Does a good website matter to you, the consignor?

Imagine yourself looking at items up for auction on EBay. You find something you are interested in bidding on. You are ready to login and place your bid only to read at the bottom of the items description is this statement:

Interested in bidding?
Contact our office at 123-456-7890 during office hours.
Absentee bids can be faxed to 123-456-7890. Click here to download the bid form.

If you look at most of our competition that is exactly what you will find on their website catalog. Nothing like killing spontaneity! How many interested people do you think decided not to bid? or plan on bidding later and forget? Or maybe you want to bid on 50 items but give up on writing up 50 records for a fax?

As a consignor you need multiple people bidding to be successful. At RIAC we give our customers options; it’s one of the many reasons why we are number one in sales.

With RIAC our customers have many options to place bids, they can;

•    Email in their bids.
•    Fax in their bids.
•    Call us with their bids.
•    Bid 24 hours a day directly on our website.
•    Bid live on the telephone.
•    Bid live on the internet.
•    Conditional bidding (we work with our customers, IE if I do not win lot number xxxx place an absentee bid on lot number xxxx for $$$)
•    A combination of several of the methods listed above!

Some of our competitors are now trying to lure in customers with low contract rates. The truth is RIAC will still get you more money for your items regardless of our competitor’s contract rate.  Our competition will tell you a low contract rate is key to getting you more money, and that they do the same marketing as RIAC; which is completely false. What is true is a low contract rate gets you a low marketing effort!

RIAC has the #1 antique and collectable firearms auction house website. Our customers get excited when we post a new catalog with up to 7,000 color images, great descriptions and condition statements. When they read the firearms headline they know they can count on it being correct, why? Because we guarantee the headline is correct in all our premiere auctions.

The data below was provided by Alexa, and was taken after our Feb. 2013 auction. RIAC was ranked as the 16,749th most popular website in the USA.

So Take a look for yourself at the various firearms collectors auction websites.
Do you like the look of their site? Does it have features for the customers such as:

• Absentee bidding.
• Wish list folders.
• Click on any item and submit your questions directly to customer service.
• Live Chat.
• Email items and entire wish list folders to other friends and collectors.
• Auction text alerts sent directly to your phone.
• Full featured catalog search by keywords, manufacturer, item classification, item type or genre category.
• Nightly email bidding updates to absentee bidders.
• Web account tools allowing customers to check their current bids and the status of those bids.
• Video productions that market the auction items to the world.
• We believe in Social Media Marketing and have an Active Facebook Page.

By providing the above and more to our clients RIAC client listing is fast approaching 100,000 customers interested in firearms (not lamps and dolls) , RIAC routinely takes in on average 14,000 absentee bids each auction, and in the time we list our catalog until the auction begins will have nearly 2 million page views of our online catalog. Now that’s marketing!  OR you can get yourself a lower contract rate and hope that someone takes the time to fax in a bid on your items?