Small Traditions LLC/SCANDAL UPDATE

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by packs

Nobody really wants to know how eBay runs it's business. The issue the board has with certain sellers is that THEY have no control over their own auctions re: shill bidding. Or at least that is the claim we're supposed to believe.

I agree with you here. It is certainly frustrating that the consignment companies have almost no control over who bids on their listings (other than adding someone to their blocked bidders list, which as has been pointed above caps out at 5,000 users and is insufficient for resolving this issue).

Originally Posted by packs

But it becomes obvious that if one seller is selling their cards for more than any other seller gets on the same platform using the same search terminology, it is because something is different about how that seller is running their auctions, not because that seller has the right audience. All the sales take place in front of the same audience.

I have to disagree with you here. Your statement assumes that everyone is searching eBay the same way - i.e., they're all typing in '1955 Topps Roberto Clemente' into the search bar and when one shows up that they like, they just bid on it, and that furthermore, they are every bit as willing to bid the same amount regardless of who the seller is. But in practice, this is not how it works. People use eBay in very different ways.

First, there's the issue of buyer's confidence. Having nice clear images that you can zoom in on will always outsell another listing of the same card with blurry pics. Buying from a seller with supernova feedback of 100,000+ ratings will always outsell 'jimbob007' with his (18) feedback score. Obviously there's no shortage of other reputable sellers on eBay, but if you compare a company who does all of those little things right against the overall market, they're going to outsell the competition for those reasons alone. But the biggest factor in how much an item sells for is hands down the number of eyes a seller can get on that auction. And this is where sellers like PWCC and Probstein far outweigh the competition. Just click on the user name of a given seller and you can see how many followers they have. I build predictive models for a living, and I can guarantee you if I were to build a model to predict card prices on eBay, that not only would this factor correlate to auction prices realized, it would probably be the #1 most relevant factor in the model outside of the card itself and the slab it's in. Here's a quick comparison of a few consigment companies:

PWCC (312295) - 43,944 followers still today, despite no longer selling on eBay
Probstein123 (893960) - 57,861 followers
quickconsignment_802 (37054) - 2,682 followers
gregmorriscards (312064) - 13,665 followers
4sharpcorners (312086) - 9,321 followers
sportscardauctionscom (91092) - 4,046 followers
bigboydsportscards (345236) - 12,816 followers
pcsportscards (45465) - 6,371 followers

Note that PWCC, 4sharpcorners, and gregmorriscards all have ~312,000 feedback (a fun coincidence) yet PWCC has more than 3x the number of followers as GM and 4x that of 4SC! And they certainly had even more than that before being banned from eBay. Marketing matters, and PWCC has learned this far better than their competition. Many other consignment companies have not. People in social media even do live PWCC auction watch parties. I just received a PWCC auction catalog in the mail this weekend. I get notifications from Probstein and PWCC on social media all the time, showing me cards that are up for auction that I never even would have thought to look for. I get email blasts from them as well. And PWCC organized thier listings intelligently. All 1950s baseball ending together around the same time, all 1990s basketball cards together, etc. People would log in and just sort PWCC listings by themselves and see what else was up for sale. This doesn't happen with other random sellers. And most sellers have next to zero followers, or just a few dozen. The only way their cards get seen is if someone specifically searches for that card and finds their listing.

Followers matter. Setting up your auctions in an organized manner matters as well. It's all about getting the most eyes on that listing. Say what you want about PWCC, but they were masters of this aspect of selling. Everyone else should be taking notes.