How to sell

Auction or dealer?

An auction finds the one person in the country who wants your gun most, and charges you for the introduction. That’s worth a lot on some firearms and almost nothing on others, and the difference isn’t subtle once you know what to look at.

When an auction genuinely beats us

• A documented rarity. If a gun has factory letters, provenance or a serial number collectors track, an auction puts it in front of everybody who cares at once, and competitive bidding on a genuinely scarce piece can go somewhere no single buyer will.
• Anything where two people might both want it badly. Auctions monetize emotion, and there’s no substitute when the piece is unique.
• When you have time. A consignment window, a catalog deadline and a sale date is months, not days — but if no one is waiting on the money, months cost you nothing.

What it costs you, beyond the commission

• Seller commission comes off the hammer price, and there are usually charges beneath it — photography, cataloging, insurance, and sometimes a lot fee whether or not it sells.
• The buyer pays a premium on top, which sounds like their problem and isn’t: bidders subtract it from what they’re willing to bid.
• You’re paid after the sale settles, not on the day. That can be months from when you first hand the gun over.
• It might not sell. A reserve that isn’t met means the gun comes back, older, having been publicly passed on — which makes the next attempt harder.
• Ordinary guns do badly. A common shotgun in an auction of two hundred lots is competing with itself, and estate lots of mixed working guns routinely sell for less than a dealer would have paid outright.

Where we’re the better answer

Everything that isn’t a documented rarity, and every collection where most of it’s ordinary. We price the whole lot rather than cherry-picking the three pieces worth catalog space, pay on the day, and take the ammunition, the optics and the safe with it. If a particular gun in your collection genuinely belongs in an auction we’ll tell you so — it costs us nothing to be right about that, and it’s the fastest way to be trusted about everything else.

Could I auction the good ones and sell you the rest?

You can, and for some collections it’s the correct answer. Be clear-eyed about what is left though: once the four best pieces are gone, the remainder is a harder sell to everybody, and the total across two routes isn’t always more than one buyer would have paid for the lot. We’ll price it both ways and show you.

No route is best for every gun. The one that’s best for yours depends on what you actually have — which is worth establishing before you commit to any of them.

The other routes

Pawn shop or gun dealer? · Selling at a gun show · Selling privately · What a dealer actually pays · What is it worth by maker