Official Luthiers Forum!

As you know, Lance and I are in the beginning phases of offering lutherie related auctions. Due to the way the software license works we will probably locate these under a separate URL and not as a sub directory of the luthiersforum.com site.

Our goal with this is to quickly identify and capture the interest of luthiers who have a somewhat more professional outlook than the "masses" who pass through ebay. Our goal is go offer high quality merchandise and try to discourage the sellers who are moving "junk" in mass quantities. We are hoping that by having a more professional platform there will be greater opportunities for you to reach different segments of the market and perhaps make bigger sales.

I know several of you (John, Brian, Bob, and others) have built fairly successful businesses on ebay.

I would be interested in getting your feedback and ideas on what we can do to make this successful, easy to use, and someplace you would like to do business.

I have a few specific ideas, but first I was hoping to just generate a discussion and any ideas you had....

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Brock Poling
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.polingguitars.com

Good idea Borck,

I have not jumped on the e-bay band wagon for a couple of reasons:

1) I do this part time and want to build slowly with a strong customer base based on respect and honesty, I very often ship goods before I have been paid and have never had a problem because a relationship of some sort is typically built before the order is finalized. I don't think I could operate that way on e-bay.

2) I am still trying to decide how busy I want to be, but this turning into a second full time job anyway so I am starting to think that it is about time to "go hard" rather than "go home". So I have been concidering e-bay more, if needed (I am getting a pretty good customer base of medium size builders).

My concerns with e-bay, just from looking at it a very little bit, is the complex cost structure, I couldn't really figure out what it would cost to operate there, and the unclear options available. So for me it need to fairly simple to understand, kinda like your OLF sponsor options, and easy to use. Also, most decent tonewood suppliers do have a few customers at least that want right of first refusal for your best stuff. One of my customers wants the first 100 mastergrade sets I produce each year for the next five years, so that would be a huge dent in the high end guitar top availability I would have. Because even if I cut 200 sets, I would probably save the others for him for the following year, just in case I couldn't find more, it is more important to keep your regular customers than find new ones. Having said all of this, I would still be interested, at least to try it out. I think that if you guys had a "luthiers e-bay" man you would be busy!!

Well, as always..long winded, hope this helps!

Shane

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Canada

Brock I'm willing to give this a try. I think it would have to reach out beyond OLF forum members to be succesful.

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Beautiful and unusual tone woods at a reasonable price.
http://www.rctonewoods.com/RCT_Store
The Zootman
1109 Military Rd.
Kenmore, NY 14217
(716) 874-1498

Bob, i wonder how many of your ebay customers are olf'ers? You would probably know that.

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Lance@LuthiersForum.com

That is certainly the plan to get more exposure than just the OLF. It might take a little time to build the awareness for it.

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Brock Poling
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.polingguitars.com

Actually quite a few of them. In fact I steered a lot of my customers to the OLF. Others have seen the OLF link on my homepage and have become forum members. I realize it will take some time to get the word out and show up on search engines. It took my website a good year before it started to become pretty busy. Of course OLF played a big part in making it successful.
Thanks to both of you.

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Beautiful and unusual tone woods at a reasonable price.
http://www.rctonewoods.com/RCT_Store
The Zootman
1109 Military Rd.
Kenmore, NY 14217
(716) 874-1498