I Think The Scott Catalog For Ipad Has Been Discontinued

Artful,
True enough but IMO they have kept very tight control over how their search features work. They could very easily make it much more than it is today and I cannot help but wonder if they are simply viewing this as a new profit center. Imagine the potential ebay income if many other organizations/companies (not just stamps) were to seek a contract with them to access their database for their own search purposes.
Don

Scott's "problem" is they are not in the business of selling stamps. Scott Catalog values for anything that doesn't sell at auction is a joke. Almost anything can be bought for far less than catalog value.

If they were smart, they'd start a service similar to bidstart to sell stamps and coins and have that feed values into their database for generating their new catalog.

Yes, I would think ebay could probably make more money selling data of this type if they were just better at collecting it. For some categories they do a decent job already. In coins, for example, there are defined fields for dates, mintmarks and grades, among other things. It would be a piece of cake, for example, to pull up all kinds of data on 1878-S Morgan Dollars graded MS-63. That's a 2-second query. Trying to filter through ebay's data to find usable data on Germany Scott 12 VF used? Forget about it.

If they'd allow sellers to select a catalog publisher (a drop-down box where you could select Scott, Michel, Gibbons, etc) and another field with the catalog number, the results get a whole lot more usable. That and they need to add many more stamp categories and sub-categories. "Germany and Colonies" is a joke. There should be at least a dozen subdivisions, each of which would still have thousands and thousands of listings, but that's a whole 'nother beef. But it's important because if I'm listing Saar Scott 12, there's no Saar category so I have to list it somewhere else. Without the right categories and sub-categories, the data would still need to be tweaked and scrubbed.

I respectfully disagree that prices on ebay or Bidstart or such venues represent _useful_ (for reference purposes) market prices when we are talking about auction items in those venues.

But even when are talking about fixed-price items, those fixed-price items had to be listed within the context of competing with the auction items.

Those prices are what those particular examples sold for during an extremely short window in a transaction between an often unknown or little-known seller and an often less-than-fully-knowledgable buyer, often with inadequate images and often without any description, and often without any useful guarantee (that is good for a time period longer than the life of an ebay transaction). This is ebay, etc., that we are taking about!

If you you want to think of (I will just call them " ebay prices") as real market prices, you place no value on a dealer paying a big chunk of cash to buy a collection (maybe someday your collection), breaking it down, identifying and grading correctly, holding items for years if necessary, and having the stamps available for individual buyers when they want them, in the condition and quality they want them. Furthermore, you place no value on the usually much more efficient methods of buying from dealers vs online auctions. Though I do buy at online auctions, I find their process to be incredibly slow and wasteful. By comparison, my clients send me orders or want lists for dozens or hundreds of items in the same time it would take them to do purchase just ten items on ebay. Also, my clients usually pay no shipping charge at all, yet ebay sellers usually have to build some amount of shipping into every item because they don't know if one buyer will buy one item or 100 items; and they don't know if the item(s) will be shipped within the U.S. or to China (in which case the seller is probably going to lose both their money and items anwyay). (eBay's pressure on sellers to offer "free shipping" has, in my opinion, actually raised total costs for buyers. Nothing is free.)

Absolutely yes, you can get stuff cheaper anywhere you look for a while. That's great. Go for it.

But, do you want that method of buying/selling to be the primary driving force of the market when it is time to sell YOUR collection? I don't think so! Let me put it this way, 95% of the time when I buy something on ebay, as the winning bidder I am paying much, much less than I would have paid directly to a collector if they had sent the items to me. As an example, recently I bought a very nice item on ebay for just less than $1000. The seller had bought that item from **me** about ten years ago for almost $5000 (and I paid a high percentage of that for it from my original source). The item is still worth at least as much as that original nearly-$5000 price. ebay is just not the right place to be selling it. I use a set-and-forget sniping service and the vast majority of the time I have to actually pay only a fraction of my top bid (which is good because so many of them have misdescribed quality, even from sellers I personally know!). So, yes, cheaper. But better? For whom? IMHO, not for anybody that owns the stamps now or in the future.

The whole subject of disintermediation (resulting from use of online auctions) and its affect on philately is fascinating. It has been highly disruptive. IMHO, it has significantly reduced the value of most collectors' collections. At the same time, I am convinced that the liquidity ebay provides has kept many stamp dealers from quiting. Many dealers have completely restructured their businesses to be ebay sellers (and are they ever going to get a rude surprise someday when the elephant rolls over on top of them).

The whole concept of an entire "marketing cycle" having to take place in only a 3-10 days is absurd when compared to a time when a "marketing cycle" was typically 30 days to 5 YEARS.

The speed-up of the "marketing cycle" has resulted in greater liquidity, but that liquidity comes at the cost of a reduction in price.

A seller's items are subject to the vagaries of whatever external forces affect the sales venue in that 3-10 day auction period. For example, the recent ebay password hacking incident (depending upon whose statements you believe, the actual sellers or ebay), resulted in a significant decline in sales and in sales prices for auction format items. Weather, natural disasters, wars, news events, elections, political scandals, financial scandals, etc., etc., all affect the number of eyeballs watching ebay and the willingness of those people to spend money. When everything has to happen in a 3-10 day period, the validity of the prices as a reference source is not valid IMHO.

I quit selling on ebay several years ago because it became "all for ebay and none for the seller". We did a reasonable amount of business (we were paying ebay about $1300 in sales fees per month if that is a measure), but it was not actually profitable -- and it was extremely annoying. I am told by many current sellers that the situation is much, much worse now than it was then. Yet this is the driving force behind defining market prices? I don't think so.

If only Delcampe -- which has ethical standards that I believe in -- could more quickly develop greater prominence on this side of the Atlantic.

Great points from a respected professional in the stamp business.

By the way, I agree that if Scott actually sold stamps, they would have a better "feel" for the market. But the result might not be what you are expecting.

However, I guarantee you that then a lot of people (and probably some of the same people!) would be complaining that Scott's setting of their prices was self-serving in some way. Worldwide, there are a number of catalog publishers that also sell stamps (and also some whose pricing is quietly controlled by dealers who sell stamps). The market treats the prices in such catalogs differently than the catalogs published by non-sellers.

Mystic sells stamps. They have a catalog (big price list) of U.S. stamps. They probably sell more stamps (both in value and quantity) than most or all other individual stamp retailers in the U.S. I am guessing, but I bet that their catalog (price list) is probably more widely distributed than is the Scott Catalog. What do you think of their prices? (I need an emoticon here for "rhetorical question".) Especially in light of the posters talking about ebay pricing being a reference source?

I suspect that the majority of members of this forum have never seen a modern Mystic catalog (price list). It's a big deal.

This brings up another of my favorite subjects: The dealers who pay real salaries to real employees have much higher real expenses than do the loners, part-timers, small ebay sellers, etc. Whose prices are more "real"? The companies that are supporting several/many families or the individuals making an extra buck in the spare bedroom? Both categories are critical to the survival of philately.

I really don't think there is any correct answer to most of this.

For the new guy around here, you certainly are presumptuous.

Well, every retailer in my area uses the Brookman catalog for US Retail Prices. When I walk in to buy a stamp. the guy immediately pulls out Brookman and quotes me that price. And this is done at the 3 closest stamp and coin stores near me.

I can appreciate the effort dealers go through to acquire stamps and break down collections and sell them.

I don't ever plan to sell my collection. I don't collect for monetary value, and I don't have any high value stamps. The final fate of my collection will either be in my kids hands or in the hands of the young collector I gift it to when I decide I don't want to do this any more.

Right now, when I look at stamps, if the stamp is being sold for any value below catalog, I assume I am getting a good price and pay for it. Foreign stamps are where I struggle.

If all the retailers use Brookman, and eBay/bidStart sellers don't use Scott, then what value do Scott catalog values have?

I support a couple full time dealers as well as buy and sell on ebay. ebay is first and foremost a way for me to get rid of my duplicates (I just sell cheap bulk lots) and turn them into better stamps that I need for my collection. But I shudder to think if that became the only way to buy or sell stamps in the future. I do place value on a dealer's expertise and large stock, but sometimes it's hard to pass up that stamp you see on ebay at half the dealer's price. But I absolutely will *not* use ebay to buy expensive stamps that are commonly faked. Those will come from a reputable dealer with a lot of experience in that area. I'll pay more (maybe a lot more) but at least I'll have some peace of mind that I have what I think I have.

I rememeber needing to buy some stamps. I found the strip I was looking for on ebay and the average auction price was about $5. I was hacking a stamp page and wanted the stamp right away, so I figured that I'd be willing to pay $10 for these stamps. I wrote down the Scott numbers and off I went with my wife to buy the stamps. We split up. She went into the stamp store with the kids, and I went into the grocery store to get a few things for dinner.

When we got into the car, she was complaining that the stamps had cost $25! I went and checked the guys ebay listings, and a pair of stamps he's selling on ebay for $100 can be had for as little as $10 and as high as $25. I support the guy by buying supplies there, and occasional stamps. But selling stuff for over 4 times what ebay is selling them for makes it hard for me to buy stamps there.

Yep, at the end of the day, I'm on a budget and a dollar saved on one stamp is a dollar that can be put towards another. I only take that so far, though, and don't extend that philosophy to buying faulty or questionable material.