Artprice Marketplace Compared with the Major Auction Houses Initial Results from Artprice Stores: the Artprice Marketplace Compared with the Major Auction Houses
News-Antique.com - Nov 30,-0001 - PARIS, June 21 -- Since 3 June 2005, and via Artprice Stores, a professional version of Classified Ads by annual subscription, buyers and sellers of Art can now sell on a standardised market place without interruption and with no constraints over the number of ads placed.
Artprice Stores provides an efficient interface for art market professionals to put their stocks of works on sales directly on the marketplace with all the advantages of value analysis tools and automatic alerts, and it also provides a service of hosting websites within Artprice databases.
This new source of income for the group has the additional benefit of being captive and recurring. Of the 1.2 million art market professionals worldwide, Artprice's initial focus over the coming 24 months will be international structures (at least 50% of their export turnover, i.e. EUR 180,000) with an initial penetration rate of 20% that should have a significant positive impact on Artprice's future income.
Of the 300 Artprice Stores already opened in two weeks, we have the following breakdown: 56.2% originate from galleries, 6.3% from appraisers and 13.1% from artists. In addition, there is an increasing number of auction houses (accounting for 7% of Artprice Stores so far) which are taking advantage of Artprice's visibility to advertise sales and seek new prospects.
Art galleries use Artprice Stores to market their works to the 2.1 million visitors to the Artprice website every month and to enhance the exposure of their own sites on the back of Artprice's excellent visibility and its indexation in search engines as world leader in art market information.
In effect, 63% of the professionals who have opened an Artprice Store already possess a website that is now listed in Artprice. There can therefore be no doubt that Artprice Stores is seen as a significant source of added value.
Artprice Stores also acts to enhance buyer confidence, thereby promoting sales, particularly in the higher-priced transactions. For works offered at reasonable prices, the time-to-sale can be very short (less than 24 hours). Classified Ads are driven by alerts (email/rss/http/sms) within a prioritised and targeted system aimed at 900,000 buyers/sellers whose artistic preferences are registered at Artprice and they are supported by Artprice Knowledge, a database of price data derived from 1.8 billion searches per year which analyses the behaviour of millions of art aficionados on an ongoing basis.
The average price of works offered by Artprice Stores is currently EUR 16,641. By comparison, and according to a 2004 activity report published by the Council of Voluntary Sales on 10 June 2005, the average prices of the cultural objects sold on Ebay, range from EUR 20 to EUR 100 euros, and 99% of the works sold in the Art & Antiques section of Ebay France go for under EUR 1,000. For Artprice, these figures confirm that there is a genuine need for rigorous standardisation in the Fine Art market which Ebay cannot specifically provide.
According to Artprice's annual report, the average price of works sold at catalogued French
