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Yep.. Example at an auction Friday night. We did a preview earlier in the afternoon and while digging around saw an original case with Eldan marked on it. Open the case up and it was a double layered box of which only the top layer had content in it. Guess what, because of SL and creating our BOLO list and remembering, it contained 44 pcs [partial set] of Eldan Stainless “Canoe Muffin” pattern of spoons, forks and specialty pcs. Won the auction as a second bidder at $7.50 and estimate the chest will go for around $5 a pc. x 42 ++ = $200 plus dollars. We also did the same for some Disney character drawer pulls. Box of 20 pulls of Winnie the Pooh that will list at $10 each=$200 and got the whole box for $5.00.
It is things that you learn like this from just going back and reading through what everybody has sold over the past several years and you will build your mental BOLO list.
On Sat. we sat through another auction, higher end stuff, we had 17 items on our Want to Buy List and got out bid on all but one. But these were items that all would sell for hundreds of dollars but it had my cut off point because of what I knew I wanted to be my profit spread. We did get an Antique Victorian, Silver and glass pickle jar. Never been mentioned on SL but our databases all showed them have sold for $300-$350 dollars at about a 67% sell through ratio. We got it for $80. Smaller Margin Percentage wise than we usually get but higher dollar item so $80 will get us about $220 gross +/-. That’s all we got out of the 17 item list and it took 5 hours of sitting there. I swear, they had those special chairs that after 9:00 they automatically double in hardness. LOL..:-)So see, as Jay says, you just have to start, use your head and work at it. This is a job, just like anything else and it’s your business. I easily work at this 50 to 60 hours a week. But I do when I want, where I want, do it in my pajamas if I want, but you still have to put in your “quality time”.
You will find and hear on SL, over and over, what should I buy, where do I buy it, what should I pay for it, what should I charge for it, how do I clean it, how should I store it, even what is it. And the answers are at your finger tips, most of the time, but you have to create lists, bookmark places and answers, archive articles, research other places other than Ebay Solds. I use Ebay almost as my last pricing source, but we do pay for outside databases that give me tons more data, so that is a cost of running a business. One especially for real antiques for the higher dollar items.
Good luck and hope to see your numbers posted someday and maybe I will include your “highest item Sold and selling price in my spread sheet database.
mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
Well Steve the answer to this question is right at your finger tips. I did this about 4 or years ago and got a great list of things to look for [BOLO]. It also will give you what the approx. selling price is and also you can work backwards from that and decide about what you should pay for it, depending on what type of gross profit margins you are looking for.
This is what I did and what I encourage you to do.
First either take a piece of paper or create a simple spread sheet.
Next start with the recent what sold videos here on SL or look at each weeks posting of the members store data.
Next write down each item that each member reports that they sold and what they sold it for. In the posts you will see the highest priced item sold for that week and what it sold for.
Now write those down on your list or in your spread sheet.
Repeat this for one year, just like I did. After doing that I had a list of over 1,000 items that sold and what they sold for.Now J&R have made this task very simple because they have everything organized so well, you can start with this weeks podcast and work backwards. I bet in about a few days you will have a huge list also along with what they sell for. Now just divide that what sold for number by whatever profit margin you would like and that will give you an approx. price of what you should be paying.
Example if you see a stack of a certain type of flatware or knives listed and they sold for $80 and you would like to make at least 5 times your investment, then $80 / 5 = 16. So if you see anything that is the same item then you should pay $16 or less. And of course “less” is better.
So I have just given you a method for creating a 1,000 item list of what you should be on the lookout for. All you have to do is put in the hours to do the research to build your list.
After we built a list of over 1,000 we used to carry a print out of the SS with us, but we have it memorized now and don’t need it. And of course you will get many new items in each weeks podcast.
Bonus Tip: When you create your list and you start to find duplicates of the same item sold, which we did find, then just add that sold price to the first one you had and average the two SOLD PRICES to get and avg.
So put in the hours and due diligence and you have the worlds best BOLO list right here at SL at your finger tips. 🙂
Mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
02/06/2017 at 5:04 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 296: Are You Keeping Up With Your Inventory System? #11920Thanks Retro WV: I usually do sales using MDM starting on Tues-Wed and end them on late Sunday night. You are correct the Sales do move items.
And since we worked through the end and relist and get the correct price back into the listing it really no bother to end or relist using WL or SB. Literally can be done in 20 secs. Drag a highlight over them, click end, then immediately hit relist. BUT you bring up a very good point and that is that mother Google does like things to be araound for awhile. The longer the better. It takes 2 or 3 months for her spiders and bots just to find and crawl stuff. Then the longer it sits they get to see it several times. BUT mother Google likes to see “fresh content” also. So to have Google pay attention and not abandon you, would one not need to go back to listings and write, new fresh copy, alter descriptions and titles to satisfy mother Google and have her not abandon crawling your site-listing? It also is a very grey cloud about how Google along with it’s Panda and Penguin algorythms are treating Ebay listings. That is a whole story about Ebay and Google which we will leave alone. But still with our stores hidden down line under Ebays main URL, is Google really paying any attention anyway.
I did an experiment about 6-8 months ago. I put a very crazy spelled word into the lower corner of a lot of listings just to see if it would be found by Google. It did for a few listings then after a while they started to drop and eventually sank into oblivion on Google. I can still find them but I know the word to type into the Google search bar.
But back to your point. Even though it is easy to relist, if it is just a waste, then why waste the time. Do as you say, just keep on doing the short sales and leave the rest alone. That way I won’t have any issues with WL or SB not relisting at the incorrect price.
Hey buddy, where were you 4 months ago. Maybe just going in this direction woulkd have saved me all that time screwing around with those software techie guys. LOL :-).
Anyway.. I am going to probably just drop the end / relist thing for now.Thanks ……
mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta-
This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by
MDC Galleries & Fine Art.
02/06/2017 at 3:05 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 296: Are You Keeping Up With Your Inventory System? #11898Jay.. Didn’t you get your Mac as a scavenger bargain? If so and you have used it for years it has used up the depreciation on it. Just dump it and get a suped up PC for $400 brand new and write it off again. Small investment for the productivity gained. If I was making what we want to be in our store, I would just buy you one and give it to you as an early Christmas present. :-). Fully people will buy a $700 phone, a $300 DSLR but not a new or used PCI. For the cost of a label printer you could have half the cost of a PC. And you noticed nobody took up my challenge a week ago to explain to me why a MAC out performs a PC to the extent that a MAC is worth paying 3 times the cost of a PC. I still think most MAC users just don’t know. BUt that’s an opinion guys.. don’t bombard me with why do I dislike MAC statements. I don’t, I just can’t see the benchmark results of how the MAC Chip set and motherboard out performs Intel nest Quad Core processors. The other items like keyboard, cooling fans, power supllies, bus slots, cards, periphs are all just about the same only the cost more.
Let me ask it this way, is buying and owning a MAC like buying a Coach purse? Is it just a status thing or does the Coach purse really outlast, outperform, is heavier material, thicker leather, thicker thread that is used to sew with, heavier metals used than say another “good brand purse”? [not a fake brand mind you]. Is it not just a status thing?
I don’t know, but this PC has run like a champ for 6 or 7 years and if anything goes wrong with it, I just pop off the cover, pull the part and replace. Most expensive thing may be the mother board or say the SSHD drive for about $80 bucks.Clue me in please from a technical side. I am probably just wasting time here but temptation to throw in the probe was worth a shot.
If I get beat up.. I will give before the fight starts.
02/06/2017 at 2:50 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 296: Are You Keeping Up With Your Inventory System? #11894Oh AT.. Want to mention to you. So far I found an interesting glitch in SixBit and it may be the killer for me right now. Be very careful that you don’t “force end” a listing while an item is on sale then “re-list it. [those of you that do the kill relist for all the reasons we have discussed here on SLF and won’t get back into] The reason is that SixBit will Relist the item at the discounted price and not revert back to your original price. I discovered this happening on WonderLister about 6 months ago and worked with their tech team and WL got it worked out. So I called into SB tech. support, they are aware of it but have not figured out how to get SB to stop doing it. They said that Mark Down Manager is real funcky and creates the proble. Also stated that Ebay is coming out with a new developer interface and API’s for developers very soon and they are hoping that the new internal upgrades will allow SixBit as a developer to fix the relist back at your original price.
Here is what can happen. You start an item that is listed at $20. Then put it on Sale for a week at 20% off. Then during this week, you see it is a candidate to force end the listing and re-list, when you do this, the item will be re-listed at $16 instead of the $20. Then if you just happen to not catch it and do this process again in a month or two, then it will be re-listed at $12.80. Again not back at the original $20. I discovered this in WonderLister, immediately brought it to their teams attention and we worked it out through a series of me creating and ending false sales until they got the coding right. Took about two weeks. BUT I found that SixBit has the same problem for the same reasons and they are aware of it but are going to wait. What this menas for the user is if you don’t catch this, like us, and do this numerous times, you will be selling items way less than you thought you had it listed at. I had to go back and re-list about 150 listings manually after I caught it in WL.
So just a heads up until they get this fixed in SB. They didn’t say exactly when Ebay was going to release the new codes for the developers.
Life just stays interesting doesn’t it.
Mike in Atlanta
02/06/2017 at 2:30 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 296: Are You Keeping Up With Your Inventory System? #11888Hi AT. As u are probably aware I am a WonderLister guy after having dumped TurboLister years ago. But I am currently using SixBit on it’s trial term. It is very similar to WonderLister so I was up and going in a day but was tweaking it for the next two.
BTW… WL & SB both are two guys who both used to work together for Ebay as developed the Blackthorn program for Ebay. Once Blackthorn went the way that TurboLister is going and Ebay started improving their own listing module the Blackthorn guys were out on their own. One group headed by John Slocum founded SixBit in 2005 and Chavi Rastogi started WonderLister.
I am just trying to figure out if SixBit brings enough to the table in the form of “Total Incentory” management than WonderLister to warrant the extra $10 per month in cost.
I agree, great photo editor built right in. I love the automatic SKU number creation and it also automatically creates a bar code for each listing. This can be used for item labeling or for pick sheets for sold items. Not that we need all of that for our 765 items and your 1500 items. But we do as you stated, I create a lot of listings by just doing a keyword search for an item, convert it to a template with one click, change a few specs to match the new item and send to “waiting to upload” folder. I usually send all of my created listings during the day to the Waiting to List folder, then at the end of the day, just click “Submit” and leave the office. In your case, all of the tons of listings you create will upload while you are aslepp and when you wake up they are all done. Guess we should mention their is no charge for bulk scheduled uploads.
I have even worked out a system 9on paper as of yet), where I can pre-determine which storage bin an item is going to go in without even having to take it out to the storage area. This way every item will have the storage bin no. on it prior to taking to storage then all we have to do is take the item to that bin and place it in. [Hint-it is based on scale weight and percentage of bin fullness by cubic capacity and total maximum cut off weight. But as stated, I haven’t got all the bugs worked out but may see if I can interest both WonderLister and SixBit in it for them to add to their program offerings.
Oh and I have heard from inside tech developement that SixBit is just about to release a new version that will also synch with Etsy. The big question is it going to cost extra or not??? In any case Wonderlister is $25 per month and SixBit is $34.95 per month. If J&R were to get a handle on this type of workFlow system, then 6-8,000 listings would be handle much quicker and the time saved could be used for other things.
mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
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This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by
MDC Galleries & Fine Art.
That is the way we understand it also. One thing that can be of a help is we have Parcel Post as a first shipping option. It is usually the least expensive and most customers just leave it at that. BUT, as a TRS Plus, we get such a large discount, we can ship 99.5% of the time less cost to us for Priority than the Parcel Post rates. And the Priority delivery time is 1-3 days tops, usually 1 & 2 days. So even if we, for some reason, didn’t get our package out, it is usually delivered two days early anyway. But we get up early most days and our packages are ready to go by the time of USPS. But in case we run late, we know our ladies so well and they both gave us their personal cell number, we just call them and they swing by for a late afternoon pickup before they head back to their home base USPS. How’s that for service. We always remember to give them both a Christmas gift card and sometimes during the year as a special thank you. In turn they will pick up any time we call if they are still out on there route.
Of note… We include a quick hand written note on the PL that says we upgraded your shipping to “Priority” at no additional cost to you. We have even gotten feedback that mentioned we did this for the customer.
Just a little trick to pass along if you are a TRS.
mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
Also found the same characters in the Chinese alphabet and same meaning. Huge-Giant in Chinese
I agree. Looked at InkFrog and several others years ago. They focus more on just the listing part. Like Jay said what is wrong with the Ebay listing tool. Nothing, now that they got with the program and made those many changes over the last year or so. They didn’t start to do those changes though until they decided to drop the TurboLister affiliation. Now they needed to add more listing “management” type tools and add editing and flexibility.
These other programs have the added inventory management focus as well as the bulk editing and scheduling features which the scheduling feature is free-Ebay charges I believe]. List all day, one right after the other, then go to bed and click up load with a 30 second delay between each listing and you get up in the morning and all photos are loaded as well as the listing. All done overnight. These programs can handle thousands of scheduled listings one right after the other.
Then for those who use EasyAuctionTracker which I have also used, these programs handle all of the fees, what you paid for your items, where you bought the item, which of your sources you got items from that sell the best or most, what your gross profit is, what your net profit is, sales made in which states, which states you sell the most in. Now probably you can get that from Ebay, but these compile all of it so that data is at the touch of a click and archived for years as long as you use the software. Cancel your subscription and you still have all that data.Just so much stuff but one has to be liked mind to see a benefit of having this type of data and also one who knows what to do with it and how to use it to one’s benefit to help their business grow.
With 6,000 items and an employee working for them and now needing to implement an inventory control system, and a process whereby the employee(s) can work more independently without their presence, I would think Jay and Ryanne could benefit from these type programs and just go buy a $500 +/- PC to do it. It is a business expense anyway and out of a such a large revenue +/- Ebay store as they have, it is a small type of investment. But again, as Jay says simple is better but they have made changes through the years also.
mc in atl.
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This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by
MDC Galleries & Fine Art.
From what I heard from the tech, they are seriously thinking about including the dual management scheme along with the $34.99 business level. But as I said I am still using WonderLister juct fine and may just stick with it for the reasons you state. Who knows, but it has been FREE to this point for me to try SixBit and because I already knew WL, then I was up and running in SB in a day or so.
Now when it comes to being frugal, see my post below about Macs vs. PC’s. People are paying more for a Mac and I ask why? chip set for chip set, processor speed for processor speed, item for item, what makes a Mac worth so much more? I have bought many of both for my printing businesses [for the reasons I stated], but would not put more money in Macs for all of the employees business needs.
Oh and by the way, I run two monitors side by side. I invested the $69 in a second monitor so I could be researching prices within my browsers on my right side screen while doing my listing entry on the left screen. That is a good investment for the increased productivity gained, in my opinion.Well I am also doing just fine with WonderLister at $25 per month and also I have the Consignor Module at that price. I have a few consignors and create their monthly reports within WL. It handles all of my inventory as well as theirs.
Also at the $25 level [it was $20 for the first few years] I have all of the names, addresses and phone numbers of all of my customers for the last 4 years. I can see who has bought from me from years past and occassionaly when I get similiar items I email them. Have only sold a few that way but nice to have everything that Ebay collects on us sellers, pulled off of Ebay servers and all of that data as well as all of those former listings and sales on my hard drive forever. Many times I do a search, find an item I sold months or years ago, hit duplicate, then do minor revisions and submit. How far back can we go with Ebay’s archives? I think only 3 to 6 months or so?
I also last week clicked on local sales tax and instantly got my report for what Sales tax I owed from local sales here in Georgia for the past 12 months.Guess it boils down to the type of person or personality one is, what type of seller or store level-number of items one has and if you re-list your listings every 30 days, if a program such as WonderLister is worth the time or money or not. Then if you are a Mac user, guess you are out of luck anyway.
Your welcome Lindsey.
Don’t want to start a war here but as “scavengers”, I just don’t see why anybody in this day and time want to spend 4 times the costs for a rig, parts or assecories for a Mac anyway? A $3 mouse or a $24 mouse??
Been around computers for decades, way back to the first Apple days. Owned them but gravitated to PC’s long ago because I could get into the guts if I wanted to. Also in the printing business we had to use Macs because every high end client used Adobe Photoshop and it was designed for the Mac environment. The Motorola chip sets they used, bench marked out at a little faster, so would process and RIP large graphic files much faster as we did color separations for 4 color process printing or outputting film. But for Business use, Spread sheeting and word processing once MicroSoft introduced MSOffice, Excel, Access for SQL database creation and Intel introducing it’s Quad Core processors, I don’t think an average Mac user can support why they spend so much more for a Mac.
Years ago, Apple did a smart thing by furnishing schools with free computers and maybe that is where many grew up with Macs. But bench test them side by side today and I think only a technician can see any difference. On top of that Macs have to use a work around or third party app to handle Office type programs. No big deal but why pay more to a rig to have to do that.
Used to hear that Macs were targeted less by hackers, well in todays world hackers go after anything, anytime, anywhere. And they go after your offline accounts and passwords besides.
To build a maxed-out Mac Pro, you start with the $3999 standard-configuration model. Then you customize it and select all the high-end upgrades. So, how much does a maxed-out Mac Pro cost?
Standard-configuration 3.5GHz 6-core Mac Pro $3999
2.7GHz 12-core processor upgrade $3000
64GB DDR3 ECC memory upgrade $1200
Dual AMD FirePro D700 (6GB of GDDR5 VRAM) video upgrade $600
1TB PCIe-based flash-storage upgrade $800
Total $9599I know this is a far out upgrade but you get my point. Seems like as “scavengers” looking for the best bang for the buck, that Apple products and Macs should not be on the BOLO list.
Now this all just came across my mind, let’s not get a feud going here. Just me thinking about why I would not invest into a Mac, not why you or anyone else should not.
Mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
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This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by
MDC Galleries & Fine Art.
SixBit is about to come out of BETA Mode and offer it. They are somewhat hush mouthed right now, but I was speaking with one of their tech the other day and it was mentioned that they are about ready to go with it.
I am a WonderLister user for several years and have also spoken with them about it. It is their To-Do list but they are behind SixBit as far as that goes. I just recently posted about my 30-day trial that I am working on with SixBit and from what I see it is going to be great, to manage inventory especially with two sites.
I was originally looking for something to do what my spread sheet does so I could integrate inventory management into the other features and have an all in one program for everything except my financial accounting-banking. Looks like SixBit will do it.
The owner of both WL and SB are from the old Ebay Blackthorn Group and when Ebay abandoned that and now Turbo Lister, these former employees went off and started their own database company to do what Blackthorn used to do.
Go to both of their web sites and watch the videos of how they operate, especially SixBit. I know there are others users here at SL that also use SixBit. They are both paid services and there is somewhat of a learning curve. Probably not for a seller of only a few hundred items, but over a thousand it gets more feasible. Especially if you have implemented and inventory control system and also would like to bulk edit all of your store items at once. Ryanne has to edit all 6,000 items 500 at a clip. That’s 12 different times she has to go into Ebay and work the magic on their bulk lister. On WL or SB you can change multiple things on all 6,000 all at one time if you wish. That would be worth something to me if I had a big store.
Jay asked me the other day what all could these programs do and I gave a long rambling answer, but you can search SixBit and probably find it.
Hope this helps
Mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
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This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by
MDC Galleries & Fine Art.
Well I am getting ready to make the move over to SixBit. t costs a little more, but also delivers more.
You can create hundreds of templates if you want. Save them for ever. It cpatures every customers name, home address and phone number and keeps iy for ever. Actually it captures everything Ebay can offer but then pulls it onto your own hard drive so you can sort, filter and compile any way you ean’t. Build your own mailing lists and send your own emails. It takes as many listings as I want 2, 4, 6 or 10 and then will automatically submit those new listings to your twitter account. Then it captures all of the fees of PayPal and Ebay, all of the shipping costs and as you list you also enter your cost for those items. Then one of the reports they generate is your own customized COGS sold plus your own P&L stament. It does some of the things that Go Daddy does.
When it comes to incoming inventory you just type in your quick title and it automatically creates a custom SKU number, then will print a tag to put onto your item and it also automatically generates a bar code for that SKU number.
It has several types of Sales reports that it generates. Tell you what sals are made in each state and will also give yo how much tax you owe in your own state. When items sell it generates a Pick List w/ a small photo, your item number and the location where it is stored. It can print your own shipping labels from within itself and also [I belive SB will also match up the output label with the product].
Next what I did a couple of days ago, was i customized the “LIsting”page to be laid out the way I like to see and enter things. You can move Item Specifics around, the description area, prices, etc. Just drag and drop them any where yo want. Then another enat thing is I can create “custom data fields” and these don’t show up in the real listing/ So beside the PRICE field I have a small research prices box.
Next as soon as you put in your title and select a category then I can click a butto and it automatically does an Ebay Sold listing and present’s the same data that the App “What’s it Worth” gives you on your phone. And, I can also created additonal tabs like WorthPoint and Kovels so whe I want to research sold prices I can get that from 3 different sources all at one time.
It also has a built in editor, that allows photo editing directly in the listing form [just like Ebay now does. guess Ebay copied them, but the photo editor does much more all on the fly. It will automatically insert your title onto the photos with a quick rename feature.
SixBi has many, many tutorial videos. Since I have usd WonderLister for several years I was up to speed, customized many pages and item specifics and am rolling as of today. I also does scheduled listings, but s does Ebay.
Another thing I can create as many folders as i want in a custom directory and in those crate as many different type of templates as I wat and they will hold those forever.
Has tons of batch editing features. Will Append, Prepend titles and descriptions, bulk delete, handle Sales creation and has features that does what Ebay Marketing Manager does but all of this is all within the same piece of software.
I heard you ask for the ability to batch edit more than 250 or 500 listigs at a time. Well how would you like to do it with all 6,000 listings you have at one time?? 🙂 Well you go it here. I only have 725 right now, but once all of our antique booth stuff is listd we will be up around 2,000 and will keep going from there. I can edit all listings in one shot. in L & SB. That is probaly worth the 39.49 price tag to you alone.
I have only spent since Sunday working on SixBit but it is something else. Also back to the Etsy thing, unsure what all they will roll out but they have been in Beta mode for a while and think I will be able, once I create my listing, to also be able to upload / submit the listing to my new Etsy account. Am unsure if they are going to auto synch ended listing or not.
Also I will also install it on my laptop and link my laptop to my local network and then Su ad I can work on thedatabase and everything it is capable of both at the same time.
With what I am listing above, that is not all of it by a long shot. I recommend going to view their web site, like I said before and view all the tutorials.
Yes it is a paid subscription and if you see the price and then immediately click off then none of these are for you. Productivity is going to cost. My WonderLister subscription is $25 a month. SixBit is $34.99 for the level I like, but you can get smaller packages on both.
I know there is another member here that is a SixBit usr because he mentioned it before. I was hopeing to flush out some of those members and we could then get a good topc going on how we all actually use this type of software, the benefits of it and tips on how to make it supercharged. Look at how much we have talked about Ebay format, maybe something like that.
Well let’s see. Sorry for all the typos bu did this fast in reply.
Respectfully Submited … Mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
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This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by
MDC Galleries & Fine Art.
Yep.. and all of their tape has had that logo since they introduced it and it still makes my packages look like they were packed by clowns in the circus.
All that color going every which way on larger packages. The box is so busy, it is a wonder the USPS folks can even read the label, and much less see FRAGILE stickers on the box. Many times on a more expensive item I still use the clear tape and the box just looks so much more professional when I get through with it.
It wouldn’t surprise me if at some point they add a jester wearing a pointy hat & shoes waving a scepter. Better off just going with the new style lettering with the tight kerning and in a solid red on a white background, or white bold letters on a clear background. But man, what a mixture.
Again, just my own, simple opinion…
mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
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This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by
MDC Galleries & Fine Art. Reason: spelling - correction
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