Small Scale Military Headquarters

Jay wrote:The only grey area I saw was in the machi auction where we had two guys bidding on the same lot, but in two different ways. It sounds like they worked it out so they both came out winning but yeah, maybe the rules should've been more clear in that instance.

I think separating the items would be better rather than some people wanting to buy only one and someone else wanting to buy all three (unless it's a 'MUST BUY ALL THREE' rule stated by the seller). Thankfully the winners of that auction all worked out a wonderful solution amongst themselves.

Jay wrote:Also there seemed to be some confusion on the "start" bid, with some people starting at above the amount. Maybe they wanted to start higher anyway?
Anyway.

I think people wanted to give him a little bit more perhaps, I mean those deals were pretty darn fantastic. But that's all something that could be covered in a LIVE AUCTION rules and etiquette thread.

It was fun Didn't see the "sniping" at the last second like eBay. Well done.

Axis Nightmare wrote:It was fun Didn't see the "sniping" at the last second like eBay. Well done.

Not sure if "pizzaguy" would agree with you.

I think it's a great idea. Lets do it again!

Hey Guys,

It looks like the majority of you you all like the live auction.

It was fun for me as well. I placed a price on the items that I wanted a minimum for and almost all of the items went over it.

The Jagdpanther was a total surprise as to how high it got.

The Spinach went low but the whole thing is that I moved some of my hoard and most of you guys got great deals.

So everybody is happy. Maybe almost everybody.

So the excitement is over now is the time for buyers remorse.

Let us see wrap this up ( payments ) and I think that I may do just one more next Sunday.

Or maybe the Sunday after next .I will leave that up to you guys input.

Auction II will have more good stuff and hopefully I will be able to find Haleankas wings.

THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR PERSIPITAION IN THIS FIRST EVER GPXD LIVE AUCTION !!!!!

The jagdpanther is one I been trying to get for awhile now. I was happy to pay that price and get it. Also I know the macchi's seemed confusing but after hearing from Rad and Matthew sharing wasn't hard. At those great deals it wasn't hard to throw out some cash and bids. I'm glad I got the chance to add some more pieces to my collection, and if Matthew is happy then I'm happy.

Sorry guys I missed three ( 3 ) items and did not lock them down.

That could have been a problem . I glad it did not become one.

Again sorry for the guys who bid on those items .

Thank you all who paid more than the starting bid .

As far as the 24 hour Auction went. I actually posted the items at around 7 Central time Saturday and shut her down 10 Central time Sunday . I usually go to bed around that time.

This could have shut out you overseas buyers.

So should my next auction shut down Monday morning when I get up or keep it the same as I did this time ?

Please remember to state what you are paying for !!!!

Open up the vault, and lets do it again next Sunday!! Sorry I didn't win the Jagdpanther, but I am sure it's going to a good home. Congrats to the winner! Looking foward to some more hard to find 1/32 items. Sunday auctions help me forget tomorrow is Monday. Thanks for the fun Matthew.

Hey Pickle... did you read my post on the previous page about my suggestions? I think having that special forum made will help you figure out which items are closed and not.

p51 wrote:Hey Pickle... did you read my post on the previous page about my suggestions? I think having that special forum made will help you figure out which items are closed and not.

Hey P-51 yes I did see your post . The auction was actually a bit longer than 24 hours. As far as putting the auction in another post, that is totally up to you. I am OK with it.

But by doing that it could get lost or other guys may not know to go over on it , being that it will be a " new " heading .

snake wrote:

Axis Nightmare wrote:It was fun Didn't see the "sniping" at the last second like eBay. Well done.

Not sure if "pizzaguy" would agree with you.

Guess I missed that one.

Lets hope that doesn't become a trend.
Maybe a rule that no one can make their first bid in the last hour would be good. Say, perhaps, first bids accepted until 10PM. Auction final at 11PM Could make for some spirited bidding down to the wire.

I like the idea of no first bids in the last hour, the only thing I would like to see is a start time and end time with a Central Time so people know the time difference when bidding.

rschaap wrote:the only thing I would like to see is a start time and end time with a Central Time so people know the time difference when bidding.

Yes, that's a good point. I'm not sure if the: "It is currently Mon Apr 22, 2013 5:46 pm", time at the the top of the gpxd page is the same for everyone, but if there was a way to unify it, so everyone could refer to the same time.

Looked good. If I wasn't a new guy I'd have jumped in too!

Greetings:

If I may play devil's advocate here.

Just because this went smoothly once does not mean it will go smoothly in the future. We were lucky with this to only have one minor incident of someone getting upset that they got snipped and guys were able to agree on the Macchi split up. Thankfully this happened or it could have been one big mess had an agreement not been reached between the bidding members.

One of the problems I can see happening is that unlike Ebay where the bidder names are protected so you do not know who is bidding, here the member names are going to be clearly known. This could get really nasty if it is a demanded item that people want and someone gets snipped.

This is not against Pickelhaube as I have dealt with and like to deal with Matthew on items, but I can't help but feel this goes against what this forum is about. From the very beginning of this forum one of the rules has been no links to your own Ebay auctions, now the auctions are right here on the site. Also P-51 mentioned a special section for Pickel's auctions, what about others who would want to do auctions? Are they going to get their own special section? What if we get 50 people wanting to do auctions? How will this board police that? Is Pickelhaube the only one allowed to do auctions? What about others who want to do auctions and are told no? Are we having these auctions to help our collector friends or are we doing them here just to avoid ebay and the fees? These are questions that are going to have to be addressed if this were to continue, but, if Pickelhaube is allowed to do auctions...I don't see how anyone else can be stopped from doing auctions going forward.

I'm not against Pickelhaube, but I personally feel this is setting a really dangerous precedent on this forum. I feel it is setting the stage for some real problems between members, members not paying for items, confusion, etc. If Pickelhaube is the only one allowed to do this, it might cause some feelings of favortism and resentment from other members who also have things to sell and might cause bitter feelings if someone gets outbid.

If Pickelhaube is to continue doing this going forward I would suggest that the bids be thru PM. This way no one knows who is bidding against who, it could just be that bids will be accepted to a certain time (all PM's are timestamped) and if your bid is not in before the cutoff...tough luck. This would also prevent people from knowing who won. Maybe Pickelhaube could post the current daily bid in the auction posting so people would know what it is. Anyone asking for clarification if they are the high bidder could direct it through PM.

I think that before this continues we need to discuss it more as a forum and come up with some more specific guidelines on how this is going to work. It has gone well so far and Pickelhaube had an original idea, but we need to clarifiy how it is going to work so we don't have problems on the forum and if this is truly a good idea for the forum.

Again not trying to be the devil's advocate or anything, just suggesting this needs some more discussion and input before going fully forward.

Corey

Hey Corey,

You bring up some good points.

Firstly it takes time to pull these things out and post the pics. Secondly it takes some time to pack them up and ship them out.

I have been selling on e-bay for years . It would probably be safe to say that if I would have posted these offerings on e-bay I would have gotten a lot more money for them.

Regardless of the e-bay/paypal fees.

I waited a week to post em and if given a 5 day auction they would have sold faster as well.

Obviously I did not do it for the money . I just wanted to move them and give a good chance for guys to fill there missing pieces.

It has been established that others want to do this and I am sure when P-51 sorts this out there would be more guys who may want to do this.

But this forum may reach 100 guys max. E-BAY REACHES MILLIONS.

This was a first for this forum hopefully not the last.

I would hope that there is no favoritism and I am sure there is not as far as me doing this.

The cold hard truth is I have probably hundreds of planes and tanks in all kinds of condition.

It got to the point were I have so much stuff that I had paths going through my studio.

Classic signs of hoarding. So a week ago I decided to take care of the situation and give this stuff a new home.

That is it plain and simple.

So if everyone is in I plan to do another auction next week and that could be it for a while.

Like I said it takes serious time to retrieve these, clean them up ,take pics then post them up .Then after they sell ( hopefully ) to pack them up and ship them up.

You and me have been trading a while and hopefully will continue.

Hopefully next Sunday ( or maybe Sunday after next ) you will see something that you want to bid on.

Matthew

Hey Guys,

Please remember to state your forum name and what you are paying for.

I want to make sure everybody gets what they paid for.

I pm'ed you back. Sorry for the confusion.

Yessir I finally got me a white Zero! That elusive plastic bugger has been dodg'n me for a decade. I was one of the first guys to see the 21st zero at comicon , but not since then had I even seen one. So, the BBI is mine for 75 rice balls. Thanks pickle!

Pardon me for not reading the rules very well. I will PM you requesting your PP address.

Coreyeagle48 wrote:Greetings:
I would suggest that the bids be thru PM.......... Maybe Pickelhaube could post the current daily bid in the auction posting so people would know what it is.

Yes, this is a tricky one. One of the problems is that it also requires the seller to "maintain" the auction through out the live event, and regularly update the status. With the likes of ebay, the site is already engineered for up to date bidding and the seller just has to collect the winnings afterwards.

I was thinking about something along the lines of a dutch auction (not doing one myself, but just in general), with the amount going down per hour. So say the auction starts at 9am on a sunday. The price will decrease say $5 per hour.
So 9am-10am it's $100.
10am -11am it's $95.
11am - 12pm it's $90.
12pm -1pm it's $85.
.....and so on until a predetermined finish time.
So basically, when the amount gets to where you are willing to pay, you send a PM to the seller to "buy". The PM will be time tagged so you'll be able to see who PM'd first.

All good ideas guys . But Jay that Dutch reduction idea ain't one of them.

The idea of posting on the item for all to see ,is just that . For all to see.

It keeps things honest.

The Machi issue worked itself out because the parties involved acted like adults and worked it out.

In the future a lesson was learned about bundling items. It gets tricky.

I think things went pretty smooth.

The only issue was me not shutting stuff down . It was late I was tired and looks like I could not see strait .

Other than a new location on the forum , I think it worked out fine so let us keep it the way it was.

The timing may be an issue for other guys in other time zones .But I did post about 7 Saturday night and shut it down around 10 Sunday night giving the auction a 27 hour run.

I think it is easy post the price you want to pay .This is not ebay , those ways will not work here. Post what you are willing to pay and that is the way it goes.

PH and all,
I watched this event and was pleased you had so much activity on your items.
You may have not made as much money as you would have on Ebay.
But think about it, the BST section is not Ebay.
PH is trying to clear out some of his extra and make some hard to find items available to this community. I commend him for doing that.
Instead of focusing on bad what if scenarios for future auctions, we should applaud PH for having the courage to step out and try something new.

1/18 scale military is getting harder and harder to find. Most of you guys remember a time when Walmart had 1/18 items stacked to the ceiling and other remember when Toys R Us carried 21st Century line of 1/18 military items. But today we only have sources of PH, Grunt and few others.
We have few new items to talk about on this site, so I say new is good!

Just because we have "never done it that way before" does not mean we can't try.
Razor

pickelhaube wrote:All good ideas guys . But Jay that Dutch reduction idea ain't one of them.

Naww, i thought i had something there .

But yeah, what's the saying "Keep It Simple Stupid". It did actually work well.
If people are going to get upset about being outbid, and wanting to be anonymous, maybe they shouldn't be on a public forum and they can buy all there stuff on ebay.

Looking forward to the next round of auctions!

Greetings:

Again not to put a damper on what Pickelhaube has done but I just do not think this type of thing has a place on this forum.

If we are allowing auctions, it will only be a matter of time before someone who has a business is allowed to post sales on here. Then there will be more auctions and more sales. There has been a very strict no advertising policy here on business promoting. What happens now if Aviatornut suddenly says he wants to have a sale? What if Jnewboy wants to suddenly start selling his customs? Then how are we going to handle it.

Some people don't care because they got a bunch of cheap stuff in this, but that leads me to my next question. What was the problem of just deciding on a price and advertising these on the BST forum like a normal sales post. I don't care if someone was cleaning a hoard or cleaning a garage or just selling their collection, I don't understand why a normal trade post couldn't have been made.

The loosely enforced trade rules here are coming back to haunt this forum with this I fear. This falls under a gray area of the normal forum rules and procedures. Before going forward, this needs to be clarified so that all membership is on the same page.

This is also eating up a ton of posting space in our forums. Some new stuff has already been pushed to the bottom because of the multiple auction posts. Now there are new posts about how to pay for things, etc. I think this all needs either a separate section or stated up front in the auction post. The forum is going to get crazily confusing and congested if every time Pickelhaube runs 10 auctions there are 10 separate posts and then more posts detailing how to pay, shipment, etc.

I may be in the minority here, but under the current setup of the forum, I am not in favor of this. It is not in the spirit of what this forum is about and kind of goes against some unwritten rules we have had as courtesy for years around here.

If this goes forward there absolutely has to be a separate section on the forum for this. I don't think it is appropriate to be pushing it through the BST forum and all over the rest of the forum either.