Snake Launch Week: How To Actually Buy Furniture on LiveAuctioneers
A few days ago, on Tuesday, I made an announcement regarding the future of my newsletter:
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Starting Monday free subscribers will receive Q&As biweekly, one auction email a month and one essay or brand profile a month. Paying subscribers will receive auction observers every week, brand profiles every month, essays once a month or so, and Q&As every other week. Posting classifieds will also remain free.
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I’ll be publishing one of the above features every day this week. If you don’t upgrade right away the best newsletter in the world will be going away. It’s that simple. Today is an explainer. The topic is:
A step by step guide on how to actually buy furniture on LiveAuctioneers and put it in your home
Steps:
Go to www.liveauctioneers.com
Sign up for an account on LiveAuctioneers, enter your name and credit card info, home info, shipping, and so on.
Download the app on your phone and stay signed in—mobile web doesn’t have the best UI, and logs people out constantly.
Subscribe to my newsletter and read Snake Auction Observers every week, click on the auctions you like and want to buy:
Then save them by pressing the heart button on the main thumbnail:
which will turn red after you favorite the item.
This is important: register for the auction as soon as you favorite the item. The registration button is on the auction page, below the big Place Bid button, in small font. It looks like this:
Once you do that, you will get a pop-up confirming your credit card info and home address. If it’s correct, move ahead confirm the registration. You can choose to follow alerts from the auction house and sign up for SMS alerts from LiveAuctioneers. I usually don’t. After you click the submit registration button, you are good. You should get a notification—in the app, or an email—within a day whether you are registered or not. If you’re not, follow up with the auctioneer through the contact button. Usually it’s an oversight.
Set up shipping—this is also important. Set up shipping right after you bookmark the item and submit registration. You should do this a week or a few days minimum ahead of the auction. Not the day of. If you’re serious about buying a piece of furniture, get information about what it might cost to ship the item the day you favorite the item. There are four ways to do this.
Scroll down to the Auction House icon and click the Ask a Question button, and ask them plainly for shippers that they recommend. Write that down. Do it.
Or use a shipper you already know. Mine is named “Steve.”
Plan to pick up the item yourself. This can be cheap. If you live in the city and don’t have a car, rent a UHaul. They are cheap.
Or use a shipping service. These are out there. UShip is a helpful service. I used UShip to get myself a couch a decade ago, from DC, and it cost a couple hundred bucks. On this service, shippers bid against each other to get you an item. There is more or less a real price. Use whoever’s cheapest as long as they have good feedback. Pay the extra $40 if the underbidder is a newjack. To do this:
Sign up for Uship, and enter a furniture item (bookmark that link), using the dimensions and weight and location listed in the auction. If the info is not in the listing, message the house.
Keep this in mind: shippers deal with auctions all the time. Sometimes you can just send a shipper an auction link outright and they will figure out the information themselves. I do this with “Steve.” The key factors in determining cost are size, weight, and how many parts the item has. Keep in mind that:
it will cost more money to ship something cross-country. It is pretty cheap to ship across only half the country.
it is very expensive to furniture from overseas.
unless you are Greek.
sometimes auctions on LA have calculated shipping, which does the math on each item, and can be convenient. I would message the seller, in this case, and check it against UShip.
Set a calendar alert for the auction. This is also important. Otherwise you’ll forget. Several things in life are more important than furniture. Don’t rely on the LA alerts. Put it in your calendar, or tie a string around your finger two weeks before the auction.
How does auction timing work? When will your auction be uo? Well, auctions take a long time, since LA is literally a web clearinghouse for actual auction houses, which have a guy (Micro Machines voice) at a dais literally calling out their auctions. The website is bound by the houses’ schedules. So if your item is Lot #400 (it’ll say it above the big name in small font) and the auction starts at 11 AM, check at 11 AM but expect a few hours wait. If it was me, I’d check back every half hour. It only takes a couple of seconds.
If you have time and interest, go through the auction and dig around through its other items. Often there’ll be good stuff in there I have not covered, or which might be more immediately suited to your tastes or your needs. Once again, though, if you are not registered for the auction, you can’t bid. So do that. Don’t do anything else until you register, and register right away. You should do this once you favorite the item. There is no cost involved and it takes 30 seconds.
Research the item’s price history if you’re into that kind of information and are being a hardass about bidding. If it’s an item I’ve written about, it’ll be in one of my newsletters. So go through old Auction Observers and search the term. Keep a vague iteration of this number in mind for when it’s time to bid.
Think long and hard about the price you want to pay for the item. This is different than what the price history is. It is very different. This is your item, it isn’t anyone else’s, it is yours. So your price will require a number of factors, only one of which is the item’s historical value. I covered this in an earlier essay:
What I mean is that different things are worth different prices to different people. Effectively, your math should consider shipping, the auction fee (anywhere from 10 to 25%), the market rate and the emotional rate. i.e., what you are willing, in your gut to pay, because you like this thing. Ask these questions before you bid:
do I need it ASAP?
is it a gift?
for a loved one?
is it the last piece of the puzzle?
is it very rare?
is it something I uncommonly love?
is it dirt cheap to ship, or local, and I can pick it up easy?
Can I flip it?
Will break out to what the max is that you’re willing to pay. One reason why I advocate auctions for furniture is not just that they’re cheap. It’s that spending money—retail price—can get you a lot more.
Do some quick reality math: this is exactly how much I am willing to spend and how much I am able to spend. This is my budget. This is how much I will go over my budget. This is way too much; this is so cheap that if I don’t bid, I will regret it. In order to bid successfully on an item you need to know what the historical price is, your emotional price is, your real price is and your to-the-wall price is. Somewhere in there is the price.
Bid on the item when it is live. I prefer to bid during the auction and not before it. (You can place a bid on any auction on LA at any time.) And I prefer to bid on the LA desktop site and not in the app. But I have bid on the app and won, it worked fine. And I have bid before an item is live, and went to the movies during the auction, and won—and that worked out fine—and the movie even ended up having a happy ending. But I still suggest desktop. It’s a bigger screen.
You lost. Too bad. But there is an infinite supply of furniture out there, and you will get them next time. Allow yourself one day of pain and then move on.
You won. Nice. Congratulate yourself for creating a better reality for yourself. The auction house will send you an invoice within a day or so and tell you the date by which you need to pay and pick the item up. Once you have that, send that info over to the shipper. Or send the info to the shipper before. Or get the UHaul.
Now you have to get rid of your sofa. If it’s a piece you are upgrading, hit me up to list it—Classifieds are always free—or, if it’s a real piece of shit, donate it, or throw it away, which is the same thing.
If you are new to buying items on auction, expect an emotional experience: you will find out things about yourself. Maybe you pay more, maybe less. What does this mean? Hard to say. I find the more often you bid, the lower prices will be. Even if you lose you will win.
Rough math: In my opinion the price paid on LA for a designer item should be general retail or lower. As in if you buy a good couch or table designed by somebody which is better made and better looking than anything in a store today, for the same price, that’s a W. But since the quality of items is higher on LA than anyone else, it’s not fucked up to pay more on LA for a couch. But… try not to since you can often pay less.
Prices aren’t fixed or rigid because these aren’t profit-drivers: the goal for this newsletter is to get regular people not in the furniture industry into using this website and getting things for themselves. At the end of the day, we all work for a living, and sometimes we have to spend money.
Best of luck and thanks for reading. Paying subscribers will receive regular explainers like these, as well as Auction Observers, Lores, Q&As and Essays. Upgrade your subscription to ensure further work.
Sami Reiss