Mineral Auctions on the Web

Today’s blurb will concern itself with web-based mineral auction sites. I have previously mentioned minerals at auction, and there are quite a few sites on the web that have auctions for mineral specimens. There are many, many auctions attached to single-owner websites, and I won’t favor or slight any by talking about them. If you want to look them up, a google search for “mineral auctions” will turn up quite a few.
As far as multi-vendor sites, there are three prominent ones.

eBay we all know about, and I am not going to spend a lot of time telling everyone what they already know, except to say that, from my perspective, the ‘glory days’ are over. Just a few years ago, any reasonably nice specimen (with a few exceptions, of course – see my “random tidbits” post) would attract a fair number of bids and sell for reasonable prices. Not so much anymore, I can tell you from personal experience that the traffic (or at least the bids) are down such that many items that previously would have seen lots of attention now sell with one or two bids, or none at all. Several prominent vendors, who used to list all items starting at $0.99 and watch the bids roll in, have given up on that scheme and now list most of their items for fixed-prices, not at auction at all. We ourselves only list a very few items at auction and mostly rely on the fixed-price format for the majority of our items we list there. I’m not at all sure what the reason is for the change, is it the bad economy, the major (mostly BAD, in my opinion) changes that the current regime has foisted on its patrons, a result of some bad press that they have gotten, or a combination of all three? But enough of that subject…

There are two other prominent websites that have multiple dealers selling minerals at auction, John Veevaert’s mineral-auctions.com (not to be confused with mineralauctions.com, which is a single-owner site), and Mark Wrigley’s e-rocks.com. Both are well-run, respectable sites, with excellent reputations. I definitely recommend that you check them out if you are itching for something new for your case.

E-rocks.com is a very ‘busy’ site, with auctions ending every day. There are quite a few sellers who list there, and in addition to the three ‘regular’, multi-seller auctions every week (T, Th, and Sun.), there are always auctions from individual sellers going on, filling in the other four days of the week. As this is a truly international site, with dealers from quite a few different countries participating, you will see some quite interesting themes on the individual auctions. Just recently, I saw a ‘Tsumeb’ auction, with 80 different Tsumeb specimens, and one of the dealers has a fixed-price page running now with all Kunzite specimens, so if you are looking for something in particular, chances are that within a short time you’ll find it there. All auctions run on 7-day schedules, and many dealers also have ‘Buy It Now’ on their items, if you just can’t take a chance on losing that special one. Mark also allows sellers to have their own ‘pages’, with fixed-price items for sale. If you’re looking for nice minerals at reasonable prices, there’s always an auction closing today!

Mineral-auctions.com doesn’t have the same frenetic schedule that e-rocks has, they pretty much stick to 3 auctions per week, usually on a 3- or 4-day duration. Each of the three auctions is in a different category. First is the ‘special’ auction, with a particular occasion, such as ‘Tucson special’ auctions that run in February, for the dealers to showcase their new finds from the show. In these ‘special’ auctions is where the dealers occasionally have their own individual auctions. Second is the weekly ‘dealers choice’ auction, where the dealers are free to list any nice mineral specimens they have. (I say ‘nice’ mineral specimens, because the site manager is vigilant in looking at listings, and doesn’t hesitate to take down anything that doesn’t meet their high standards. They are rightfully proud of the quality of their site, and don’t allow pedestrian, $5 rocks to be listed.) Third is a ‘theme’ auction, where the administrators come up with a particular theme or category, such as ‘North American minerals’, or ‘rocks with 3 or more mineral associations’, or ‘Native elements’, etc. They also allow the dealers to have ‘Buy It Now’ prices on their auctions, but don’t wait too long, those ‘BIN’ prices generally disappear after about 24 hours!

So, if you are wanting to add to your collection, and just can’t wait for the next show, you have a couple of excellent options…..

To close today’s post, a pretty to look at: Azurite with Duftite from renowned Tsumeb, Namibia