Primer
Plain English. No jargon that isn't explained. If you've never bid on anything in your life, start here.
What the winning bid was. It is not what you pay.
The auction house's cut, added on top of the hammer price. Between 20 and 28 percent depending on the house. You pay it, not the seller.
Win at $10,000 with a 22% premium and you owe $12,200. Then sales tax, then shipping.
Hammer plus premium. The number that actually leaves your account. Every price on this site is all-in unless I say otherwise, because the other way is how people get surprised.
Sotheby's 28%. Heritage 22%. Goldin 22%. Grey Flannel 22%. SCP 20%. Julien's is around 28% but I'm still confirming it.
Same shoe at two different houses is an eight percent swing before anyone's bid a dollar.
Watch the minimums. Most houses set a floor — win a lot for $25 and the minimum premium might also be $25. That's a hundred percent.
A range the house expects the lot to sell in. Sotheby's publishes them on most sales. It's an opinion, not a promise — and nobody ever checks whether they were any good.
That's most of why this site exists.
Heritage doesn't publish ranges. It publishes a minimum, written as "$50,000 – up." The lot cannot sell below it. That's a completely different thing from an estimate and can't be scored the same way.
Means there isn't a published one. Sotheby's weekly NBA sales run this way. No house number, so no house to beat — only the outcome.
A secret minimum the seller will accept. If bidding doesn't reach it, the lot doesn't sell. No-reserve means it sells to whoever's highest, even if that's $25.
Actually played in. Sweat, scuffs, the lot.
Made for the player, given to the player, never played in. Looks identical. Worth about half.
Measured it: 58 role-player lots, same team, same night. Worn runs 1.75× issued. Published first as 2.00× off a 26-lot subset, then corrected against the full population.
Someone has matched a specific mark on the item — a scuff, a crease, a stitching flaw — to a photograph from a specific game. It's the strongest proof there is that this exact object was on the court that exact night.
It's also where most of the money is.
Same pair of Jordan's Finals shoes, split by half. The matched half sold for $2.2 million. The unmatched half, $102,000.
Hedged language. It means they couldn't prove it. Read those words carefully — houses use them precisely, and the price should reflect it.
MeiGray, SIA, PSA and Photo-Match.com are the independent services. Some houses also match in-house, which is them authenticating their own consignment. Not necessarily worse. Worth noticing.
Letter or certificate of authenticity. Quality varies enormously. A full letter from PSA or Beckett is meaningful. A letter from an interested party is a story on paper.
Made for the player, never sold at retail. Often the only pairs in existence.
Pre-production. Sometimes one of one.
You set a ceiling and the system bids for you, one increment at a time, only as far as it needs to. Nobody sees your ceiling.
Which is why the price on screen isn't what people are willing to pay. It's the second-highest ceiling, plus one step.
Two numbers on the screen. The standing bid is what it's at. The ask is what you'd need to bid next. They differ by one increment and people confuse them constantly.
Everything happens on the internet, lots close on a clock. Most of the sales I track work this way.
Bid in the last minute and the clock resets. Stops snipers. Houses run wildly different versions — Sotheby's extends two minutes, Goldin thirty, Grey Flannel goes lot-by-lot after a certain hour. It changes how a sale ends.
An auctioneer, a room, phone bidders and online bidders all at once. Heritage and Julien's run these. The online bids beforehand are a floor — the room decides it.
The price you see is not the price you pay. Add roughly a quarter. Then tax. Then shipping, which arrives separately and can be brutal on anything large or framed.
A famous name on an ordinary night is where the deals are. The market pays for moments. It's much softer on names attached to nothing in particular.
Read the whole lot description, not the title. Titles leave things out. I published a finding this month built on truncated titles and had to withdraw it, so I'm not preaching from a great height here.