E-Photo
Issue #20  10/15/2000
 
Sotheby's and Amazon Eliminate Joint Site

By Alex Novak

Sotheby's and Amazon have eliminated their joint site. The two behemoths finally woke up to what everyone else was aware of for the last year: the Sothebys.amazon.com site didn't make any sense and only confused buyers and sellers.

It looks like Amazon gets the best of the changing deal. They get some of their $45 million development costs back in the form of multi-million dollar cash payments over a multi-year contract for fixed placements on the Amazon.com site. Amazon also got a kicker based on the Sothebys.com site's performance.

The original proposition was that material between $100 and $300 would go on the combo site, and material above that amount would go on the Sothebys.com site. Sotheby's site is now happy to take anything just to beef up the number of items on the dwindling site. The last time I looked they only had 223 lots in the photography category, which was mostly their own. That's about 2/3 of what they used to post up at the beginning.

Down is not a good direction on the web. Many, if not most, photo dealers have given up the site for dead, although it has had erratically good results from time to time. But the site is just too cumbersome, and the buyers' premium and the site's lack of ability to track bids always put off bidders. And the exclusive ironbound contracts and lack of direct customer contact put off dealers. I truly hope they fix their problems. We could use another high quality alternative to eBay for auctioning on-line.

Novak has over 47 years experience in the photography-collecting arena. He is a long-time member and formally board member of the Daguerreian Society, and, when it was still functioning, he was a member of the American Photographic Historical Society (APHS). He organized the 2016 19th-century Photography Show and Conference for the Daguerreian Society. He is also a long-time member of the Association of International Photography Art Dealers, or AIPAD. Novak has been a member of the board of the nonprofit Photo Review, which publishes both the Photo Review and the Photograph Collector, and is currently on the Photo Review's advisory board. He was a founding member of the Getty Museum Photography Council. He is author of French 19th-Century Master Photographers: Life into Art.

Novak has had photography articles and columns published in several newspapers, the American Photographic Historical Society newsletter, the Photograph Collector and the Daguerreian Society newsletter. He writes and publishes the E-Photo Newsletter, the largest circulation newsletter in the field. Novak is also president and owner of Contemporary Works/Vintage Works, a private photography dealer, which sells by appointment and has sold at exhibit shows, such as AIPAD New York and Miami, Art Chicago, Classic Photography LA, Photo LA, Paris Photo, The 19th-century Photography Show, Art Miami, etc.