Where have all the Auctions gone?

Good respond. I hope the web master is reading. There were some really nice auctions in the old times and was quite a feature of Audiogon. Now with mostly listed items, Audiogon is like other selling sites and lost the appeal to me.

I used to sell LPs in auctions. The new website format is not conducive to selling LPs. Current format thinks an LP is a type of music. Same with a CD. Something as simple as examining a list of all LPs available for auction cannot be done!

When an ad is created the Seller selects a Category that describes the music item being sold. Problem is that the Category does not define a type of music but is a catch all variable that lumps types of music together with types of media formats. Thus the Seller can select LP or Classical Music or Rock Music or SCAD or Vintage LP or Cassette, etc. BUT THE SELLER CAN ONLY SELECT ONE.

A prospective Buyer who uses “LPs” as search criteria will only see those auction ads where Sellers entered LP as a Category. That search would ignore listings for Beethoven LPs where Sellers entered Classical Music as the Category. That’s not good!

It gets more confusing. As the new website allows selecting multiple Category items as search criteria a Buyer could use both “LPs” and “Classical Music” as search criteria. A logical person would assume such a search would return a list of all auction ads for LPs that contain classical music. That would be incorrect as the list would include CDs and might even include DVDs & cassettes.

When Joe created the auction listing for his Debussy CD he entered Classical Music as the Category. Regardless that Joe’s auction is for a CD, it would display in the list of auction ads when both “LPs” and “Classical Music” were the search criteria.

In addition, with the new website, it is harder to find auction listings compared to the ease of finding classified ads. Also the manner the various search criteria options are selected and used is awkward and clunky. When things are awkward to use people tend to shop elsewhere. All in all these problems hinder sales making it a waste of time to list auctions. Until these issues are corrected I suspect auction listings will be minimal. Should that happen I hope that many of the Buyers who used to shop on this site return. Though after such a length of time Buyers might be too frustrated or just conditioned to shop elsewhere.