Word: auctioneer
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Users of the popular auction site will have another way to make transactions. eBay and Wells Fargo are rolling out Billpoint, a service that allows sellers to accept credit cards without establishing merchant accounts. Instead of waiting to receive a check or money order, sellers will get immediate payment to their checking account once the buyer inputs his or her credit-card data. After the first three months, sellers using Billpoint will pay 3.5% of the purchase amount plus 35[cents]. Sales under $10 will get off a little easier and cost only 35[cents...
...feds' investigation did not, in fact, begin with the auctioneers. In the early 1990s, the Justice Department turned its scrutiny on private dealers in an effort to nail the ones who indulged in "ring" bidding--the technique of defrauding sellers by agreeing not to bid against one another in the auction room so that the low-balled object could then be sold by the ring at a second, informal auction of dealers only. About a dozen dealers and collectors were convicted. But Justice decided that the paper trail compiled in those cases might lead further--to Sotheby's and Christie...
...Auction houses charge two commissions on sales--one from the buyer, the other from the seller. It's perfectly legal to drop or raise your prices after a rival does; gas stations facing off across an intersection do it all the time. What's illegal is for two or more rivals to form a "cartel" by agreeing in advance to fix a price. One of the signs that this may be happening is a close, copycat pattern of changes--and this, the Justice Department claims, is what has been happening for years between Sotheby's and Christie...
What longer-term effect the scandal may have on the auction industry is far from clear. Christie's has already announced a new fee structure, raising the amount buyers must pay to 17.5% on the first $80,000 and 10% above that but reducing the seller's commission for customers who buy a lot of art. The art world awaits Sotheby's response. "We will not be underbid by Christie's," new chairman Sovern told TIME, "and we are reviewing our fee schedules to make sure that we are as competitive as we need...
Dealers of course hope that clients will buy more through them and less at auction. Collectors, says gallery owner Howard Read, prefer "a relationship with someone they know and can trust." Stephen Wirtz of San Francisco's Stephen Wirtz Gallery thinks the harm will be done by a free-floating unease. "Whenever there is some kind of seemingly blatant dishonesty, people will probably want to sell less at auction," he says...