How to Sell Antiques and Collectibles on eBay... And Make a Fortune! - Softcover

Prince, Dennis L.; Dralle, Lynn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0071445692 ISBN 13: 9780071445696

Publisher: McGraw Hill, 2004

Synopsis

Dennis Prince teams up with antique and collectible expert Lynn Dralle to provide all the information necessary to reap the huge benefits of selling antiques and collectibles on eBay. Written by an eBay Power Seller whose earnings topped $20,000 a month, this book helps you:

• Research types--and eras--of antiques and collectibles
• Find the best merchandise
• Use language that gets buyers to pay the most for the seller's items
• Price strategically. . . and much more!

About this title

About the Authors

McGraw-Hill authors represent the leading experts in their fields and are dedicated to improving the lives, careers, and interests of readers worldwide

Lynn Dralle is the author of The Unauthorized Beanie Baby Guide and has lectured around the country on how to buy and sell on eBay.

From the Back Cover

Imagine opening an antiques and collectibles store...

and 19 million people show up!

That's the power of selling on eBay.

Every year more than 19 million people, or roughly the populations of Illinois and Massachusetts combined, browse and buy antiques and collectibles on eBay. In order to reach this growing market, and get top dollar for your merchandise, you need the right listing, the perfect presentation, and two of the world's leading eBay experts to answer all your questions--fast.

How to Sell Antiques and Collectibles on eBay...and Make a Fortune! gives you insider tips on untapped selling opportunities in this popular category including: buying tips for building your inventory; expert advice on evaluating  the condition and appraising the value of your antiques and collectibles; proven ways to target customers; clear instruction on how to navigate the eBay network and make it work for you; quick answers to questions about start-up costs, taxes, and legal issues; and reliable key words, descriptions, and images that will make your listings stand out and get results.

• List items on eBay for maximum visibility
• Use antiques trade lingo to get the highest bids
• Find, appraise, and buy the five hottest categories
• Use your eBay store to attract customers
• Create a selling strategy that fits your market
• Handle, store, and ship fragile merchandise
• Price strategically for the eBay market

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

How to Sell Antiques and Collectibles on eBay ... and Make a Fortune!

By Dennis L. Prince, Lynn Dralle

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2005 Dennis L. Prince and Lynn Dralle
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-07-144569-6

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1: Welcome to the Wonderful World of Antiques and Collectibles
Chapter 1 Why Specialize in Antiques and Collectibles?
Chapter 2 The History of Selling Antiques and Collectibles
Chapter 3 Becoming Better Acquainted with Antiques and Collectibles
Chapter 4 How to Become an Expert in Selling Antiques and Collectibles on 
eBay
Part 2: Selling Antiques and Collectibles with Success
Chapter 5 Creating a Winning Business Plan for Your Antiques and 
Collectibles Business
Chapter 6 Buying Strategies for Building Your Inventory
Chapter 7 Determining the Value of Your Antiques and Collectibles
Chapter 8 Targeting Customers Interested in Your Antiques and 
Collectibles
Chapter 9 Tips for Boosting Sales
Chapter 10 Packing and Shipping
Part 3: Becoming an Expert Antiques and Collectibles Seller
Chapter 11 Making Your Fortune with Furniture
Chapter 12 Ethnographic and Cultural Categories: From Asia to Classical to 
African and Beyond
Chapter 13 Pottery
Chapter 14 Glass
Chapter 15 Tabletop: Dinnerware, Stemware, and Flatware
Chapter 16 Decorative Collectibles
Chapter 17 The Future of Selling in Antiques and Collectibles
Index

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Why Specialize in Antiques and Collectibles?

Did you know that certain collectible cereal boxes can sell for big bucks oneBay? A recent completed-auction search on eBay (which lists all items sold orlisted for the past 2 weeks) found a Peter Max–designed Love cereal box from1970 that sold for more than $450 (see Figure 1-1). It did not even come withthe original cereal, and it was flattened for safe keeping. Amazing! Granted,Peter Max is a very famous artist who is well known for his colorful,psychedelic style, and he contributed to the Beatles Yellow Submarine albumcover, but these prices are still amazing!

Antiques and collectibles cover almost every item imaginable. Anything thatsomeone collects can be termed a collectible. The best part about this categoryis that antiques and collectibles can be found in anyone's home. You don't haveto go out and invest a huge amount of money in inventory to get started. Justlook around your house, your garage, your attic, and your storage unit and,while you are at it, spend some time at your parents' home doing the same thing.Voilà—you have taken that first step on the road to making your fortune! Butlet's not get ahead of ourselves. There is still a lot to learn to be successfulwith antiques and collectibles on eBay, and this book is going to show you howto get there.

IMPORTANT STATISTICS ABOUT THIS INDUSTRY

The antiques and collectibles industry can present a challenge when it comes tofiguring out an annual sales volume. According to Sharon Korbeck, editor of theAntique Trader, there is not an accurate number for sales volume, and there areseveral reasons for this. For starters, it is a fragmented industry and hard toquantify. What this means is that the sales number would need to include salesfigures not only from brick-and-mortar antiques stores but from antiques malls,antiques shows, flea markets, garage sales, auctions, thrift and pawn shops,and, finally, online markets, including eBay. Korbeck explains that antiques andcollectibles is not a regulated industry like banking, so reporting of sales isnot required. For example, she noted that the people who sell as a hobby or oneBay out of their homes would not be reporting under any industry code.

According to Kim Esser, a Research Analyst at the University of SouthernCalifornia, the industry numbers for SIC code 5932, Used Merchandise Stores, in2000 indicate that $17 billion was spent in secondhand stores. The NationalAssociation of Resale and Thrift Shops reported that resale was one of thefastest-growing segments of the retail industry, with an estimated growth ofabout 5 percent per year. A growing segment within the antiques and collectiblesindustry was flea markets, which had grown to a $7.5 billion-a-year business by2000.

eBay TIP eBay sold $8 billion in merchandise for the first quarter of 2004, up51 percent over last year! Based on this figure eBay has predicted that thecollectibles category will account for $1.6 billion of its business for the year2004. Any way you look at it, these are huge numbers. The antiques andcollectibles industry, both on and off eBay, is growing.

A reason for this growth can be attributed to the 1990s, when the ecologicallyminded turned to recycling. In the 2000s this trend is continuing. Vintage hasbecome trendy. More and more people who could easily afford new items nowpurchase vintage because they prefer the styles from other eras. Also, in timesof economic growth, more people donate, and in times of recession, more peoplepurchase used merchandise. Anyway you look at it, resale is one of the fewrecession-proof segments of retail because it is successful in both good and badtimes. And that is good news for you!

IMMEDIATE OPPORTUNITIES IN ANTIQUES AND COLLECTIBLES

There are many immediate opportunities in the antiques and collectiblesindustry. Let's backtrack and spend some time examining the term fragmentedindustry. A fragmented industry has low overall barriers to entry, apparentabsence of economies of scale, high inventory costs, diverse market needs, and ahighly diverse product line. The diverse product line requires a great deal ofuser/seller interface on small volumes of product. What this means in layman'sterms is that antiques and collectibles favors the small business over thelarger one. It also means that it is relatively easy and inexpensive to breakinto the antiques and collectibles business. And with the advent of eBay, thishas never been truer.

Good news for us! With eBay, there are no big start-up costs except forinventory, and another benefit to eBay is that you can turn over your inventoryin 3, 5, 7, or 10 days, so even the inventory expenditure does not have to behuge. We will talk more about start-up costs in Chapter 5.

Another great thing about antiques and collectibles is that they have a limitedsupply. Remember the old saying "The best investment is land, because they arenot making it anymore." This is also true for antiques and collectibles but withthe difference being that with each succeeding year, the supply of objectsdiminishes: fewer antiques and collectibles come onto the market because theyhave found permanent homes in collections, but also because there is theinevitable deterioration and breakage. While the supply is continuallydecreasing, hopefully the demand continues to increase. Lynn's grandmother usedto say that antiques and collectibles are the only inventory that actually gainsvalue as it collects dust in your store! (See Figure 1-2.)

However, all of this good news doesn't necessarily translate into success withantiques and collectibles. Korbeck says that knowledge is key in this business.You have to continually educate yourself, and that is why you bought this book,isn't it?

AN OVERVIEW OF THE SUBCATEGORIES

Antiques and collectibles is a huge field, encompassing every subcategoryimaginable. Vintage clothing is considered collectible, books can be antiquesand collectibles, old LPs (records) are desirable, and the list goes on. As wefound out earlier, even cereal boxes are bringing in big bucks as collectorsbattle over them. For the scope of this book we had to narrow the playing fielddown into a manageable size.

To accomplish this, we did research on eBay, looking at the top categories withthe most listings and taking into account that some of these categories wouldhave higher-priced items. We also chose groups of items that would most likelybe found in your home or you could easily find at estate and garage sales. Fromthis research, we outlined broad categories and determined which are the mostpopular. This book will focus mostly on these categories.

Furniture

Of the five areas we selected, Furniture had the least number of listings(78,000 items), but this category does have higher ticket prices. This is alwaysgood! Also, everyone owns furniture and can easily find furniture to buy andsell. Over the years, china and glassware break and metalware gets melted("worth its weight in gold") and repurposed (pewter was made into bullets), butfurniture has remained and endured.

We will take a look at furniture by room and by eras. It is a huge category witha lot to learn, so we will start with the basics and teach you just enough to bedangerous. Just kidding. You will learn things such as where to look for marks.Even though the majority of furniture was never marked, it doesn't hurt tocheck, because your piece may be the rare one that was signed! Also, what do youcall a certain piece, is it a highboy or a dresser (see Figure 1-3)? What is theprimary wood and what is the secondary wood? How was it made—with dove tailing,nails, or staples? Furniture is a great category to list and sell, and I havemade some of my best profits in the furniture arena.

Ethnographic/Cultural Items

Ethnographic items run the gamut from classical, as in Greek and Roman, to thehuge Asian category. Of the 115,000 recent listings in this area, more than 40percent of them were Chinese and Japanese antiquities. Things such as cloisonné,Imari, and snuff bottles are among the treasures.

This section also includes collectibles from all cultures, such as Russian hand-painted boxes, Hawaiian grass skirts, South Pacific serving bowls, and Africanmasks. It is a fun classification, and we will help you learn some of therudimentary skills you will need to identify your items or at least get startedon the right track. Since no one can become an expert in all of these fields, wewill also point you in the right direction for learning more and where to go toget an expert's opinion.

Pottery and Glass

Based on a recent search on eBay, this section had 355,000 listings on one day!Wow! These types of antiques were once termed smalls by the old-time antiquesdealers. Smalls are obviously tinier items that are easy to display in a cabinetand easy to package and ship. Smalls would not include furniture, linens, andlarger items in general.

We have broken this huge classification into two chapters. Chapter 13 focuses onpottery and Chapter 14 on glass. We will examine items ranging from rustic WattsPottery to fine Rookwood and from American brilliant cut glass to Tiffany glass.A lot of pottery and porcelain was signed with the maker's mark on the base orunderside. This makes it a lot easier for us to do our research. However, mostglass was never signed, and we will show you how to start your investigation byidentifying shape, color, type of manufacture, and use. Once you have thesebasics, we will look at where to go for more information.

eBay TIP In this area, condition is very important, and we will talk aboutchips, cracks, crazing, and flaws done in the making. These are just some of thethings you will need to know to become a successful seller on eBay.

Tabletop Items

Tabletop is one of Lynn's favorite categories. (Okay, to be honest, all antiquesand collectibles are Lynn's favorites!) China sets, flatware, and stemware areeasy to find at garage and estate sales, and you can make some of your highestreturns on investment this way. For example, Lynn recently bought a box ofdinnerware for $8 and sold the pieces individually on eBay for more than $450(see Figure 1-4).

The Tabletop category includes china, dinnerware, glassware, stemware, andflatware. A recent check of this category on eBay revealed 309,000 items listed(almost as many as pottery and glass). For beginners, this is a great categoryif you want to test the eBay waters. You will find a lot of these items right inyour own kitchen or dining room!

Decorative Collectibles

Decorative Collectibles is the biggest category we will be covering. This one isthe granddaddy of them all—a recent look on eBay showed more than 452,000listings in this category alone. Decorative collectibles are another big factionof the "smalls" world. These are things that you will find in your parents' orgrandparents' hutch. Things like a collection of Lladro, Bing & Grondahl, oreven Hummel figurines. Maybe your brother had an elephant collection. Now is thetime to sell it! Animals is a subcategory in Collectibles on eBay, comprisingapproximately 25 percent of decorative collectibles. There is a huge followingfor all types of animal-related collectibles particularly dog items, such asbulldogs and spaniels. This is also the place where a lot of name brands comeinto play—Enesco, Precious Moments, Boyds Bears, Dept. 56, and the list goes onand on. Luckily, almost all of these items are signed with the maker's mark. Itmakes our job of describing the pieces so much easier. Since these items areusually commodities and not as unique and rare as others, we will focus more onstrategy in this section to help you get top dollar.

In Chapter 2, which covers the history of selling antiques and collectibles, weget going on our road to fortune.

CHAPTER 2

The History of Selling Antiques and Collectibles

Antiques and collectibles have been bought and sold since the beginning of time.Early antiques such as jugs, tables, and other utilitarian items were originallytraded or bartered for food and other necessities of life. In the seventeenthcentury, Japan got into the game with beautiful porcelains like Imari, and thedecorative antiques and collectibles market was on its way.

HISTORY OF ANTIQUES DEALERS: THE ORIGINAL MARKET

In the more recent past, say 50 years ago, this industry was dominated by smallmom-and-pop shops. The old-time antiques dealers worked hard at their craft,spending hours hunting for bargains, cleaning, repairing, pricing, dusting, anddisplaying their wares in their stores. Research was next to impossible. Thereweren't a lot of reference books, and the dealers would have to check what otherdealers were selling, read trade magazines, and sometimes PFA to price theirgoods. PFA was what Lynn's grandmother called one of her pricing techniques:pulled from air.

These dealers usually had to keep set store hours, and that meant spending manyhours tied to your business location, which didn't leave much time for findingstock.

Many antiques dealers sold at shows each year to broaden their market basebeyond their small towns. It was typical for a dealer to do 12–18 antiques showsa year. It was a ton of work. Lynn knows about this first-hand: her grandmotherstarted dragging her along to antiques shows when she was only seven! Thepreparation for these shows was intense. They would spend two weeks prior toeach show picking out which items to take, making sure they were clean, in goodrepair, priced, and that there was a nice mixture of goods. Then they would packeach item very carefully in divided boxes filled with tissue. They had"snowboys, fatsies, finish feeders, plates, and tinies" boxes. These were theirfunny terms for the different-sized and -shaped divided boxes. Packing was ascience, and it would take 2–3 hours to pack the van with the shelves, risers,display cabinets, extra tables, tablecloths, utility box, lights, electriccords, and, at last, all the fragile antiques.

The shows typically ran three days, plus an extra day for setup, which was afull day's job. The tables were provided, but the dealers had to set upeverything else, including the electrical cording, spotlights, shelving, anddrapes (see Figure 2-1).

What does this mean for you? With eBay, you can make the same profit without allthe extra work. You should by now have a feel for how much work this industryused to be, and for such small financial returns. Now let's take a look at howthis industry has continued to evolve since the 1950s.

HOW HAS THIS INDUSTRY CHANGED AND EXPLODED IN THE PAST 50 YEARS?

Generally speaking, the 1950s and 1960s were dominated by small shops andantiques shows. In the 1970s, mail-order and the collectibles businesses reallytook off. The Antique Trader was a huge source of buying and sellingopportunities. It was truly a shopper's periodical. Starting in about 1970,collector's plates became the rage, as popular then as Beanie Babies were inmore recent times. Bing & Grondahl and Royal Copenhagen had owned this marketsince the 1890s, but suddenly everyone wanted a piece of that pie. Frankoma in1968, Imperial Glass in 1970, Goebel Hummel entered in 1971, Metlox in 1973, andthe list goes on. The Bradford Exchange took it to a higher level in the late1970s. The plate business thrived throughout the 1970s and made a lot of moneyfor the dealers who dealt in these items by mail, in person, and at shows.Lynn's antiques shop used to advertise collectible plates every other week inthe Antique Trader and would sometimes sell $2,000 worth of them from one ad. Itsure beat all the work that an antiques show required!

Some of the more traditional antiques dealers would not be caught dead with anewer collectible in their stores, and they missed out on a huge opportunity.However, some of these dealers did advertise their antiques in the popularmagazines (Antique Trader, Hobbies, etc.) and did supplement their salesfigures.

The plate business in the 1970s was the basis for many of today's populardecorative collectibles such as those from Enesco, Franklin Mint, and BoydsBears. You will learn more about this category in Chapter 16.

The 1980s brought us the antiques mall, which became a great opportunity for apart-time hobbyist to make a little extra cash. The part-time antiques dealerdid not have to keep an open shop and could pay a small percentage to the ownerof the mall. Antiques malls typically charged a flat rate for booth rental—$50to $500 a month depending on size—and then a small percentage of sales, 10percent or so. Because the dealer didn't have to invest a huge amount of money,the number of new dealers entering the business increased. The antiques mall wasa great concept for the buyer also. Instead of having to drive to 20 differentshops looking for one item, the antiques collector could find many items underone roof. The downside was that the dealer wasn't there to explain the historyor to share his or her knowledge. Antiques malls are still around today and seemto be surviving.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from How to Sell Antiques and Collectibles on eBay ... and Make a Fortune! by Dennis L. Prince. Copyright © 2005 by Dennis L. Prince and Lynn Dralle. Excerpted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: McGraw Hill
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0071445692
• ISBN 13: 9780071445696
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256