What does Sotheby?s, the blue-chip auction house, hope to gain from partnering eBay for live-streaming its own auctions and allowing the latter?s users to bid? The blue-chip auction house and the online marketplace/auctioneer have struck a partnership before, in 2002, before walking out of it in early 2004. The lure of the online auctions is surely strong for Sotheby?s, given online bidders participated in the auction of 17% of the lots it offered in 2013 and the total number of sales it made online that year grew by 36% from the year before. Given how the highbrow auctioneer is also the world?s largest fine and decorative arts business, having sold $5.4 billion worth of art in 2012, Sotheby?s interest in online sales must have peaked with recent research by insurer Hiscox projecting the online art market to reach a value of $3.76 billion by 2020?more than double its current value. With rival Christie?s reportedly pumping in $50 million this year towards increasing online engagement, it is expected that Sotheby?s would want to get there first.
But is partnering eBay the best way to do this? If one considers history and some statistics from a few years back, the answer is ?no?. eBay has experimented before, on its own, with high-end collectibles and art sales, and has retreated after unimpressive results. The company, in 1999, launched Great Collections?later named eBay Premier?a website selling high-end collectibles sourced from reputed auction houses. eBay Premier was shut down the very year its parent company first partnered Sotheby?s. Moreover, a 2007 research, whose findings were published in the Palgrave Macmillan Journal of Marketing Analytics, puts the average income of eBay users at $37,321 per annum?hardly the income figure of someone looking to buy a Picasso or a Cezanne.