Caveat: this was my first online auction and, in fact, my first auction period so some of my comments reflect that.
Pre-auction: The catalog was great and searching/tags about as good as could be expected. I picked out some items that I thought might not go for budget-breaking amounts and added them to my watchlist. That was all pretty easy. Signing up as a bidder was pretty easy, although I had to not only give my credit card info online but send images of my driver’s license and credit card, which wasn’t a problem but seemed a bit excessive. Again – my first auction, but I certainly buy things online and never had anyone ask for that. Julien’s got all that approved pretty fast.
Auction: really about as good as I could expect online. The video of the auctioneer, while not really adding anything functional to the process, really helped my to feel like I was there and connected so good for that. Bidding was easy both live and setting up max bids which was good because I did have to step away during one of the items auction that I was interested in.
Other people have commented on the estimated pricing being way off and I also found that frustrating. A number of items I thought I might have a shot at ended up being way way more and just too much for me. I would have picked out a different watch list set if I had had a better idea of prices.
I thought both auctioneers were entertaining each in their own way. Yes, it would have been great if maybe someone had given them “read this description and don’t shorten it” notes for the items because they obviously had no idea what each item was. Or told them to even just stick with the full descriptions as in the catalog. They missed calling out the important info (I think someone else mentioned them calling a Les Paul styled guitar just a Les Paul). Did that hurt the auction? No, because we all could read the descriptions and I’m sure all of us knew exactly what each item was. Still… it detracted from the overall “vibe”. Very quickly you realized that they were not “one of us” which is not unreasonable, of course, but it would have taken very little extra effort to make them sound more knowledgeable.
So far Julien’s has seemed far more organized with the actual auction than the follow-up. I am 3,000 miles away and am having someone local pick it up for me. Scheduling a pickup time has been a little difficult. They are very nice, but they only want to communicate via email and I don’t think they check their email very often. A week after they took my money I’m still trying to set up a pickup time. First they told me to pick a time, and I did, and then a day later they said they were busy then. So I pick another time and then don't hear anything back all weekend. Don't tell me to just pick a time if there are entire days that you are already all booked please!
Last one – and maybe this is just me not being familiar with auctions – I would have liked to have the prices that we were bidding reflect their commission as well. It was a fair amount of money added on and I had to constantly be transposing the prices in my head during the auction.