Vintage Pistons - Vintage Porsche Auctions

[Vintage Pistons]

Dear Registry members, it has been a pleasure serving your rubber-product needs under VeloceSpace for the past 7 years. We would now like to introduce you to our new service, Vintage Pistons.

Vintage Pistons is an auction site catering solely to vintage Porsches, which would include models 356, 911, and 912, up to model-year 1973.

Our goal is to provide a dedicated auction environment for vintage Porsches, one that is focused, and at the same time, transparent. We try to enhance the transparency by indicating on our listing page if a seller is a Registry member, which will help bidders research the owner/car in the forums, for history and provenance.

Our auction site is easy to use, with the requisite auctioning tools: reserve price setting, buy it now, make offers, commenting, user ratings, keyword search, etc. Auctions start at your preferred starting price, with option for setting a reserve price, and run for 10 days, including two weekends.

We currently maintain a popular Facebook page, which generates hundreds of hits per day to our website; here is the link: https://www.facebook.com/vintageporscheauctions/

We encourage all Registry members to give our website a test-drive, and welcome both private-party sellers and commercial concerns to list their cars with us, as an auction, fixed price buy it now, or offer. We treat all equally, with no distinction between private and commercial listings.

Last but not least, our services are completely free to all users, as we plan to derive our revenues from future advertising.

Our website’s URL is http://www.vintagepistons.com, and our e-mail address is info@vintagepistons.com. Please do not hesitate to contact us with questions or comments, at any time.

With this platform and your support, we hope to again become a useful and important tool for the vintage Porsche community.

Thank you!

[Frank Beck]

And here I was getting ready to contact you about matching up a few NOS 69S Mahle orphans.

Seriously.



How DID you come up with the name anyway?

Good luck with your new venture.

[Vintage Pistons]

And here I was getting ready to contact you about matching up a few NOS 69S Mahle orphans.

Seriously.



How DID you come up with the name anyway?

Good luck with your new venture.

We apologize for the confusion!!!

We knew that it had to be "vintage" something, and "pistons" didn't sound half-bad.

[Vintage Pistons]

We'd like to wish ESR members a happy and prosperous new year... here's hoping that the new year will bring you more Porsches... and that's a good thing, right?

An update on Vintage Pistons:

We have been discussing our services with not only private individuals, but also dealers and consignors of vintage Porsches. Vintage Pistons represents an opportunity for "commercial" users to further promote their inventory to the public, and take advantage of an auction platform dedicated to vintage Porsches only. The auction format brings price transparency and efficiency to the transaction, as it's "dynamic", reflecting the market conditions of that particular moment. In an auction, sellers do not leave money on the table when demand is high, and buyers do not overpay when demand is low - it's simple and fair, with very little to lose for either party, especially when the (our) service is free.

Aside from the likely negative impact of the holidays on the number of listings on our website, we also attribute the lull to potential sellers waiting for more listings to appear on the site, before submitting his/her own... this is in fact a Catch-22, as when everyone waits, no listing will ever appear! Perhaps the following points will convince sellers that this is a good time to submit a listing:

1) With few listings on the site, all eyeballs will gravitate to the existing listing - no distractions, and no competition.

2) Despite the lack of listings, we continue to attract consistent numbers of visitors to our website each and every day, with a total of 5,767 unique visitors since October 1st, 2016, according to Google Analytics - this tells us that a significant number of enthusiasts are now aware of our platform, and are checking/waiting to see what cars we can offer on the site; in other words, the "eyeballs" are already here.

3) We've tweaked our listing duration from seven to ten days, going live each Friday - with weekends at both ends of the auction for maximum listing traffic before auction-end.

As a reminder, we welcome cars in all conditions - from the dilapidated project to the most highly restored/original example, as long as they are older than 1974.

We hope that the above highlights a few new details about our service; if you have questions, please feel free to post them here, or e-mail us at info@vintagepistons.com - we are very quick with our replies :-)

Thank you for your time, and again, have a very happy new year!

[Richardnew]

It's going to be tough to compete with BaT.

Richard Newton

[Vintage Pistons]

It's going to be tough to compete with BaT.

Richard Newton

Hi Richard,

Thanks for your comment, which is probably the first thought that occurs to anyone when initially introduced to our new business.

To some extent we are competing against BaT, but we've also asked ourselves why theSamba.com is so successful, against the variety of car-selling platforms (such as AutoTrader.com, classiccars.com, etc.) out there; for us, the answer lies in Samba's focus on Porsches and VWs, and mostly vintage ones at that. BaT has no particular focus, other than a requirement that the car be "interesting", according to its own interpretation, and what is in their queue of cars applying to be auctioned.

We feel that there is value in this "focus", because it attracts folks with knowledge of these cars, who in turn enhance the level of transparency to the cars and transactions on the platform. On such a closely-scrutinized platform, reputation and honesty become important, if a car is to sell successfully. This would explain why many forum members prefer advertising their cars for sale in the forum classifieds, over any other platform. This is the type of platform that we strive to become, one that is determinedly focused, where forum members feel at ease auctioning and buying their cars, if they choose the auctioning model over the traditional fixed-price classifieds.

In our view, and more crucially, we are competing against a different selling model (and not against another auctioning platform) - the traditional classifieds. In speaking with individual owners, we understood that "the hassle and costs of auctioning" is what stops them from auctioning their cars; to that, we feel that to sell an average but in-demand car may take up to a week of price wrangling and physical inspections - our auctions take ten days to conclude, so there is not a significant difference, time-wise, and better yet - no haggling is required (though PPIs and visits are unavoidable); additionally, setting up an auction doesn't take any longer than an online classified ad - upload a description and photos, set some parameters, and off you go to the races. For commercial users, such as dealers and consignors, an important concern is that an auction may not reach the ideal selling price range; this may be true in some instances, as auctions bring clarity to the prevailing market conditions... the business would thus need to choose between two priorities - higher throughput in an auction environment, or higher profits from dealership-floor dealings; it is not for us to determine a commercial user's priorities, but there is room for auctions in their calculus, especially for cars that have sat around for a while, or those coveted models of which values are difficult to ascertain - hence the success of large auctions houses with high-dollar cars.

We are thankful for Richard's comment above, which gave us an opportunity to describe our mindset and goals in more detail. We would welcome further comments from the membership, as it helps us understand your needs and concerns, so that we may address them, or simply engage in a conversation with you.