RR Auction

Helping auction house save $300,000 a year in printing and fulfillment costs, while attracting more bidders

RR Auction, is the world’s largest monthly autograph auction company.Every month the company auctions almost 2,000 autographed items. In business since 1976, RR Auction is based in New Hampshire with 13,000 active customers worldwide. Its auctions cover the founding fathers to famous artists and authors to music stars past and present.

Beginning in 1980, RR Auction published its monthly auction catalogs in hard-copy format and mailed them all over the world. Each catalog spans 270-350 pages. By 2008, its monthly print order was 3,000 catalogs, about 10 percent of which were shipped internationally. The total monthly tab for printing and mailing: nearly $50,000.

In 2008, Operations Manager Bobby Eaton – responsible for compiling each auction catalog – discovered Zmags. More than a digital publishing tool, Zmags that would enable him to transform the PDF file he was already creating for the printer into an interactive catalog that could be posted at www.rrauction.com. RR Auction’s e-catalog enables bidders to search for specific items and bid for items all online.

Each month, Eaton’s team emails a link to the new e-catalog to 13,000 RR Auction customers, and click-through rates have grown to nearly 20 percent. Since RR Auction moved to Zmags, it has also seen the number of people participating in each auction grow by one-third to 1,500, and international participation has doubled. Each e-catalog is well read, with about 50,000 page flips and several thousand unique readers.

Thanks to its e-catalog, RR Auction has reduced the print run for its catalog by half, and reduced the number of catalogs shipped internationally by more than two thirds. The net result: a cost reduction of nearly $300,000 annually. Their initial investment in Zmags’ ICM solution to produce the e-catalog was recovered in less than a month.

“We evaluated many digital publishing solutions, and none come close to the feature set and value we get from Zmags,” says Eaton. “Zmags makes it so easy for us to produce a fully interactive catalog that downloads quickly and is fully searchable. And that in turn makes it easy for our customers to find what they want and place a bid. Zmags has created a real advantage for RR Auction in the autograph industry.”

According to Eaton, feedback from customers has been very positive, and he adds, “We’re proud that can continue our 30-year history of producing these comprehensive catalogs, now in electronic form.”

Eaton calls Zmags’ back-end “flawless,” noting that the analytics are particularly outstanding, allowing his team to track item-specific data such as click-throughs and also discover what types of items customers are searching for the most. “With our print catalog, we could never gather that type of information,” says Eaton. “We’ve really come to rely on Zmags data as a way to help ensure we’re acquiring items that our customers really want to bid on.”