I have a question... this happened a few months 
ago, and it's not sour-grapes on my part. Rather, 
I'm curious as to what the mainstream opinion is 
on how to handle cel auctions.

When it's sold on your site, privately, you're a 
lot more flexible. If you don't want to entertain 
offers beneath $X, you can say so. If you're 
willing to let it go for $Y, you can say so. But 
with auctions... you can never really predict 
when a bidding war will drive your price up, or 
if your cel will be ignored for one reason or 
another, and close unbid upon.

The instance I'm thinking of had to do with a 
good cel of a minor character from a popular 
series. It had a relatively low starting bid, as 
far as cels from this series go-- and I was quite 
prepared to go a lot higher. The odd thing was, 
no one else seemed to either notice or care that 
this cel was on the block, and my bid went 
unchallenged for several days... until the last 
30 seconds of the auction, when the seller 
canceled the auction completely.

*shrug* I understand completely that it's their 
cel and all that, but that's what starting bids 
and reserves were for, I thought. Even though I 
didn't think it was right, I sent an email to the 
seller and asked what they had been hoping to 
get, in the hopes we could work something out if 
it was in my range. No reply. ^_^;;

On the one hand, it's absolutely within their 
right to sell or not to sell. I don't know how 
much they had paid for the cel when they 
themselves had acquired it, and it's not fair to 
expect them to take a loss when culling their 
collection. On the other hand-- it's a bit smarmy 
to cancel an auction just because you don't make 
a profit off your cel-culling. If you're not 
willing to sell it for less than $X, you should 
either give it a reserve price, give it a 
starting price that's closer to $X, or sell it 
privately.

Has this sort of thing happened to others? How do 
people feel about this sort of practice?