Breeder’s Award Program Article

A Few Words About Selling At The Auction

by Mike Schadle
SouthWestern Michigan Aquarium Society.  From SWAM, March/April 1987 Issue
Aquarticles

I’ve had the pleasure of acting as auctioneer at many aquarium society auctions in the last few years, and in that capacity have sold thousands of bags of fish and assorted aquarium paraphernalia. In the process I have developed some rather strong feelings on how the aquarists can best realize the maximum profit for his goods, and conversely, on how a seller can guarantee a low return (and, occasionally, the wrath of the buyers) by poor presentation of the items he has for sale. In this article I hope to bring out some of these pet peeves and helpful hints with the aim of educating the auction sellers, so they may attain higher profits while adding to the success and reputation of their society’s auctions. For the sake of this discussion I will leave out the topic of proper bagging and packaging, as this has been well covered in other articles and should largely be a matter of common sense, and will instead concentrate on the items being sold.

The first and foremost rule to follow as a seller is to consider whether or not you yourself as a buyer would pay money for the item you are considering for sale. No matter if it is fish, plant, aquatic animal, equipment, or other hobby-related items, would you, if you had an interest, pay out your hard earned dough for the item you are about to put in the auction? If the answer is no or even a marginal qualified yes, you are best off throwing it in the garbage, flushing it, or feeding it off, as the case may be. Let’s face it, who profits when a 1-pound baggie of fluorescent purple gravel is placed in an auction and sells for 50 cents? If you really need the 30 cents that such a sale might net you that badly, then maybe you really need to take a look at your priorities and sell off your aquarium stuff and put some food on your table. At any rate, following this basic rule in and of itself will insure that you are welcome back the next time a given society holds an auction, and you will usually not be disappointed with the financial outcome. Not following this guideline can insure the buyers will be on the lookout to avoid your items in future auctions, and auction staffs and auctioneers will be on the lookout for “that cheapskate jerk with the purple gravel”.

Let’s take a look at the fish you bag up for an auction. If your kribs spawned three weeks ago and right now you’re sitting on about 500 three-eighths inch long fry, do you bag up three to a bag and put twenty bags in the auction? If you do, you are guilty of at least three auction mistakes. First of all, your fish are not ready to be sold – they simply aren’t yet big enough. Especially for a more or less common fish, such as a krib, tiny fry are just not large enough to place in an auction and expect someone to part with several dollars to obtain them. Only in the case of extremely hard-to-come-by fish are small fry really acceptable for an auction (and then, if they’re really that rare, you ought to have a long list of ready buyers at hand for private sale with no need for an auction). A good rule of thumb for most species is that the fish be about one inch long before they’re ready for auction (obviously this doesn’t work for Heterandria Formosa, among others, but, hey, the whole point here is think before you bag). Here’s another test to try: would you take the fish to your local dealer and ask him to buy them from you for sale in his shop? Again, if the answer is no, what makes you think that they are any more desirable in an auction? If you don’t have the room to raise up all your fry to a saleable size, then use the excess as feeders. Why waste time bagging stock that will not net you any money and just bogs down the auction? Excess baby fish are a wonderful source of live food. Remember the old rule - big fish eat little fish! It doesn’t really matter that it took you a year to spawn the suckers - if you can’t raise them they’ll be stunted, which means they aren’t good for anything but feeders anyway!

The next mistake is usually made in the number of fish placed in the bag. Almost every article you read about spawning fish says, “purchase at least six fry to insure obtaining a pair”. Assuming that there is a fifty-fifty mix of males and females in every batch of fry (usually a false assumption, but that’s another article), purchasing six at a time gives roughly a 97% probability of obtaining at least one pair - pretty fair odds. However, rarely do I see six unsexed fry bagged together in an auction. It may be two, three, or four, but rarely six. Here’s a tip from the auctioneer: unless it is an expensive or desirable species (like Tropheus or Discus) your best bet is to place four fry to a bag. Four in a bag will bring a far better per-fish price in most cases than two or three, and a marginally better price than five or six. It all has to do with buyer psychology - particularly as the price per individual rises. For expensive species, buying three bags of two fish each for ten dollars somehow seems less expensive than buying one bag of six fish for thirty dollars. However, as the price per fish falls, four to a bag seems to make more sense than either two or six. I’m not defending this behavior from any logical or rational point of view; this is simply my observation of what really happens during an auction. Take advantage of it!

The third big mistake of the breeder/auction seller is to flood any single auction with too many fish. If you’ve put more than half a dozen bags of single species in the auction, you simply will not see the return you might expect. All the fish are on the table for everyone to view before the auction starts. As a result, if there are twenty bags of a particular fish available, everyone knows it, and there is little incentive to bid up the price on the bags of that fish that come up early. Later, as the crowd thins, there are less people bidding on those fish, and again, the price won’t rise as desired. Finally, if there were simply too many bags of one species to be comfortably distributed throughout the auction, they will end up practically being given away in a lump towards the end of the sale. Always remember to apply the law of supply and demand. Too many of your fish plus too few buyers for your fish always equals low prices! You can’t do much about the number of buyers, but you can certainly limit the number of fish available, thus raising the price on at least one side of the equation.

Let’s move on to the non-fish items in an auction. I’ve seen some tricks that can do a lot to raise selling prices on normally ho-hum items. For example, every auction seems to have more than its share of microworm and white worm cultures. Each of these can normally be counted on to bring in its half - or one-dollar bid. BUT - try including a typewritten sheet of culturing instructions and see what the price is. Many people know that live foods are good for their fish, and are willing to buy them, but simply don’t have the know-how to sustain them. I’ve seen a simple set of culturing instructions triple the price of a food culture over those without them. A few minutes’ time at the typewriter and judicious use of a Xerox machine may well net you a few bucks in the future.

How about equipment? A little bit of elbow grease and some time are all that is needed to turn a $5.00 grunge covered 20-gallon high tank into a sparkling $15.00 or more bid winner at your next auction. The same holds true of any piece of hobby equipment. If it is clean and shiny, be it tank, hood or box filter, it is guaranteed to do better than an algae-encrusted, water-stained piece of crud that someone obviously didn’t give two hoots about. Again, this goes back to our primary rule - how would you feel about buying it?

My final point/tip has to do with labeling. Personally, I feel that every item sold at auction should be labeled with the seller’s name and complete phone number, over and above any descriptive information on the item to be sold. Putting your name and number to something indicates that you personally have no problem with the items you are selling - in affect, a guarantee, since if there is a problem the buyer has ready access to you. If you can sincerely stand behind each and every item you sell, providing this information should be no problem, and can strengthen a buyers resolve to purchase an item offered in an auction. As far as information on the item itself goes, the more information provided, the better - up to a point. First, the information must be accurate; I’ve seen three inch diameter Discus labeled as “large”, “pairs” of two inch Angel Fish, and many “female” male Kennyi, to name just a few exaggerations. If you aren’t sure of the identity or sex of an item, don’t guess, and please don’t insult the auctioneer’s intelligence by stretching the size - if the auctioneer is a specialist in the field and catches your mistake/exaggeration/guess while looking at the bag before selling it, his comments may only make you feel dumb and the price may drop. On the other hand, if he sells it “as is” and it is not what it is represented to be, the host club and eventually you yourself may come in for a whole slew of trouble and bad feelings once the error is discovered. If you don’t know the identification of the fish you wish to sell you have three options: 1) Find someone who can identify it (and not your six year old kid looking through his natural science book); 2) Sell it as an unidentified species, but at least try to narrow it down somewhat (Cichlids, Guppies, Killies, and Gouramis are usually fairly difficult to confuse); 3) Don’t sell it and use it as a feeder. You will never lose by being honest in your descriptions, yet you might never be trusted by being caught once in a lie, er, excuse me, by stretching the truth. Whatever you do, please don’t leave the item devoid of any description - a sure way to stop an auction is for an item to come up with no description whatsoever, and have the auctioneer try to figure out what it is. No matter how good an auctioneer is, he cannot know every fish, plant, or device that comes up for sale, so please give him a little help, however limited it may be.

I hope that you find this information of some use. There are other tricks and techniques which I’m sure others could add, and I don’t expect that this article should be the last word in helping those who sell at aquarium auctions. Much can be learned by attending auctions and observing what sells for good prices, and what doesn’t “meet expectations”. Experience, of course, is the best teacher. I’m sure that the things I’ve mentioned have hit home with most readers in some way. Please accept this information in the spirit that it is offered - as help, so that auctions may be more interesting and profitable for all of us.