News From Dinnages (1989)

Those that already know our site know we run our online shop via a free open-source software package thats based on donations, & a community spirit rather than high cost commercial software. These can be an outright cost in one go, often in the region of £300, then after a while updates & upgrades.
Today 26th December, my mailbox came with a message from Auctiva, and thinking on what they recently said about slow sales via eBay, maybe they too need more sales through thier customers. Being that ethye are all tied to ebay, they are looking for monthly fees from eBay members and others to keep them afloat, so at least they are not taking thier income just based on ebay itself, a sensible approach to spread your risk.
All I would employ traders & small business to do is, really take a look at our online shop, ask us or forum members about the system, & although there are few more technical avenues to follow, there is a great help freely from others in the learning curve. Witha paid for shop & software theres still templates to set up so its not all plug & play either.

My message said;

Starting in January 2009, you will be able to open your own off-eBay store using Auctiva Commerce. We have the best features and prices
available to help you easily build and manage your store.

Auctiva Commerce will be free through March 2009! If you sign up for a store during this introductory period, you will lock in a monthly store fee of only $9.95 per month!

Well it might be free to start, its still a flat fee per month just to run the cart, plus Id expect whatever method you take credit/debit cards online youve to add that fee in on top so another 120.00 pa to find out of nett profit, and your site is based at Auctiva not your own server. Our site gets found easily in many of the keywords on each individual product on the top search engine Google without any cost to placements. Yes you may find an ad comes along occasionly in the sponsered side listings but thats not related to our products being found in the normal, main keyword listings.

Well its interesting for a partner site promoting eBay to be saying this but with all the changes eBays been making this year, not really surprised, although the economy slow down may have added to its sales.

“We know it has become increasingly difficult to make money on eBay…”
Auctiva Commerce Team
(Dated 11 Dec 2008 19:17:30 -0800)

A return to our Maidstone Toy Fair for the pre-seasonal Christmas sales.

A better turn out than the last one here in October yesterday, with yet another 1,000 photos to purchase, and more slides, some 3,500 to do my best to sift through on the day along with dealing with a variety of sales, both models, DVD, second-hand books, booklets on Peter Harding railway Branch Lines and a steady increase on the sales of books published by the Maidstone & District and East Kent Bus Club stock.

A dry day does help, yet summer the heat of a day can turn them away too, so all round pleased for a good event. Noted some traders missing, but then thats to the advantage of those regulars who stayed put.

Next one here is in February 2009, in another trading year for us marking the start of 21 years on the circuit, where does the time fly…

Pity, the only comments we have received in ever increasing amounts per day are in the main, what you all get on a daily basis in your own inboxes, subject to anti-spam measures & we are sure you dont want to read yet more here…

Suffice to say until we can find a way to stop these being added we will have to ensure comments can only be added once logged in.
Shame as we would have liked any positive commenst, okay maybe the odd criticsm too, but not having to depreciate all comments so visitors can only see our own messages.

If this can be circumvented, even with all the anti-spam measures here, its far too time consuming to ban & delete all the idiots who add totally unrelated junk & adverts to our site.

For those who do wish to make contact or a comment, try the contact us point found within the shop itself or from the home page.

Only some four weeks ago were we invited to this little informal railway groups own event & we were pleased to have another indoor event to attend to in October, adding to our regular Maidstone stall only two weeks earlier.
This small show could well prove to be useful for locals to meet up with us & for David Young who is the owner of the shop called ‘Loco-Notion’ only just opposite the Church Hall at Peacehaven.
Around 12 stalls and exhibits plus The Lavender Line society stand supplimented by a decent ‘home-made’ refreshments catering team run by the Church Hall, itself proved to be a hit with Bacon Butties and hot meals at lunch time.
A good spread of people attended throughout the day however a bit more publicity could have helped out. Thankfully instead of letting the show die off from changes in the organising team last year, at short notice David Young stepped in with others to help push the show back on the agenda.
All being well, we have offered to promote the show possibly with a dedicated web page & sponsoring the leaflets for the 2009 show from about January next year.
Do check out the event again by then should you be reading this much later than todays posting and look in on the weblink which will be provided, linked from within our sister site www.Sussex-Transport.co.uk

18/10/08
After my visit to the Showbus transport show, I had a leaflet in the post advertising that a new Railway Show was to be hosted in Peterborough at the East of England showground. Being that I’m always up for journeys by public transport I took the chance and pre-booked my entry ticket for £8.

Planning for the trip was quite simple and I used nearly identical trains from Brighton to St. Pancreas in the morning as I had for Showbus although this time it was a Saturday and I was lucky again not to have any engineering works in my travels. On arrival at St. Pancreas I darted through the day trippers and got to Kings Cross just 3 minutes later only to find I had missed the fast train to Newcastle. Instead I caught the slow First Capital Connect train to Peterborough which took around 1hr 20mins but gave me a better sight of the scenery passing.

As we passed Hitchin I happened to notice people with cameras and camcorders at in car parks and on platforms, this trend continued well up the line until I noticed heading to London a steam locomotive with a mixture of carriages and a diesel on the end. I dont have much knowledge of the railway stock so I was unable to determine much more than that!

On Arrival at Peterborough I stepped out into the sunshine and awaited the free bus to the showground, which duly turned up a few minutes later. On its arrival I recorded its registration A707THV and recognised it as an MCW Metrobus (correct me if im wrong) in ‘Double Decker’ livery. If you hadn’t of guessed its age from the outside then the moment you step on board you knew you was on something past its best when it was very aged and had at least 4-5 different colours of seating.

The journey was quite swift and within 10-15 minutes I was at the East of England Showground, the bus squeezed through a gate and drove up as close to the entrance as possible. I walked up to the ticket gate and handed in my pre-paid ticket.

The welcoming hall reminded me of the downstairs at Brighton Modelworld (Brighton Centre) with lots of displays and information boards. The first set of stalls where based on crafts, tools and singular items such as these super strong glues, engineering tools and base boards. These didn’t keep me entertained for long so I stepped through into the main hall which appeared to be quite big, pushing through the crowds I looked around the mass of stalls selling trains, tracks, books and a surprisng amount of DVD’s! I found a few pieces to pick up and wandered around the exhibits including one of Midhurst. I reconised the odd face from events in our region but it was mainly a new territory! After an hour or so and a good coffee from the refreshment bar in the main hall I decided to head back into Peterborough.

On arrival back at Peterborough, after a journey on board C365BUV another Metrobus, I paced into the station to catch the fast National Express train back to Kings Cross. Being new to how these trains work I ended up being on the A section of the platform which was first class only and had to walk through the carriages with some passengers giving me a right look! I found a seat near the buffet car that was suitable for standard passengers and settled in for the 55 minute journey back to London calling only at Stevenage. I was impressed by how quiet it was inside the train and found it a very relaxing journey. The need for a Team Leader on board the train was something new to me and I admit to not understanding the need for one apart from improving someones job title.

On arrival at Kings Cross I made the short step back to St. Pancreas and thankfully onto the semi-fast FCC train to Brighton getting home in just over two hours which I found to be very impressive.

Well October has soon come round again and our Autumn attendance at the Maidstone Toy Fair on the 11th was its usual gathering of regular faces, and a reasonable turnover considering the current financial climate.
As usual we had another 1,000 photographs offered from a pair of regulars, these views were of all periods of the bus scene, all colour from the seventies through to the last ten years of modern day liveries. The views were from a variety of collections as is the norm, from the likes of Photobus, and The Maidstone & District and East Kent Bus Club, all secondhand, including some originally from ourselves, which shows just photos go round and round the circuits of enthusiasts.

Looking back at events this year, there is an increasing amount of modern photos available on the established dealers stalls, but rarely many will actually buy in collectors spares, or in a exchange or as some kind of mixed deal. This is where we have scored well over the years since 1993 when we were first offered our first photos, selling diecast model buses back then in our retail shop. Theres a few society stands including the M+D+EK bus club that sell older material including the B&W views, although these stands seriously have limited scope to attend being reliant on volunteers.

Back to our Maidstone event, our best offering was the start of yet another collection of material, this time in slides alongside some transport booklets, fleetlist books, and magazines from the current day right back to before the 1950’s. Suffice to say there were rally views in this first sample of more modern views although a taste of some really good views of vehicles in Kent going back to the post NBC period. We eagerly look forward to our next batch from this same source, where all photographs names are used on the back of printed material we print up, in respect of those efforts, and this has been another ‘attribute’ encouraging survivor family members to pass on these collections to us. A good amount of negatives and slides frequently get swallowed up into those ‘Joe Bloggs Collection’ credits and the originators names are forever lost.

On a fresh note about auctions, while I write this, eBay have yet again made more annoucements about the ‘improvements’ they are to make, but for whose benefit I wonder?

From 27th January 2009, we’ll be making changes to our Postage and Packaging (P&P) policies on eBay.co.uk.
2. The introduction of maximum costs for domestic P&P in the following categories:
* Books, Comics and Magazines
* DVD, TV and Film
3. All DVD listings are to offer Free P&P for domestic deliveries
From the above you can see that the seller is being dictated to yet again, although in some way I might agree to free P&P for DVD, but theres nothing ever free in life so, it means the sellers wont be able to add anything to the DVD price. Therefore the P&P costs will have to be taken out of the retail price posted, and the fixed costs will have to go up or a seller is expected to take a loss.
Quite how a maximum can be set for books, as these can be quite heavy & as much for postage as for the books cover price itself, particularly hardbacked covers.
We posted a few booklets on Amazon, only to find the fixed rates for postage dont always cover the weight on some either.

Our own online shop, where we control the prices & handling, we like to offer a fixed rate for the UK, and encourage repeat custom through a system of integrated coupons, and volume rate discounts, with a tipping point that give an included P&P over a set amount.

As for our auction sales, these are for sales of our one off items available, not so much those booklets we stock on a regular basis.
If you would like to see what we have at auction at any time, just follow the Auction links given on our Home Page, although I doubt I will return to eBay as a seller even though it still may have the majority of buyers at the present time. It still looking after them at the expense of the sellers, hence the slow drify away by some to other sites.

Comments on anything said here would be welcome, & some may be made public too, subject to the webmasters editing!

After a last attempt to attract new buyers on eBay with a new set of photograph listings, with all the changes that have been made at ebay, have found that the eBid auction set up, and the shop was quite easy, taking time to play around with all the settings & options.

So as of the Sunday 5th October we have provided a mix of eight of our postcards, set really as auction publicity giveaways. More importantly, nine sets, thats more of those grouped photos we had on ebay of a selection of four colour Southdown Enthusiast Club photographs, again starting at a giveaway price of 49p. Thats just over 12p per print! With postage costs just covering the stamp & a boarded envelope, just where could you get those photos at that price. Stall prices in the main now for photographs have reached an average of 50p (direct from the Club too), although we had offered these on our stalls for a while at 3 for £1, we have so much material from collections we have bought, having more to purchase, we could really do with the space.

Could you really imagine we had a small 12ft square shop until the turn of the century & could not fit the stock in that space anymore, having doubled the size of our store rooms now twice, and thats just the stock for sale! My home collection will have to reduce a bit more too, to keep home a little less cluttered. Photographs & postcards do take up far less space with the best views on the hallway walls, a good talking point.

Building on the development of the store in Hove, okay its not retail like before but those serious visitors who came and supported our ‘real’ shop are welcome to request a visit to delve some photo boxes at a muitally convienient time. As promised to those who have kept in touch, the second Hove store to replace the shop has grown to a size that could take a small gathering of invited visitors. This is most likely to be infrequent invites for Saturdays maybe with a window between 10am to 2pm or similar.

Back to auctions, the next bundle will be some B&W views, again from our Southdown Enthusiasts Club collection.

Bye for now…

Previously posted elsewhere 17-Sep-08 21:13:29 BST

Recent listings…
Well it would appear our recent fresh batch of five listings, each of four colour views from our stock, these being from the Southdown Enthusiasts Club were not of interest to members on ebay then, or was it that those looking through the listings just saw a postage fee against others a lot lower, had not been curious enough to check like for like, as these were using recorded delivery second or first options at our cost which included about 12p for a boarded envelope!

As this eBay & Paypal team seem to be tinkering yet again, appears that using what is required, a trackable postage method, the potential buyers just dont want to pay for it, going maybe for standard postage, yet this will just not cover the seller if the item somehow disapears ‘in the post’. Next month sees the final removal of using ‘alternative’ methods of payment by the buyers, paperless only, finally in other words no Cheques. Knew that coming.

One good thing out of no sales of the five sets offered, no one can have spoilt the 100% feedback rating here, so maybe it is time to move on like many others to other auction sites with far less fees involved & a happier atmosphere in the forums too.

Unless things change here, come find us, as wherever we sell we use ‘Dinnages’ as our username where we can, this way we are easily found all around the internet, just Google us…

Previously Posted elsewhere 29-Jul-08 19:22:43 BST

September 2008, bundles of transport photos…

To maybe ease our stock of some 70,000 photos, we have decided to have another bash at eBay from September 2008. Our stock of photos are primarily UK, (foreign views elsewhere), with a return to selling four at a time in themes, which could be livery, vehicle type or original photographer. Listings would give a gallery view of the four, with registrations and a basic vehicle description. None of these would be with any copyright to the bidder as these would have come from our ‘used’ stock, not from our own negative library.
We may be able to arrange lots on request for themes, based on UK buses, quite a number could be from the Southdown Enthusiasts Club for example, plus many other by unknown sources.
Modern Fire Brigade is well covered too, originally provided by Mr West & friends.

The issues surrounding the PayPal insistence will mean we will be listing only for the UK for the time being, and anything

won will be sent under a tracked method, that’s to be included in the postage fee the recorded cost. Never had anything lost or mislaid, or deemed damaged either on sale at eBay or other methods. As for feedback, not ever had anything but positive feedback and cannot see why we would ever have otherwise. Only one issue did cause a query & that was settled before either of us had given feedback. However on this point, we will only give our feedback after the buyer has given theirs after they have received the won item/s showing others their opinion of the item, packing, & service. Once that’s been done we would provide our individual response in equivalent depth.

As a reminder, for those who have not dealt with us before, please do search us out & see what we can offer. We have traded long enough to have become established, and known by the Southern England buyers at stalls, past retail customers and online shopping.
Time to spend on eBay is scarce, and is when there is something different to offer our buyers, otherwise it’s just another marketplace competing on price.

September is after most would have been on Holiday, kids are back to school, and nights start to become more in-house for hobbies and entertainment. Happy for queries at any time.

Previously Posted elsewhere 12:12 PM PST, 9/6/2008

Auctions via Auctiva (for eBay)
Okay so after a bit of a task working out what ebay disliked, it appeared what was in the listing was a copied reference to Google from T&C in our online shop.

Pity it was not mentioned as mentioned in our earlier posting on the blog, so with two posted, now adapted yet again the templates on Auctiva and a third posted. Lets see how these fare on ebay. This time a set of four Hastings coaches, whereas the first two sets of four were Bristol VRT ECW buses, a firm enthusiast favorite.

Nothing gained nothing lost as they say but for a few pennies more the time to list is where the effort is involved.

Looking at the actual listings yesterday on ebay it does appear Auctiva dont use ALL the options & a revise listing is still required to select specific options for what we have posted as under the revise your lisitng has deeper options as sub-topics Auctiva dont provide. Misses the point of listing with Auctiva if every listing has to be revised again.

In time our three blogs will be combined, one here, one at ebay itself and our own at our online shop.

Any comments welcome, and any from buyers past & present will be added to the messages to seen by all.

Previously Posted elsewhere 21-May-08 21:02:47 BST (Updated 22-May)

Auction sites ? ebay & forced use of pay pal?
While we have always offered paypal to our bidders in the past, it is with some hesitation that as sellers we are becoming informed that its to be mandatory to include paypal as a payment option.

While this is an easy option it is by no means the only safest, & definately NOT in the best interests of everyone, and apart from being seen as a forced ‘option’ its bordering on a restrictive practise, hence a thread on this is gradually geting bigger at the forums while a petition at #10 is gathering apace too.

We have previously retailed & could never imagine that we could insist on our customers paying in cash, cheque or any other method exclusivly, while this is not quite the case, on eBay, by far the easist method on ebay has indeed been paypal. The impression is that the buyers are given that all other methods are more potential for fraud. What they dont allow us to provide, is any method in which the seller can offer its buyers an incentive to encourage other payment methods, using direct banking (BACS), cheques & other money transfer agents (not including Western Union here), have been no problem to us, in fact the only problems we have ever encountered since 1989 was the use of paypal itself !!

Fixed sale items are always found on our own sites, & a much improved shopping system offering variable discounting, with many other up & coming auction sites around Europe too, eBay may have had its small beginnings come to a peak where its almost publicly seen monopoly falter as times moves along with the bias on forced use of such additional percentage revenues on auction sales, with the final percentage by paypal.

The smaller the item the harder it is to make sure its worth putting on any auction that takes a fee for listing, final sale, & the payment take, let alone any options along the way. For much bigger purchases at the start price the fees do get bigger but at least there more of a margin to lose the fees at £300 then something at £3.

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ebayripoff/

Previously Posted elsewhere 28-Apr-07 16:35:50 BST (Updated 27-Jun-08)

What shall we sell again on eBay?
We welcome some thoughts…

Wonder should we bother with auctions, with fixed sales working fine for us.
Most who have know of us since 1989, know of our stock.
Photographs, second-hand on buses & other transport.
Photographs both new printing & hand-prints from our unique library of negatives.
Postcards, including our most recent charitable cards.
Booklets from Peter A Harding on Branch Line railways,
or something from the Southdown Enthusiast Club publications stock,
maybe a local or themed topic book, be it Southdown, Brighton or similar.
A number of timetables to sell, along with a few models.
Mind you we sell these things already on our long established home & shopping cart pages, and on stalls in the South-East

long before our sales on eBay since 2001, dislike some attributes of it, hence we dont add items frequently. One-off items

more likely here. Time to create items for auction on eBay is not always available either.
Found another busy site for our postcard & photograph auctioning, with lower fees too!
Maybe some bundles of photographs might tease some newcommers…

Previously posted elsewhere 12:31 PM PST, 9/4/2008

First auction via Auctiva (for eBay)
Well, from looking at other sellers listings they look a bit flshy, howver after some tinkering to get a more subtle &

plain template, I have crested a first ebay auction to restart our sales using this method. Loads of settings & a template

to form around selling photographs. After a preview & last edit, posted it auction or so I thought. Some time later its

still not seen at ebay.co.uk so where has it gone, do I add more of the same format or at this point a concern is have I

wasted all this time on Auctiva templates, mind you all for free, and go back to ebays Turbo Lister or just add each one

via my own templates we used previously when we were selling on ebay before. Our photographs are to be from some of the

70,000 used views we have in stock and to start with our stock of bought in Southdown Enthusiasts Club Colour then Balck &

White views, with anything else in th UK we find may be of interest, not all buses, but in the main, plus some fire

brigade too. Maybe some railway would be possible too, we shall see…

Previously Posted elsewhere 16-Mar-08 10:34:11 GMT (Updated 29-Jul-08)

New items…
From Autumn 2007 we now carry the range of booklets from;
The Maidstone & District and East Kent Bus Club.
These compliment the booklets from;
The Southdown Enthusiasts Club
where since 1997 we have stocked all current (& some out of print) titles.

For 2008 we have started to stock the Train Simulators & add-ons based on MSTS1
Looking to the end of 2008, & early 2009 for the release of the long awaited MSTS2

A quick note here to say that we have added comments on a few third party site blogs under our username, and have come to the conclusion its far too spread out if we are to make sense of using such a blog.
These wont be very regular, neither intend to be boring or too promotional, just if we add the commnets from the other blogs into here, we think our online chat & comments would be better served here.
Visitors or customers of the shop, and those that may come over from the Sussex site can draft a message, & after a review, we can post it to the feedback blog. Im sure users would agree we cannot leave a blog totally open to users to add anything, with so many of us having to clear inboxes of spam, we dont really want unsavory comments, adverts or pictures added here.
Pop back again to see what else we have to say, & if you want to comment please login as a basic users where we can allow your draft post and possibly make you an authorised user. You can always go to our shop and the ‘contact us’ page & leave a message for us there.
Regards
Gordon & the family team!

28/09/08
Today I made my first visit to this event, taking the train from Brighton which cost me £21 return with my well used young persons railcard. I left Brighton at 7.44am on the FCC train to St Pancreas International, walked over to Kings Cross and boarded the 9.15am FCC Cambridge Flier service which got me into Cambridge for 10am.

At this point I had a 50 minute wait due to the scrapping of the free service to Showbus. This was most annoying but I do much timetable preperation for my trips and decided to waste some time in the station. The Stagecoach service 7 arrived and was a single decker which was already busy and after taking ten minutes to load up the mass of people heading for Showbus, we left very overcrowded and had the long 45 minute journey via every village on the way. I was a bit surprised by the £5 bus fare and so where many others.

I spent around 2 hours looking at the stalls, picking up a few items and walked around selected buses and then repeated the entire process of the slow bus back to Cambridge, then after understanding the platforms and a coffee got the Semi Fast FCC train back to Kings Cross and with a swift walk caught the FCC train back to Brighton from St. Pancreas

It was on the train back to Brighton, I was left wondering what on earth all the hype was about, I found it was a very expensive day for what left me with no better impression than any other local rally and I wont be going again any time soon.

Just attended one of our bigger Soutrhern Bus Running Days at Worthing Seafront last Sunday (27th July), with a very warm & sweltering long day. This started at an alarm call at 6am, the thrusting the younger ones out the door so we could get on site reasonably early enough not to be harrassed too much while we geting our pitch sorted. The less people about the better at this time of the morning with about six others already setting up on site. By the time we were all ready to go, there must have been 23 stalls, 21 booked and a few additions that came along.

There were reported 41 buses booked, but did not quite seem as busy with visiting buses as in previous years more so we expect due to the increasing fuel cost for individual owners or groups, as the bus companies have the pockets to cover this & like publicity. As for our local company to us, B&H had three vehicles, with others in attendance, some available for the run outs as per the programme, which almost sold out this year.

As for being our most local event, this is our best event and long may it continue, being we have lost a number over recent years, pity as we found Littlehampton Bus Gathering a very worthy event & fared even better in our sales, but we think thats because of the tightness of the site, and trips were shorter bringing everyone back more often.

We all miss Southsea, and it was great to see a return of Netley a while back in June this year, but it helps that end of the Southdown area, along with the smaller event at Gosport, neither will bring back the Southsea event.

Onwards, and we have just updated our blog on one of the auction sites we have been on since 2001, although with some changes against the sellers opinions, we have mentioned we will have another bash to see what we may find buyers for some of our ‘used’ photographs now that after December 2007 we had bought a new collection of 21,000 that brought us back up again to 70,000 and thats nothing to do with the library of images we have 22,000 negatives or slides to produce prints from.

Another presentation given to the Kent & East Sussex Railway Group at Pevensey in mid July on the ‘Tribute to Jack Turley’ brought many visitors to comment on his vast collection of early images from 1937 through the war and into the seventies, which were not just buses, but trams, trolleybuses, steam railway in the South, some shipping and aircraft at the originbal Croydon & Gatwick Airports.

Look forward to queries from anyone over what we might have to supply enthusiasts and historians with views, with more magazines now asking for prints to compliment articles. When some of these have been published we will mention them here. Occasionly some books use our views and we get a little upset at this if they have not talked to us fiorst as this denys the original photographer his right to have his credit announced in print in appreciation for his efforts often at a time when cameras were less affordable as was the film and cost of developing.

Regards
Gordon & the family team

The family team of Dinnages of Brighton, started selling after a rekindling of a sort of collector of childhood toys from the seventies in the early eighties, finding each others ‘hording’ interests were similar. This frequent visiting then an eventual progression to selling, from simple car-boots to market stalls, with a stock level of second-hand collectables and with children on the way, stepped into retail for a period of ten years, then onto online internet sales, adding occasional auction sales ideal for the one off items. The secure revised shop system has been brought to work during 2007 to further enhance the customers journey & buying experience. During the retail shop period, expansion into books, photographs & postcards, and even publishing our own postcards was the reward for perseverence against some of the tough times in the early nineties. Drawing away of the reliance of diecast model sales, both new and second-hand, has brought far more benefits, having an insight to book publishing, and a future potential use of our amassed collection of original transport & local negatives and slides.

As a way of interacting & providing information on an ad-hoc basis a new addition to our site is the BLOG!

Messages on what we are adding, & up to in life, both out & about and on the shopping site.

A secondary blog for users, or customers to feedback to us & others!
Tell us what you want, what you have bought, how we fared. Okay we dont want anything but polite comments of course, but if you really feel like airing your views, its like being able to give feedback & get satisfaction more than just auction site feedback does.

Finally, there is also a LINKS section here too, where suggestions of other links can be put forward, although unless its your own, managed by the posting member, we reserve the right to not add it for public viewing.