How Popula Auctions and Shopfronts Work

What We Do

Greetings, esteemed, and welcome to Popula, the grooviest online venue specializing in vintage, antique and collectible merchandise. Browse our pages for rare and out-of-print books, vintage clothing and decor items, Hollywood memorabilia and other Pop Culture collectibles. If you're a collector, you'll find here all manner of unusual, occasionally even bizarre, stuff. If you're a merchant, or an individual who likes to sell as well as buy, you can list your wares here either in our auctions, or at a fixed price in your own PopShop.

Registration

Either way, you'll first need to Register -- a process which is pretty painless and absolutely free. If you're concerned about your privacy, please be sure and check out our incredibly responsible privacy policy first. On the registration form, you provide your email address, the username you'd like to use, a mailing address, and a phone number. We don't want to know what your household income is, your age, or how many kids you have, and we only need your phone number in case you change your e-mail address without telling us and someone needs to get hold of you to complete a transaction. We would like to know how you heard of us, but you don't have to tell if you don't want to.

Anyone who is registered can bid or sell on the auctions or buy from the PopShops; but if you want to set up and sell things in your own PopShop, there's an additional (very short) PopShop Registration.

By registering, you explicitly accept our Terms & Conditions, which are pretty standard and written in plain, easy-to-understand English.

How We Keep The Wolf From The Door

On auctions, we charge no listing fees for anyone who lists more than 100 items in any calendar month. For the lower-volume, occasional auction seller, the listing fee is a flat 25 cents per item regardless of the starting price. The commission on successful auction sales is on a sliding scale, but never more than 5%.

On PopShops, you can list an unlimited number of items for the basic fee of $10 a month. The commission on sales is 10%. To see our fee structure in more detail, see Fee Information.

Your Popula Account

As a seller on auctions, with a Basic Account you can run up a tab of $10 in listing fees and commissions. If you'd like to carry a higher balance, you can open a Cash Account, with a credit line of $50, or you can open a Credit Card Account by providing a credit card number. Credit card account holders are billed $1.00 up front as an advance against fees. You can get a refund of any unused amount on this advance at any time by sending a request via email to the chaps at Popula..

Sellers on PopShops must use a Credit Card Account. Credit cards are billed once a month, at the same time that invoices are sent out.

What's In It For You

... aside from being able to tell your friends, "Thanks, but I'm already a member".

Well, for one thing, you get free image hosting. Every Popula member gets 5MB of space in which to store picture files. You can upload and/or delete them with the greatest of ease using the Popula Image Manager. Popula is probably the only site left that doesn't charge for this service; and we might have to start at some point, so enjoy it while you can!

Other nifty features include:

Private Eye. Whether you're a buyer or a seller, you can track your auctions, bookmark your favorites and get all your account info from one handy page.

Send us up to 100 auctions with a single click using the patented List-o-Mat. This very handy tool makes it very easy, once you've done the initial work, to keep meeting the 100-a-month required to escape the payment of listing fees.

Alternatively, if you're running a PopShop, use the mighty Populator. This incredible software machine can handle large upload files from many different formats, including Excel and the ever-popular Homebase. Somebody tell Ripley...

Editorial material on the site includes the Vox Popula bulletin board for Popula members and the extraordinarily scintillating and useful Vintage Voice e-zine and reference library. Vintage Voice is somewhat irregularly published, but it's usually worth the wait. And you can win fame (no fortunes just yet) by submitting your own contributions to our esteemed editrix. Once in a while, we also hold contests, of which you can see past examples in the Vintage Voice Archive. You just won't find stuff like this on ebay.

Popula's Member Rating System

So you can get some idea of whom you're dealing with when you buy on sell on Popula, we have a rating system based on Comments made by members. Comments can be Positive (+1), Neutral (0) or Negative (-1), and the overall Rating, which appears as a number in parentheses after the member's name, is the cumulative total of these points. Any registered member can leave a comment on a trading partner. However, only the first comment counts toward the Rating; so, if you have a second positive transaction with the same person, and leave him or her another comment, the number appearing next to his or her name won't change, even though your comment will appear. You can see all Comments made about a member by clicking on his/her Rating number

Some sites allow you to "import" your rating from another site, so that other users can see what kind of record you have elsewhere. Popula doesn't do this, but we have no objection to you referring users to your feedback page on other sites, if you want to.

Popula members' screen names appear not only with the Rating number in parentheses after them, but also with an icon. The icons have the following significance:

Negative, designated by the icon (Officially a Rat)

1-9, no icon

10-99, designated by the icon (Good Chap)

100-249, designated by the icon (Peer of the Realm)

250+, designated by the icon (Saint)

Any member who descends to less than –3 (i.e. worse than a Rat) is automatically de-registered from Popula.

Please note, in case you feel like getting too vituperative in your comment-making, that Populists can read not only the comments made about you but also the comments you make about others.

Click here to go make or review Comments about a specific member.

Terms & Conditions

Popula offers a website where people can sell and buy stuff from each other. Each seller maintains his own standards of customer service; we won't interfere in any way with your transactions, which is how we can keep prices low. Please make sure you're satisfied with the particulars before you conclude your transaction. Read feedback, and don't be afraid to ask questions of a buyer or seller. We are not responsible for the accuracy or content of our customers' listings, and we don't give any guarantees on the stuff bought and sold on our site. We can't guarantee that all our members will behave themselves, and we can't be held responsible for our members' behavior.

Not only that, but if some seller or buyer should suffer in some way from having sold or bought stuff on our site, that's their look-out, and they accept it by registering.

Not only that, but any member automatically indemnifies and holds us harmless for anything nasty that might happen to them using our site. For example, we have an Erotica category. By registering, you accept the responsibility for being scarred for life by exposure to naughty pictures.

Not only that, but we expect members not to collect, sell or use information about each other, like email names, except when they need to collect the information to complete a transaction on our site.

Not only that, but we are not responsible if some member harms another by breaking these Terms & Conditions. For instance, we can't help you if it turns out that a seller or buyer is under age or reneges on a deal or doesn't pay. The vast majority of Internet auction transactions proceed smoothly and pleasantly, but again, make sure you're satisfied with the terms of your deal before bidding, buying or selling.

Moreover, we can't be responsible if you suffer loss or damage from malfunction of the site or of the internet.

Furthermore, we can refuse service to anyone at any time for any reason or for no reason at all.

You must be old enough and otherwise fully qualified to enter into a binding contract.

Sellers must not use shills or manipulate prices in their auctions except as allowed by our rules

If you decide to get litigious with us, you agree to do so in the State of California. Our rules and Terms & Conditions are governed by California law.

We can change the rules.