I move to outbid- or-out.

At that later date (a date after all the uncontested items will be Gone), I restrict bidding on a remaining item to those who already have a registered bid on it. I also set a deadline by which any bidder not holding the high bid on the item must either outbid the current high bid or be declared out on that item.

To date, I've only had one item hit the outbid-or-out phase of an auction, and the bidding on it was settled very quickly thereafter. Of course, I've only run two auctions, so perhaps this advice should be taken with a massive grain of salt.

The longer an auction goes on, the more likely another copy of the game will come up for sale and then you'll be stuck with one bid or end up bidding on two copies.

I did a quick check through the year's worth of auction posts I archived and found that many of the most frequent auctioneers use an enddate system (auction ends at a particular date).

I have mixed feelings about end-date auctions. I've lost things at 11:59 pm, which I would have bid higher on, but I've also won some items in the last few hours. It's also nice to have a drop-dead date, when you'll have either won or lost the item(s).

In general, most people, especially bargain hunters, will drop out before things start Going. Also, I often raise by more than $1, which sends the message that I'm serious, and seems to cause less interested bidders to drop out. I don't mind other copies coming up. I make a note to watch them, and usually either win or lose the first one, beforelhe new copy has been sold. I can then jump into that auction if needed.

Most of the auctions I've been in do updates every one to three days, at least twice per week. They tend to move along just fine. Once-a-week status changes suck, as do reset to not-going auctions. Both of those auction styles move like molasses.

Optional but really nice: email me to let me know when I've been outbid on an item.

I think that this is the first time someone has mentioned this in the discussion. I think that this is a good idea too, but the message should be carefully crafted to sound like a notification and not like a beg for new bids (which can be sort of annoying.)

You can get to the same result by including email updates to current bidders on a more frequent basis than updates to the newsgroup. It gives them the opportunity to respond with a higher bid before others may have the chance. Individual notices might get over burdensome, but email updates to the entire bidder list isn't.

The you-are-overbid email takes it one step further because it's very possible that someone won't dig through a long post to find all their bids (or might not remember everything they were bidding on) and a specific note is a sure way to get their attention.

I've participated in 88 auctions on here (since I started keeping track that is; there were probably a few I didn't track). Most of them reset to Going (or Going I depending on how they phrased it).

I just checked the auctions I'm currently involved in. Two reset back to not going, one resets one step, one doesn't reset at all (two others are time-based deadlines).

One auction I participated in had the following system:

• He set a minimum bid on items. He mentioned that you could bid under the minimum, but he might not sell for less.
• He allowed any bidders for two weeks.
• After two weeks, all items became going. This meant no new bidders on the items.
• Updates were twice a week (I think Monday and Thursday).
• Status advanced on the third consecutive update without a new bid (the top bid on update 5 would become Going 2 on update 7, and sold on update 9 if no new bids were received).
• Status reset to Going I whenever a new bid was received.

If I remember right, items sold rather quickly. About half the items sold within the first four weeks. All the items were gone by six or seven weeks.

Would it not be best to allow bids at anytime?

It would let the marketplace dictate what the worth of a game is. Case in point, in my auction, a late entrant stimulated further increases (a sort of spark for bids that were slow or non-existent). I would agree that this takes longer for the seller but it does maximize returns. I am one of the rare sellers that actually goes back to the start after each new bid. I may rethink this position after hearing more on this subject.

It also ticks me when I've had the high bid on an item for weeks, and at the Iasi minute, a new bidder shows up and raises by $1 (on a $40+ bid). I then have to wait another couple of weeks hoping it finally gets to Gone. I just plain don't like having to follow an auction for more than three (or four max) weeks.

My practice is that I don't even use the Going 1, Going 2, Gone. I simply use a seven day cycle. Along with the name of the bidder I post the date the bid was received. If seven days pass and I do not receive any other bids on that item then it is sold. Very simple, easy, saves me work and I think is perfectly fair to everyone. I usually try to update three times a week. It has been my experience though that not many bids are received over the weekend. I assume this is because many people access through work or school so on their days off they don't read the newsgroups. Not a universal truth by any means but just my personal experience.

I am usually trying to seek a balance between a good price and a rapid completion of the auction. It isn't too often that the price I get isn't the highest price I could have gotten, but I guess it does happen. There is value to me in not having the auction run forever and in keeping the administrative effort on my part manageable. If that cost is reflected in perhaps nor, the highest price possible, that's ok with me, assuming of course the game sells for at least my minimum.

Commentary

That was quite a lengthy article to work through. I hope you found it worthwhile, even if only to a small degree.

To wrap up discussion on this subject, I would like to pass on some information from Peter Sarrett's quarterly publication, The Game Report, out of England. Peter has confirmed my observation that standard prices for collectible games apply only for specific countries, and may be significantly (and surprisingly) higher, or lower, in other countries such as England and Germany. Thus, if you have access to the Internet, and frequent rgbm because it is convenient and representative, you may wish to consider checking out the prices on game lists from European countries, such as uk.games and the like.

I can attest to the fact that some games which command very high prices here in North America go for significantly lower prices in England, and vice versa. The cost advantage even outweighs the additional costs of postage. So don't assume that a rare game here will be equally expensive everywhere.

Peter also reports about problems with dealers: "Sadly, much of the market is now underpinned by knowledge of the prices asked by Weekend Warrior, Second Chance and, to a lesser extent, the German Dealers and collectors. The people aware of these lists will ask silly prices and some, I'm sure, get them. The fallacy here is that the sellers believe the games are worth that on the 'market'; the truth is that there is no market as such. What there is is shallow, severely lacking in volume and dominated by an oligopoly of dealers.

There is not an open market out there on which you can buy and sell freely (perhaps Peter is unaware of rgbm -ed); there are no Reuters screens showing twoway prices for Homas Tour, (sorry, I've never heard of it, and none of my reference books lists it; but Ipresume it's rare -ed) so the dealer margins are correspondingly high. In fact, if you sell the games to even a high-charging (and hopefully paying) dealer, you will only get 50%, 33% or even 25% of the nominal market 'value'. This means tapping into a market where you will need to find gullible, or desperate, purchasers who will pay a private seller a dealer price."

Well, I believe that there is an open market beginning to develop now on rgbrn, where buyers and sellers can transact their business freely and for all to see (and critique). And best of all, the prices are almost always reasonable.