Amber Listserv / AmberGallery.com domain name and collections for sale

[Paul Howell]

Hello Amber Friends,

  I hope this email isn't considered spam... we've gotten a lot of
good from everyone on this listserv over many years, and we would
never want to jeopardize that.  It's just that there are likely more
people potentially interested in this amber collection and domain name
concentrated on this one listserv than any other internet outlet on
the planet.

  After ten years of fun, we're selling the AmberGallery.com website,
domain name, and collections.  We never recouped our original
investment, in large part because we stopped trying hard to sell our
pieces, and seldom updated the website.  But now the friends-n-family
loans are being called in, and we need to unload it all, within a
fairly short period of time.

  A little bit of background:  AmberGallery.com has been live since
1998, showcasing beautiful Baltic amber with fossil inclusions from a
collection we bought of some 2500+ pieces of inclusion-rich Baltic
amber.  We thought to sell the collection one-by-one online but now
we're through.

So...
I'm starting with selling the AmberGallery.com domain name and
website.  I have one firm offer in hand, so I'm going to (shortly)
list the domain/site for sale on Sedo.com (the largest domain auction
house these days) with a starting price of $1100 US.  Sedo works like
this:  I list the domain for sale.  As soon as someone offers the
starting price, an auction begins and runs for 1 week, with Sedo
handling the exchange of the domain and money as an escrow service
(and taking 10% of the sale).  I'll write to this list again in a few
days when the domain is officially listed at Sedo.com.

About the domain and site:
1.  There are many inbound links to this popular site (238 estimated
by Urltrends.com), from many of the amber websites that have been
around since the 1990s.
2.  We rank highly for baltic amber keywords on Google and other
search engines.  Example:
    Search for Baltic amber - #1 on Google.  #5 on Yahoo.  #7 on MSN.
3.  Despite zero advertising, we get between 50-100+ unique visits per
day -- that's thousands per month, and that does not include visits
from spider/robot traffic (a lot of those too).

So, that's potentially thousands of visitors per month that could be
seeing an advertisement for YOUR website selling amber, amber jewelry,
or whatever.

---
And after the domain name... I'll be selling the amber.  Or I'll sell
it now, if anyone wants it badly enough to buy it all in one swoop, or
a couple swoops.

The collection was made over several decades from beach collecting by
(I believe) a Lithuanian family and ALL the pieces have inclusions,
mostly insects.  A few points:

1. The pieces are beach-polished only... we're not gem polishing folk,
we just loved the fossil creatures.   That said, a lot of them have a
really decent rough polish.
2. The pieces range from tiny (5-10mm across by 2-3mm thick) to quite
large (15-20cm across by 2-3cm thick).
3. The pieces range in quality from a very rough polish on a cloudy
pieces with lots of flow-plane flaws to some drop-dead gorgeous
pieces.
4. The fossil inclusions range from a single fungus gnat, or some
other small and unidentified insect, to swarms of insects (we sold one
piece with about 20 gnats inside) to some very unusual and largely
unidentified creatures.  We simply haven't had the time or expertise
to go through all the collection systematically.  There are several
nice spiders, and a couple pieces with strands of webbing.

We've sold many nicer pieces for up to several hundred dollars apiece,
and refused offers of over $1000 for a couple of them.  That's over
now.

I'll count up the pieces soon, and produce a better inventory of sizes
and overall appearance.  But my first thought is to auction off the
entire collection as a single package, from the best pieces on down,
all 2500 or so, for a starting bid of about $5 per piece.  I think
that the top 40 or 50 pieces sold individually could recoup that
price, with the right seller.  Unfortunately for me, I'm just not that
right seller... I need to get rid of this collection soon.

So if you're interested in the whole collection, let me know!  I'll
get some photos ready soon.  If I don't have any takers soon, I'll try
the full-collection auction, and after that I guess I'll have to break
it up and sell it in smaller batches, probably on Ebay.  I'll let you
know.

But more than that... if any of you have suggestions on how best to
liquidate this collection in an expedient fashion, I'm all ears.  And
my mother will thank you if it works (she gets the money, not me).

Cheers,
Paul (from ambergallery.com)

ps.  I tried to run this message past Doug before sending it to the
list, to see if he thought it would be too spammish for consumption by
the list, but I never got a reply... I'm hoping he's off in the mines
of DR or perhaps even better places and didn't have a chance to see
it.