WorthPoint, which recently completed its acquisition of GoAntiques, an online network for buying and selling antiques and collectibles, sent a letter recently to dealers to update them on recent changes. WorthPoint said it would have two auction venues for members. One is a live-auctions format that will move from eBay Live Auctions (which is closing at the end of the year) to the Proxibid platform. The other is a timed auction that WorthPoint said is similar in format to those on eBay, but with a focus only on art, antiques and collectibles, and "terms, structures and features will cater to our industry."

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I wish they would hurry up already. I have been looking forward to this for months.

dlrane wrote: › I wish they would hurry up already. I have been looking forward to this for months.

I've been looking forward to the timed format auctions also. When I signed up with Goantiques in late August, I was told that the timed format auctions should be ready by the end of September. I expressed my doubts that it would be ready that quickly but the person at Go repeated that it should be ready by the end of September. Then I learned that the commitment to Goantiques would be for one year. The principal motivation to us to sign up with any other service was our refusal to accept Paypal and other electronic payment methods and eBay's insistence on it. Based on what I was told on the phone by Goantiques, I made the decision to sign up with them.

Since then I was very disappointed when the timed format auctions did not begin at the end of September nor in October nor November. In the recent emails from them the timed format auctions are said not to be ready until the 2nd or 3rd quarter of 2009. The Proxibid Live auctions are said to be ready to go this month. However in looking at the terms for registering for the Live Auctions the requirement is that the Seller accept Paypal or credit cards!

I emailed Goantiques Support regarding this and the response from Support was: "It is a requirement for dealers that participate in live auctions to either accept credit cards through a merchant service or Paypal. It is our opinion that buyers will make larger purchases and pay quicker if they have these options. We are not sure of any procedures or requirements for the timed auctions as yet."

So far on Goantiques we have sold one item for $16.99. We are paying $39 per month. We have almost 500 items listed. We have been notified of some recent price changes ($49 per month with no commission) which we could opt into if we wanted.

My current question for myself is, "Why would I opt in for a higher price when the statements made to me in August as to what would occur are not happening?" My current thought is that sales on the site must not be very high overall if they are offering an option that eliminates commissions on store items. My feeling is one of disappointment in what has occurred so far. I feel as though we joined under false pretenses presented to us by Goantiques.

I would not have joined Goantiques if I thought there was any chance that Paypal or any other electronic means of payment were going to be required means of payment by sellers. Why would I consider joining any company that would consider doing the same thing that I find objectionable at eBay?

Also, I find that instead of waiting a month or two for the timed format auctions to be available, that timed format auctions may not be ready for five to eight months. And that there is some possibility that they will be expecting sellers to offer Paypal and credit cards as forms of payment!

I am very disappointed in myself for going ahead in August and joining Goantiques without taking more time to find out what was going to happen. At the time I thought that I would go ahead and join before they got really busy. At the time I believed the guy on the phone. I feel as though I was naive.

Don't beat yourself up about it ginny,
Many of us who decided to leave feebay have been met with disappointment after disappointment. Just mark it up as a lessoned learned. I think many of the venues had high hopes that all the disgruntled sellers would flock to THEIR site and things would be booming overnight. We see the results thus far are slow to say the least. As with anything it takes time to develop anything worth having. Sounds to me like I can put my enthusiasm back on the rear burner for a while.

Have you asked them if they are planning on integrating GCO. I seem to have more customers using that payment system as opposed to fraudpal. You might want to check out Ruby Lane, I know it costs a little to set-up your store, 75.00, but there is no FVF and low maintenance costs per month. I have averaged about 500.00 per month my 1st two months on the site, and am a Silver seller already. Last month with 700.00 in sales, I paid around 70.00 in fees. The great thing is, if I sell 7000.00 in one month, it still would have only been 70.00 in fees.

When I 1st joined I added 250.00 to my account and got 25.00 back, so my set-up was really only 50.00, plus one nice seller used us as a reference when setting up their shop and we got 40.00 for that. You might want to go to quantcast and see the difference in daily hits between these 2 venues, Ruby Lane is about 50,000 a day.

The main reason I was looking forward to the goAntiques auction format was the feature RL has that allows you to 'Send to Auction'. If your item sits there a while, you can send it to the Auction site of your choice with one click. Of course there is some pre-setup to take advantage of the feature, but at this point, there is no viable auction format to send the items too. Unless of course you still use feebay.

I hope that they or someone else will come up with something soon, but I try to keep in mind that taking their time and doing it right the 1st time, will be much more beneficial to all. We would be more upset to use a half-cocked system full of glitches and not working properly. I have seen a lot of advertising on the subject, and to me that is good. Get the word out while their building, so the customers will be standing in line when it goes online. JMO

Hope things work out for you and all of us.

dirane,

I was so angry at ebay when I called Goantiques. I still am angry at ebay. We are still on ebay. I have this tiny hope that I'll wake up one morning and that ebay will be the company it once was. It really was a great company up till they started treating sellers as though they were contractual worker bees.

I was so angry at ebay that I gave Goantiques my credit card number and believed everything that the nice sounding fellow on the phone said about when the timed format auctions would be ready and about how they would never insist on sellers having to accept Paypal. I had that conversation with him about not ever having to take Paypal! And he assured me that would not happen!

Why am I signed up with a company that might well do the exact same thing that made me furious about ebay?

We've been on ebay for ten years. We have great feedback, great DSRs (although I hate the DSR system). We've always taken only checks or money orders. Forcing us to do something that we do not want to do is not going to make us better dealers.

So I find myself out $39 more per month for possibly no benefit. And they are proposing that we could sign up to pay them more if we want to. Why would I do that based on my experience so far? I am not THAT naive!

The lesson is not to trust what the nice friendly person on the phone says. To read the contracts completely. Not to jump too quickly. Not to make any decisions when you are angry.

These last few months have been miserable as far as trying to adjust to selling online after ebay's rule changes. I have been spending much of my time editing hundreds of listings again and again on different sites.

I haven't yet tried the Ruby Lane site. I guess that should be tried too. I have heard decent things about it. Thank you for the recommendation.

Ginny

I know the feeling, I lurked around here for a month and a half, and did a lot of research. One of the 1st things I learned was believe none of what you hear and half of what you see, when it comes to Alternate Venues. If you list at a site and can not find your items high in the Google searches within a few days, STOP RIGHT THERE!!!! A site without the knowledge to get the items in front of the buyers is not going to perform well for you. Always, after you list a few items on a site, check for your google placement after a week. If your on page 10, 'cie la vie' is my opinion. When I list my items at AM or RL I get same day coverage and high on the Placement usually. I also hear Bonanzle is great, but with only a week under my belt I can not give you a definitive answer on that one yet. They are not Quantified yet, so it is hard to really judge the traffic, the guesstimates supplied at Quant look good however.

As a Business Person I am sure you know it is better to operate with the mind, as opposed to emotions. Try to set your anger aside and let your good business sense take over and you will do just fine. It may take us a while, but looking to the bright side, when one of these sites takes off, we will be some of the oldest and most trusted members of the venue. Customer confidence is always high on the Buyers 'LOOKING' list. JMO

Here's the Site Analytics chart on Goantiques:
http://tinyurl.com/5d6wpz

Growth looks to be minimal.

dirane,

I've never tried checking our Google placement. Thank you for that tip.

We're on Bonanzle now too. Just a few days worth. We're having trouble with the Google base feed for the listings but perhaps it will be resolved shortly.

Thanks Gin,
Glad I could help at least a little. You might also want to check out Craigslist, if you are in or near a city. I actually sell more there than anywhere. I use it mainly for big bulky items, but have sold a lot of other collectibles on a regular basis. I do better with lots on CL in small stuff, i.e. Record Collections, Tablecloth Collections, Comicbook Collections. Higher profit for less work to me. JMO

I think it is just a shame how Mr. Donahue has screwed up eBay and left us sellers in this prediciment. I think in number we have power, if all of us sellers one day finally find an auction site equal to the old ebay if we all went in the millions to that site, it would give us the power to put Mr. Donahue out of busines. I am also looking forward to GoAntique auctions, if they had a contract with ebay until the years end then they have to keep it. Also as said in the above comments, if they are taking their time to do it right the first time it will worth it. They do have the money, and knowledge and staff to do it. The difference of them and eBay is they are honest, don't have feedback to worry about, I think they are open to taking Google Check Out if people keep calling them or emailing them and suggesting it, I think they would go for it. I am familar with Proxibid and that is their policy to only take credit cards. They have thousands of auctions on Proxibid, and if you consign your items with the real auction companies it costs you in percentage wise. So I think Go Antiques is on the right track, it just will take time to get there. They got screwed by eBay like everyone else, that is why they are leaving them, and found for what it cost them to pay ebay now they can do their own auctions. Since it will take time, I might put my stuff on Ruby Lane since they are an honest webmall also and do sell a lot of stuff. I think this economy problem is part of the problem of not having alot of sales as in the past. I also have my own appraisal web site and might start my own website to sell my dolls. I am doing free advertising with a site that gets me at least 200 hits on it or more a month. I will post it for everyone to see to help you guys if you have your own website. It is for antique and collectibles only but if you have these items the free advertising really helps. I will be patient and try the Go Antiques auctions when they start them and for now I guess I will try Ruby Lane.
I sell dolls and now they have their own lane for dolls since they are popular items to sell. I wish everyone luck thru this dismal Christmas season and if we all stick together when we find the right web site and millions of us flock to it we could put Mr. Donahue out of business. To my fellow sellers I wish you the best of luck of selling for the Christmas season lets do the best we can in this dreadful recession or depression we will be going thru.

Ginny wrote (View Post): › We're on Bonanzle now too. Just a few days worth. We're having trouble with the Google base feed for the listings but perhaps it will be resolved shortly.

I don't know why, but I got 2 failures before they finally started being picked up on the 3rd day. I don't know if this had anything to do with it, but, I had some items listed and had not refreshed my booth page. As soon as I did that and all items were active, it went through fine. So if you have any items that are not active, you might try refreshing you booth and give it another try.

@dolly,
I feel the same way, I don't know if I ever want another feebay, but one heck of an Antique and Collectible AUCTION SITE, would sure make me smile again. I have faith that goAntiques will be the one to beat, we will all see in the near future. Until then, God Bless and hope all stays well with you.

dirane,

My googlebase feed for my Bonanzle items decided to work today. Mark Dorsey had said that they were going to do something today that would make submitting to the Google database feed easier.

I didn't do anything since it failed the other day. In my case it just needed patience.

Thanks for the suggestion! I appreciate your help.

You sound as though you have faith and hope in Goantiques. I hope you're right. I'll feel better about them if they respond to my last email and let me know that they are taking responsibility for misleading me, even if it wasn't intentional, and that they are sorry for doing that. An apology can go a long way. I am feeling cynical about the intentions. I have a hard time believing that they didn't know at the end of August that they would not be ready to offer timed format auctions at the end of September.

I'm not sure how much of a return that we're going to get by being part of their group of sellers over the next 8 months. Today I featured a number of our listings on the site.

I'm getting kind of sensitive about all of the companies that are wanting our business and what they will say to get it.

I do have faith because of goAntiques knowledge of the Auction industry, and Worthpoint's money and knowledge of the 'SHARE' industry. When they get these two positives together in a working format, things will move rather quickly in my opinion. JMO

dirane,

What is the 'SHARE' industry?

Ginny

One of Worthpoints expertise areas is Networking. Basically they know how to advertise and get the word out throughout the WWW in this manner. I call it the 'share' industry for short. Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Myspace, etc, etc. Plus they already have a large following among collectors and antiquers for their Value & Identification Platforms that are used by these sellers and collectors to get the 'Skinny' on their item.

About.com, Antiques Review and many other Blogs and I-Publications have WP's Icon on top of their pages, for their members to use. I am sure that these notable and respected sites are a good source for building a buyer base and point them toward the goAntiques Auction format.

From what I understand you are in a good position at this point and I would keep a presence of some kind for a little longer and see what happens. You can stroll along for the $39 and 10%, but you will have the choice to upgrade at any time to the $49 with no FVF. So if your sales start to increase above the $10 mark, just upgrade and sell like crazy for $49 a month. JMO

One other thing you can do is build a kaboodle blog, takes about 30min. Make it storename@goAntiques.com. When somebody googles goantiques, your blog will be right among the top listings because of the great placement kaboddle gets, and that will help you link Google customers directly to your goAntiques storefront. Little things like this really help. It is a little work and effort but always pays of with sales. You can also do an explorz.com page an get similar results.