Early cars had mechanical crank starters. They didn’t work very well, were hard to use, and required the strength of a good sized man to turn them. In cold weather they sometime “kicked”, breaking the hand of the person trying to start his car. Yet even after electric starters were invented, for many years cars were equipped with both the newer starters and the older type. People were used to one thing, and even when something better came along they were reluctant to change. Such is the case now with stamp auction catalogs.
Auction catalogs are cumbersome to produce. They require long lead times and are very expensive to print and mail. The average stamp auction company prints and mails about 3,000 catalogs at a cost in excess of $30,000, which is over $10 per catalog. In general, only about 20% of the recipients of an auction company’s catalog bid in each sale, so average catalog cost per bidder is $50. Most collectors who get catalogs either find nothing in them that they want to bid on or the catalog comes to them when they are not in the stamp buying mood. In the days before online stamp catalogs, the economics of catalogs were no better, but there was no alternative. Catalogs were the only way to reach bidders, and an inefficient sales method was better than no sales method at all.
Several years ago, Apfelbaum stopped producing paper catalogs. We found that listing our catalogs online gave us access to tens of thousands of bidders each month. A few of our old time customers wished for things the old way, so we print a download of our online catalogs for them, but most of our clients were online fans already. They enjoy the ease of viewing, the beautiful enlarged scans of both single lots and collections, the updated start bids and bidding all in one place, the online interactive auctions, and the joy of being able to access our auctions any time of the day or night anywhere they have a computer or cell phone. Many stamp auction companies still print catalogs as well as put their auctions online, but it is only a matter of time until nearly all stamp auctions are online only, except for a very few of the finest collections that are sold each year and whose auction catalogs serve as the coffee table books of our hobby.