HipStamp And The American Philatelic Society Announce Strategic Partnership

All the sellers are seemingly on vacation. A whole slew of links don't work.

My personal take is this is a horrible integration. Buying from seller APS 123456 is a personally a terrible consumer experience.
Better experience, get a real identity, and grow a brand if you have wares to hawk. Noone is gonna trust this except for maybe really cheap offerings.

Dead links, poor images and atrocious descriptions. Going well so far!!

The store just disappeared. What a mess.

Maybe I am picky but there is not one image that is not skewed. Looking at a page of listings feels like I just downed a quart of Smirnoff. Getting a headache.

Store didn't disappear and checking about 20 items at random, no broken links. More than 250,000 listings. Skews are minimal and stamps are easily seen per scan. Practically all the descriptions were entered by StampStore guidelines long before link to HipStamp was announced, so, yes, they are minimal (with only face side of stamps showing), but questions can always be submitted. ALL these listings have the backing of the usual APS StampStore guidelines. Yes, I have a handful of items listed and all look fine. It's a good start.

All APS listings are under the APS Stamp Store banner, with a single feedback rating system for the entire store. No matter which individual seller you're actually buying from, feedback affects the rating of the Store as a whole. So let's imagine a person shopping on HipStamp who is not an APS member, and perhaps completely unaware of the existence of the APS store, its original structure, etc. If that person has a bad experience with an individual seller and posts neutral or negative feedback, the reputation of the APS Store as a whole suffers. This makes no sense.

And by the way, currently, the message "Please note that this seller is currently on vacation, and there may be a delay in when this item can ship" appears on every APS Stamp Store listings I've looked at so far.

While playing around with the search function, it seems that HipStamp's search function does not extend to item descriptions. For example, I want to look for stamps overprinted "specimen" within US. There's a particular APS Store-listed stamp that includes "specimen" in the description, but not the title. So if I do a general HipStamp search (not confined to the APS Store) for "specimen," that listing will not appear in the search results. I mention this because I'm pretty sure that in the original implementation of the APS Store, searches using keywords ("specimen," "proof," etc.) would generate hits based on text in the item's description. That HipStamp's search engine doesn't reach into descriptions is both a regression in function and a disadvantage to APS Stamp Store sellers.

I understand that this migration process is still underway. But no one has posted a list of "known issues" that people should be aware of in the meantime. So whether any of the above will be resolved when the migration is complete or not remains to be seen. But the above reflects the current behavior.

Every single APS listing I look at says

This is what I am talking about. These are from one page of listings I was looking at. I mean come on people.

There are lots of images where it seems the seller couldn't be asked to place items square on the scanner, or rotate them after-the-fact to appear square. Lots.

Now to the group of Columbian proofs you pictured above, rodgcam. I'm interested! But I tried in vain to locate them on the APS stamp store.

They look like card proofs to me (P4) so I did a search for "P4" from within "in this store" and this is what the otherwise blank results page displayed:

1 listing found. Showing results 1 to 0.

So I tried...

• 230P4, same result.
• 230P3 (in case they might be India paper proofs), same result.
• Used wildcards in the search criteria, such as *P4. The expected result for any modern search engine would be to return all P4s (all card proofs) from within the store, but... same result.
• Tried 230P4-245P4, hoping that the seller titled the listing with the range of catalog numbers for card proofs. This time I got the following, showing zero results out of 5 listings:

5 listings found. Showing results 1 to 0.

Ugh. Coming from long experience as a professional software beta tester, this system has not been well thought out and even more poorly tested. So much for HipStamp's "next-gen" technology.

Does anyone think the pricing of most of the items is a bit rich?

The thing is, this is all the APS, not any individual seller. Sellers have to mail their stamps to the APS, which scans, posts and maintains listings. Any sales from the APS store are done by the APS, not by the individual owners of the stamps. All of the images are done by the APS.

It's always been that way, which is why I never used Stampstore. I can get the exact same stamp cheaper on Hipstamp or Delcampe or eBay. That doesn't seem like much of a benefit for APS members, does it?

Regarding the images, image quality and resolution has always been a major downside of the APS store. Their entire imaging workflow needs a complete overhaul and standardization. The current results are horrific.

I'm the Australian Director of the Internet Philatelic Dealer's Association, one of SCF's sponsors. If one of our members listed stamps with skewed images, overlapping stamps and poor descriptions, they would be asked to correct them.

We know that Hipstamp don't care, but as the APS is responsible for imaging and descriptions, perhaps they should!

As I understand to way this is going to work;
- APS is the basically selling the material on 'consignment' and the material is actually owned by an APS member
- The transaction goes through HS and APS then pays out the APS member. Hopefully the amount of time between the sale on HS and when the APS member gets their money is short.
- APS is responsible for shipping the material in a timely fashion and I assume that APS chooses how best to ship the item.
- APS get either no feedback from buyer, a positive feedback from buyer, or a negative feedback from the buyer. This seem fair since I assume that APS is party who is selling the item(s) and is responsible for its timely delivery. But what happens if a negative feedback over the item itself occurs or a buyer has questions (before or after the sale)? APS will be investing extra time and resources acting as an intermediary. Does the buyer ever get to know who actually owned the material in any situation?
- How do the actual owners (APS member) receive feedback (and build a positive transaction history) if APS is the one getting all the feedback?
- I thought that existing APS Stamp Store folks were already working at full capacity before the transition to HS. It sems to me that the scope of work has increased by adding HS another 'layer' to the listing tasks.
- Will the APS/HS listings ever be able to have more than a single image? It seems to me to be a monumental task to update the existing listings to add images of the reverse side of the stamps and update the titles so that searching becomes much more efficient and competitive with other HS sellers listings.

I truly hope this works for APS and its sellers. Back in the 'old days' and as a brick and mortar store owner, I found that a physical move to a new location or a new store opening was a critical event in the potential success of the business. Hopefully this 'grand opening' will be successful and its momentum can seed future improvements and growth.
Don