Loyalty

Collectors wishing to sell their stamps traditionally have asked stamp dealers that they are considering selling to “Do you have good customers for x?” And the traditional answer always was “of course we have good customers for x, we have the best customers for x, we are the leading players in the x market”. And sometimes this was true. But now it is always true. We do have the best customers for virtually every area and so does nearly every other stamp dealer. In 1980, probably 50% of every auctioneer’s customers were largely proprietary, dealing almost exclusively with that one company. Auction catalogs were expensive to produce and time was short so unless a collector was unusually avid he picked only a few stamp dealers and did most of his business with them. The Internet, and especially the rise of the web site Stamp Auction Network, has changed all that. Very few auctioneers have many proprietary customers anymore and we all have access to the vast pool of serious buyers that the Internet provides. A case in point was our auction last month. We had a series of better specialized Estonia collections going into the sale with no bids. We opened one at the minimum-$400-and within minutes four bidders who we had never sold to before and who had never bid in our sales and did not receive catalogs were competing furiously for this lot which ultimately sold for $3250 to a buyer in Tallinn. Through the wonder  of the Internet we were now specialist Estonian dealers and a few lots later specialized Finnish dealers and on and on.