I Think I Have Over 60,000 Stamps To Sort Through

Well - after sorting through and mounting US, and a short lived infatuation with US Columbian Issues and Penny Blacks... I decided to start on some worldwide collecting.

I had a thousand or so stamps from my childhood collection. But I figured I needed more...

Went a little crazy on Ebay...



If I find some cool stuff, I'll post it later..

The "Lucky Strike" tins you see in the box sell for $10-$20 a piece on Ebay. This box had 6 of them filled with stamps... So, the tins alone almost payed for that box!

Eric

Interesting lot you have there. Do keep us posted on any gems

Wow! That's a lot of potential fun right there! Congrats!

Lovely treasure hunt time! Nice.

Well that should keep you out of trouble for a while..i hit two good sized stamp shows in May..thank goodness...now I can sort and catalog instead of surfing the stamp markets on the internet !!

Welcome to "worldwide" collecting by the way...i call myself a worldwide collector but there are some countries I hardly if ever touch, who knows why ? the eye of the beholder !!

It is crazy that I already see that and almost drool.

Stupid question, and I'm sure this isn't something that you really want to say but I'll ask anyway - when looking for lots like that of supposedly unsorted stamps to buy to sort through, how do you search for them exactly?

Rocky you have to make a gut judgement based on the info they give you...lots of times I see a box lot go for 3 times what I bid..but thats what I thought it was worth to me !!

Thanks philb, but what keywords are best used to search with, if there are any keywords that are better than others?

Hi Rocky - On Ebay, I search for words like:

box
box lot
accumulation
stock book / stock pages / stock sheets
unsorted


Another way I have been doing it is doing an Advanced Search, search for Number of Bids of 1 - 100, and sort by either newly listed, or, ending soonest

Filtering for items with at least 1 bid, hides most of the junk...

Here is an example:
http://www.ebay.com/sch/Stamps-/260...LH_Auction=1

Thanks for the tips EricBismarck. I didn't even realize you could sort by number of bids, and I'm a high use eBayer and have been on the site buying and selling since it started up.

Do you know if it's possible to sort by SOLD completed auctions? I know you can do it on the iPhone app and that gets rid of the unsold completed auctions when trying to evaluate prices in the market, but I can't figure out if it's even possible to do on the website.

Yes - on the left hand side, you can select "Completed Listings" - to see what stuff is going for.

For example, the guy that is selling the 30,000 stamp lot - I bought one of those, but first I looked at his items for sale, and looked at his completed to see what other people had paid... Then, I set my bid accordingly

Also - I only buy "Off Paper" -

Eric
Use the search engine if you need help on sorting. It's been discuss here many times I believe.

philb

That's true, but in doing so it lists prices both in red and green, green being the only ones that sold and it has tons of prices in red that are usually things listed by people that just didn't sale even though the prices were fair, and prices that wishers put on things hoping to get someone to bite on. On the iPhone app you can take it a step further to sort out the unsold red prices and only list the items that people actually bought and paid for. I'm not sure if that way is possible on the website.

Thanks for the tips. I'll look into all of this!