This year over 1,200 new customers have registered on the AGM website, and we are glad to have each and every one of you! AGM catalog ’veterans’ already know this stuff, but having answered more than a few "how this this work?" emails in just the last few months, I thought that perhaps a short public article on the basics might be in order. Pity - I am not biologically capable of writing "short" articles.
Here is how the AGM system works:
1) We gather up militaria for a catalog - and hide it!
As collections and individual items are acquired, they are brought back to our office where they are researched, described, and photographed. When we have enough new material to fill our catalog, (normally about 700 items), we send the printed version off to press and begin preparing the online catalog as well. Here is the important part: New catalog items are never sold before the catalog opens. Every item worthy of being included in the catalog goes to the catalog. There are no want lists, special customers, buddies, big fish, or other back door sales. This keeps the catalogs interesting, gives everybody as much of an ’equal’ chance as we can manage, and prevents us from having to remember who is ’first in line’ for specific types of stuff. This First Dibs Guarantee policy has cost us some friendships, but I think it has earned us many more than we have lost.
Also in the interest of sanity, we do not freely share information about what is going to be on the next catalog - until step #4 below.
2) Sometime in the week before a new catalog is to be released, we take down the current web catalog. At this point, the front cover image is replaced by one that has a brown paper wrapper on it announcing the date of the new catalog (like the example below.)
If you click through, you will find that all of the web catagories say "UNAVAILABLE". Nothing is broken - we are just preparing the website for the new catalog, and preventing people from confusing the old catalog with the new one if they don’t notice that the new catalog opens at a specific date and time. Eventually, we will have a countdown clock on the home page instead of using this system, but for now this is what we have.
3) On Friday before a new catalog, the printed versions are mailed to US customers who either do not have internet access, or have crappy internet access that prevents them from browsing the catalog online. We mail on Friday and Friday only because we have found that this gives them the best possible distribution in the postal system. 90% of postal customers will receive them sometime on Monday. Do postal customers have an advantage over online customers? No. The postal and online customers each have advantages and disadvantages, but in spite of our best efforts it balances out in favor of the online customer. A few postal customers may see the catalog before it opens online, but they cannot order until it is open for everyone (See #5 below.) Online customers have the advantage of photographs, not to mention access to the Web Only Bonus Section, Trench Art, and Photography sections which are typically not in the printed catalog. More important, they know for certain that their catalog will be available to them at the appointed hour rather than trusting in the random fate of postal distribution.
4) On the weekend before a new catalog, we ’go dark.’ We are officially closed until the posted catalog opening time on Monday. We are not answering phones or replying to email inquiries about the catalog at that point, so we can start to let folks know about what kind of material is going to be on the catalog. (If we did this while we were accepting phone calls earlier in the week, we would be deluged with "you have to sell it to me before the catalog opens" requests.) At this point we will post a news article to the website, and send out email notifications to let everyone know that the new catalog is just around the corner. This is a good time to register, update your email, password, or anything else that you don’t want to be messing with on opening day.
5) Monday - CATALOG DAY. (or Tuesday, if Monday is a postal holiday.) We remain closed until the catalog opens - normally at 3:00 PM Central Time. This way the few people who have received a catalog in the mail have to wait until the catalog is open to everyone. Trust me, the postal people think that the web people have the advantage, and vice-versa. There is as close to ’fair’ as we can manage. Speaking of which - rest assured that absolutely nobody is happy with the starting time of 3:00 pm central. We are trying to accommodate customers everywhere from Moscow to Tokyo. There is just a tiny sliver of time in a day when people on one end of the globe can stay up an hour or two late, while those on the other side of the world are getting up an hour or two early. 3:00 pm US central time seems to fit the puzzle better than any other time. It is equally inconvenient for everyone.
6) 3:00 - The Catalog Opens! We normally know that it has opened because the phones which were ringing off the hook all morning while we were closed are momentarily silent. (the calm before the storm.) You will know that it has opened because the catalog cover image on the homepage will change from the ’brown wrapper’ (above) to reveal the full catalog cover.
Now the individual web categories are all populated, and the catalog items are available to the first person who requests them. Which, of course, brings us to the most common question received from new users:
7) What is the best (fastest, easiest, most likely succeed) way to order? There are three basic options. You can call an order in (1-800-233-1918; 1-573-243-1833; 1-573-243-1785). You can send an email to: agm6 (@) advanceguardmilitaria.com. If you are registered on the website, you can just hit the "buy now" button on the item(s) you wish to purchase. The latter is by far the fastest and most efficient way to go. The phone lines get jammed up pretty quickly, so the online ordering system is by far your best bet for getting the item that you want.
8) If you have ordered online, it will be a few hours before you will know if your order was successful or not. It takes us a few hours to process all of the orders. When we have ’caught up’ with orders, we will update the website (post the invoices to your USER CP page and delete ’sold’ items from the site), and then send out the order confirmation emails. These emails contain a link to the invoice on your USER CP page, so we must update the web first. If you decide to order more items after this, we will simply add them to your invoice and send you a new confirmation email after the next update cycle.
9) In the days and weeks after a new catalog opening, we update the website less frequently. During the first 2-3 days we will update the website and send out invoice batches once every few hours. After that point, we get busy with wrapping orders as quickly as possible, so updates and order confirmations are normally sent out once per day, less often if we are ’on the road’.
10) Payment: The easiest way to pay is also through our online system. If you are registered on the website, just click "USER CP" and follow the links to your invoice. From there, you can print out a copy of the invoice and mail it in with your payment, or make a payment (credit card or PayPal) online. If you are not registered on the website, you can call in to use a credit card, or send your payment by mail. Items are held for 10 days. If you cannot make payment in 10 days, no problem - just call or email and we will work with you to arrange a lay-away. (Lay-away deposit must still be made within the 10 day timeframe.)
11) Shipping: We work as quickly as possible to ship the orders; however, we do ask that people allow 2 weeks for delivery. We make sure that items are wrapped in a manner that will ensure their safe delivery. We’re all ex-museum geeks here, so that kind of thing is important to us. It also means that we are not quite as fast as the other guys who simply toss your item in a box with a handful of packing peanuts and boot it out the door. We can average about 25-30 packages per day for each person working in shipping. Sometimes there are four of us; sometimes only one. There are normally 300-400 packages that need to be sent out after a catalog opens. All of this math adds up to "please allow 2 weeks for delivery."
12) Repeat.. As soon as we appear to be reasonably caught up with shipping, it is time once again for some of us to hit the road in search of the items for the next catalog. We publish between 6 and 8 of them per year.
OTHER FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Yes, we have a "FAQ" section, but it is a bit outdated and hard to update - the new website that we are working on will fix this. In the meantime, here are a few new questions that a new user might find informative.
I don’t want to register, but I still want to see what you have for sale. That is an easy one. On the login page, just click "browse as guest." View and agree to the terms of sale, and you’re in. You will not be able to use the "buy now" button, or the online payments system, but you can still see what is available for sale. If you want to order, just call or send a regular email.
I can’t get in! My password doesn’t work!! Click "forgot password". Next, go to your email. Collect the new password. Use that to log in. After you are logged in, you can change your password to anything you like.
I am interested in an item, but need more information. Understood. We do our best to describe and photograph these items in a manner that I dare say is significantly more thorough than most other online militaria catalogs, but we occasionally miss an important detail - especially if the item is not something that we deal with on a regular basis. If you are making your request days or weeks after the catalog opens, we will try to answer almost any question for you as best we can. If it is opening day, though - we are up to our eyeballs and must run extra information requests through triage. If you need to know about a maker mark or some other important detail that we might have missed, we will absolutely help you as soon as we possibly can. If you are asking something like "Please set up the tent and take photos of every square inch so I can be sure it won’t leak on my dog" or "Measure that $1900 painted A2 jacket - I need one to fit me for the upcoming hanger dance", to be completely honest we are just not going to have someone stop what they are doing to go and help with that.
What is the "Web Only Bonus Section" category? Making a catalog is a lot like making a movie. Just as a director will shoot a lot of scenes knowing that some will not make it to the final edit of the film, sometimes we have items that do not make the final edit of the print catalog. There was nothing wrong with them; it is simply a matter of trying to push 55-60 pages of material into a 48-page catalog. Before the website came along, items that were ’cut’ at the last minute simply became the first items into the next issue. Sometime last year we realized that these items could just as easily get their own category on the website, and the idea grew from there.
Sometimes this category is large enough to be a ’catalog within a catalog.’ Consider it an extra perk of the online catalog - sort of like the ’Director’s Cut’ DVD with all of the cool extra scenes and bonus features included.
Speaking of web categories - what on earth is this one?
Because we are now deleting ’sold’ items from the website, we no longer have the long list of ’seconds’; the saved requests from other customers who had asked for the same item. Consequently, if someone reserves an item, does not send payment, and then stops responding to emails, calls, or letters... the items that were reserved for them are freed once again and turn up in this category. Since the text is kind of hard to read on the small version of this button, here is what it says: "items previously reserved / by customers who disappeared." Yes, it is also an attempt at humor. Every dealer has this problem, and there are two ways to handle it. You can get some personal satisfaction by ’naming and shaming’ the few unreliable customers, but you risk scaring the crap out of everyone else and make yourself look like a bit of a jerk in the process. OR, you can turn it into a bit of fun as well as an opportunity for other customers to have a second chance at items that they previously missed. We prefer the latter approach. It is less stressful, and better business in the long run. There is never very much in this category, but it is worth checking. Some good militaria is indeed ’emancipated’ every once in a while.
What happens to the stuff that does not sell on the catalog? We normally sell about 65-75% of the items on any given catalog. The items that remain available when the catalog is replaced by the next one are often listed on eBay, or if we are feeling really ambitious they may be pulled from catalog stock and added to the items that we take to militaria shows. More often than not, if an item has lingered for a few months it will be included in one of our periodic web-only sales. We normally do three of these every year - one around Christmas / New Years, one sometime in the spring, and one in the summer around 4th of July.
There are sometimes a few items that we just really enjoy having around the office; if they don’t sell at our price - fine - we’ll keep them. When I say "few", though, I mean it. I think I can count these items on one hand. Everything else, no matter how cool it is, no matter how much we paid for it originally - must be sold. Often the items on the sale catalogs will be priced at or below our original cost; sometimes dramatically below our cost. We have learned that it is much more important to have new, fresh items for every catalog than to hold on for the last possible dollar from the items that we already have. If you like good militaria at bargain prices - be sure to watch for the sale catalogs.
Speaking of price - how do you price your items? We subscribe to the principle of the sustainable retail sale. Que? Sorry. The idea is to find the market price that allows us to make a profit, but would hold up catalog after catalog if we had several dozen of the same type of item. Sure - you might be able to find one guy who will pay you $300 for a WWI cartridge belt... but what happens when you want to sell the next one, and the one after that, etc.? You can sell them all day long for $50 to $85, so that is where ours tend to be. We use our database of over 40,000 past sales, as well as doing comparable price checks with other dealer sites, price guides, etc. If an item comes in that we have not had recently and we find that similar pieces are listed for $100 on other sites, then I want ours to be priced at $85 if at all possible.
There are sometimes a few items that are so unique or exciting that they carry a correspondingly high price, but normally anything that exciting does not hang around for long regardless of the price.
Bottom line: we want the items to sell, and the customers to be happy. When the items sell, we get to run out and find new items. When the customers are happy, they will keep coming back catalog after catalog, year after year. Everybody wins.
If you are new to AGM, I am sure you probably have other questions, but this really covers the basics. To be absolutely sure that you are notified of new catalog postings, be sure to check out the article on our free ’Whiz-Bang!’ download on the home page.
If you are an AGM veteran, you must have been bored as hell today to come here and read all the way through this, but we’re glad you did all the same!