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

[Paul Howell]

Hello Everybody,
     As promised, I've listed the AmberGallery.com domain name for
sale at Sedo.com.  The direct link to the page for entering an offer
for the domain name is
http://www.sedo.com/search/details.php4?domain=ambergallery.com
     And I'll soon try to get some decent pictures of the amber
collection up for display so that if anyone is interested in a portion
of the collection, you can bid appropriately.  Thanks for your
interest, and to all those of you who wrote privately to wish us well
in our future endeavors, thank you so very much.

Paul Howell, for AmberGallery.com




On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 9:35 AM, Paul Howell wrote:
> 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)
>