Nick Furious

It's not the norm but I believe best offers have the same amount of time to pay as auctions...something like 15 days. And if someone is going to back out you won't know it until the end. This one was more frustrating than most because it was an amount of money that a commoner like myself would plan other purchase decisions around.

I agree. You have to chose items more carefully for the weekly auctions. The weekly auction can work out well for something like a Daredevil 168 4.0 raw or slabbed, while a 9.4 you would definitely want to sell by BIN or hold for Prime Auction.

I agree, and I don't really like the 14 day lag in learning if your auction item will be paid for or not. It's also why I don't do "best offer" anymore after having a $2,500 book sit in limbo for 2 weeks or more, probably while the buyer was trying to broker a resale. At least with BIN the book has to be paid for before it comes out of inventory. But for auctions I imagine not having to pay immediately must have some positive effect on the final selling prices overall.

So glad I was only lurking when this thread started. Comparing pictures of that book is like comparing old Adele photos to new Adele photos.

My first post on the forum, hopefully it gets approved. A while back I started selling exclusively through MCS. My 2022 sales just went over $20K with 110 books sold. I'm sure that number is large to some and smallish to others. But what's worth noting is that MCS made less than $2,000 on those 110 books. That seems hardly enough to compensate for all the man-hours put into processing, storing, pulling and shipping. I'm convinced that I get the better end of the deal. If someone offered me $2,000 for all that work, I would decline it. The only place where I don't give MCS a 10 out of 10 is Visibility (other than the marked up Ebay listings). I've done many 5% price reductions to get on the "New In Stock" list, but haven't really seen any immediate results from that. I've also tried pricing aggressively at initial set-up to take advantage of the want list notifications. That had more success but was limited. I would be incredibly happy to see a "want list" notification sent out on price reductions. Maybe there is a way to keep consignors honest in their pricing expectations by putting some kind of minor cost or limitations on the additional visibility opportunities? I also have learned not to be afraid of putting books into auction (after a few discounts) if I truly believe that lack of visibility is the only thing keeping it from selling. I have certainly had some disappointments, but I have also had several pleasant surprises where the final auction price was more than my discounted BIN asking price. Sometimes it turns out that all the book needed was additional visibility. I have also found this to be true for raw books that I felt were graded very strictly. Putting them into auction and letting the market decide often works out better for me than trying to sell them with BIN.