Quote:
Originally Posted by LEHR
I have never paid a sellers fee on a consignment to an auction house, even on lower dollar items. There is so much competition now I believe that's basically a thing of the past for most AH's, especially if you deal with one or two all the time.
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If you have an established relationship over the years with an auction house or two and they know you have had really good items that have been consigned, they may well give you a zero seller commission on lesser valued items hoping to get the better items down the road.
However, a new consignor has zero chance of getting a zero seller commission on a few $500 items.
I have a friend who consigned a $10,000 collection to a major auction house as his first consignment and I told him he could get zero but the best they would do was 10%. He certainly could have found another major house that would have done zero if he shopped around with a collection of this value, but he did not. He just settled against my advise.
My original reference was to the type items this seller sold on Ebay. The vast majority of the major auction houses would not take those items even with a 20% seller premium. They have too much of the more valuable stuff to fill their catalog with $100 items. They might lot up a bunch of them into a single lot but no way they do zero commission.