Surplus equipment has ranged from high-end color copiers, to offset presses to folding, stitching, trimming, inserting and decollator machines.

In July, a late bidding war brought in 39 bids for an offset press from a client in Sacramento CA. The starting price for this item, on eBay was $499. By the time the auction ended, the bidding had reached $6,000! Of 14 offset presses being sold over the last few months, the average selling price was over $2,000.

Some other unique print shop items have also sold particularly well. In June we sold a Docutech 135 on behalf of a school district in the East Bay for $7,100. And in another recent auction round for a client in the San Francisco bay area, we sold a binding machine for $3,600, a Xerox digital printer for $5,200, and a Heidelberg Offset Press for $8,600!

Hiedelberg Type GTO Offset Press Sold for $8,600	Multigraphics 4620 K Offset Press Sold for $6,000

“The success of this auction round was probably enhanced by the fact that we had multiple print shop listings up at the same time. This gives us the opportunity to cross-promote items and send potential bidders of one item to view the other items.” explains Ron Turner, InterSchola’s Field Auction Manager Supervisor and resident expert on printing and pressroom items.

“The sale of these pressroom and prepress items is positioning InterSchola as a major printing equipment source on eBay,” says Jeff Greenholtz, InterSchola Vice President, Client Services. “And with every additional piece of equipment that we put up for auction on behalf of our school district clients, InterSchola becomes better known as the source, on eBay, to find high-quality, used print shop equipment. We are committed to expanding our expertise in these areas and providing higher end values for our clients.”

If you have print shop or related items, please contact Jeff Greenholtz or your local InterSchola Field Auction Manager to schedule a special inventory of these potentially valuable items.

The eBay marketplace is a strange and wonderful phenomenon! Earlier this year InterSchola staff watched as last minute auction activity drove a single auction item which had a high bid of $900 with 10 minutes to go to a final selling price of over $1,600. Another item recently tripled in value in the last three hours of auction bidding to over $3,700. In yet another recent example, a bidding war among three people drove the selling price of another item from $1,499 to $5,205 within the last few hours of auction.

In all three cases above, InterSchola’s staff had an inkling that bidding might jump considerably in the closing minutes of these auctions due to the high number of “watchers” of these particular auction. A “watcher” is a potential bidder that registers to keep tabs on a particular item and get alerts of that item’s current bidding progress. Although the general eBay population does not have access to this “watcher” information, InterSchola’s auction experts are able to use these closely held statistics to analyze auction progress.

With some general rules of thumb plus a fair amount of strategy, InterSchola is able to yield the best auction results for our clients. InterSchola relies on our expert team of Listing Managers who have extensive experience on eBay to produce best in class eBay auction listings for our clients. Basics of our eBay success include the completeness and accuracy of details in the item listing, key word inclusion and clear and obvious photographs.

Veteran team member Chris Lelugas explains some further examples of our listing strategies, "Setting the listing price low to attract buyers yields higher sales prices in the end. Timing of the auction is an additional consideration with auction close times being critical to enticing bidding wars.” Cross promotion of all our auctions is also standard practice for InterSchola, further allowing us to capitalize on the volume of items we sell on behalf of our large and growing client base.

Welcome back to school. Like many of your students, InterSchola also spent time learning this summer. Specifically, we took time to research how we can continue to improve our auction operations to provide you with even better service, more streamlined operations and higher sale prices for your items!

InterSchola is very pleased to announce that Mike Comstock has joined our team as Vice President of Auction Operations. Mike brings a broad background to InterSchola with over 25 years of management and operations experience in the shipping and logistics industry. Mike was previously an executive at DHL Worldwide Express with responsibility for over 3,000 employees. Further Mike also brings unique experience to InterSchola from his previous position as the Vice President of Operations for TestMart, an online marketplace for electronic test and measurement equipment.

Mike is a fantastic fit for InterSchola to help us scale our operations to better serve both you - our clients as well as our eBay customers. One of Mike’s first projects at InterSchola is to help us introduce NEW funds transfer terms to our clients in Q4’06. These changes will result in faster payment to our clients of the funds received for auctions and fewer quarterly adjustments after a transfer of funds has already been made. Details will be forthcoming in the form of an Amended Services Agreement to each client upon scheduling the first Inventory Assessment after our policy change has become effective. We hope you will see this change as a very positive step forward in our relationship with our clients to get auction proceeds to you more quickly and more effectively. InterSchola will send

In addition to Mike will also be responsible for leading our team of Listing Managers, who work closely with our Field Auction Managers to create the most effective eBay auction listings and communicate directly with the eBay population to ensure smooth transactions. InterSchola credits this team with helping us achieve Top Seller status on eBay with an almost perfect eBay Seller feedback rating of 99.5%. Below are just some of the feedback comments we have received from our customers.

“Excellent seller; items exactly as described; would highly recommend”
“Went out of their way, above and beyond. Great to work with!”
“Everything great! Sellers like InterSchola are what makes eBay # 1”
“Good Seller, As described, I'd buy from again, I recommend, A++”
“Great job, InterSchola! Courteous, professional, responsible staff. RECOMMEND!”
“A class act company! great!”

You can’t buy this kind of advertising for the items we sell on your behalf!

As of 7/15/06, InterSchola has returned more than $430,000 to our school clients. As most of you know, we have barely skimmed the surface of the constant stream of surplus at your facilities!

If you have suggestions about ways that InterSchola can continue to improve our operations, please don’t hesitate to contact your Jeff Greenholtz, your local Field Auction Manager or feel free to reach out to Mike directly (mcomstock@interschola.com). He would be happy to hear from you.

We look forward to continued work with you during the 2006/2007 school year!

Melissa Rich
Founder and President, InterSchola