How Does He (Billsbargainstamps) Ever Sell Anything?

Randall....
I know Bill Langs well....
He is a fair person.
He does much traveling to shows (across the country).
I know he is in Chicago this weekend....
BUT...he lists his phone # in the listings.
If you have a problem....call him.
That is the easiest thing to do.

Bill has historically taken liberties with respect to identification and undisclosed flaws on a regular basis. Back when I participated at Delphi, he was a regular subject of discussion.

Now with respect to pricing, yes his asking prices are insane. However, he will on occasion accept offers as low as 50% of the asking price (he may go lower, but that's the lowest I've personally gotten).

I would venture to say that I know him longer than anyone reading this board, at least 25/30 years (or more) and in that time, he was a major buyer and seller in our sales. He has a huge inventory. Managing it, I think is part of the problem, but there is no question that many folks believe his "Buy It Now" prices are, as Dan says "Insane". But again, there is no law against maximizing profit or greed. Both are legal and are practiced by many sellers. It just so happens that, with 70,000 ebay listings, his listings sort of dominate the landscape. Unlike Ken, I do not necssarily agree that is healthy - so many listings belonging to one seller and I think it tends to distort an accurate assessment of total amount of material available in the United States categories.

Regarding whether to file a complaint with APS, I am stunned that you would wait from March until November until you decide to think about actually doing it, but on the other hand, you are within your rights to wait that long and so long as you have "proof" of your contact attempts, you have a decent case. I am not a big believer in forcing a buyer to have to "chase" a seller to receive satisfaction. Any honorable seller should respond to, and address your concerns promptly. I am wondering whether you ever received ANY response from him - even once - about this item? If so, what was the reason he gave you for refusing a refund or credit? And if you did NOT ever receive ANY response, then something isn't adding up and I would also recommend that you call him.

"A more cynical perspective might question why the errors always seem to err of the side of being profitable"

Not cynical at all. Its part of his MO.

Shortly after completing my degree in economics, I began to learn about all of the real-world, operational-type reasons that rational people do rational things that do not fit our 'all other things being equal' & 'in the long run' models.

Speculating, a seller may adopt a preference for a slower pace of a higher-than-typical-markup sales because:

- it is getting harder to acquire new material, in part because there are so many easily-accessed options for disposing of collections nowadays - or, it is getting harder to acquire new material for reasons internal to the seller - so s/he would juset as soon maximize realizations from existing stock;

- s/he is getting bored-to-death (etc) with scanning & describing stamps, or with preparing invoices & packing & shipping, and raising markups is a good way of decreasing physical sales volume while maintaining some cash flow;

- s/he is experimenting with varying markups in order to discover the business model most comfortable, most profitable, etc.

I have a fair-sized pile of very similar postcards from a single publisher - eg, of post offices, of state capitols, etc - and if I were listing them for sale online, I would certainly consider randomly assigning a spread of prices (eg, U$D 5, 10, 20, even 100) to see what the cat dragged in, how quickly, and how I felt about the pace of sales at the different markups.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

He has a 99.9% ebay rating with more than 10,000 items sold so that must say something good about him? I found out the hard way, one must have a Scott before him/herself before any bid or buy - anywhere, not only ebay, then, maybe, one can make an informed decision. Good thing is, ebay seems to be standing by the buyer as much as or more than the seller.

Albert,
Just curious why you would believe that a high number of sales and high rating would indicate a seller is either good or bad? I can point to some sellers who have high number of sales and 100% rating who are actually known felons with long history of ripping off stamp collectors. And I can point to some sellers with less than 100% ratting due to unscrupulous buyers who use it for malicious purposes.

Mr. Langs has indeed sold 10k plus items but that is since 2006, this makes it around 120 items per month. A pretty decent number of sales but he also lists thousands and thousands of items per month.

But one thing that has really surprised me about some of the bad stamps sold of ebay is the number of them that simply get put into an album without further thought (or cert). With the experts saying that it is very possible that as many as 90% of all US Washington flat plate coils are faked, just look at how many are selling. Yet we virtually never hear about anyone returning them after determining they got ripped off. So what is going on? I can see two possibilities;

• 1. Folks put them in their stamp albums and fool themselves that they are doing a good job at purchasing from ebay
• 2. Folks find out and are too embarrassed to admit they got ripped off

My fear is that the majority of collectors are fooling themselves. I base this opinion upon looking at hundreds and hundreds of feedback left for stamps that are obviously misidentified or have undisclosed faults. Some are so obvious as to be laughable (i.e plate blocks sold under incorrect Scott number when it is easy to determine that that particular plate number wasn't even used for that Scott number), yet good feedback was left.

It is this lack of education and/or too much ego that keeps these buyers supporting the unethical sellers. Keep in mind that many buyers also invested in many other 'philatelic investments' such as mass produced gold stamp replicas.

And unfortunately many of us end up indirectly encouraging this behavior every time we announce that we have found a great deal on ebay. The truth about ebay is far closer to that of going to Las Vegas; the majority of people do NOT hit it big. Of course there are some 'winners', no doubt about it. But in general it is a crap shoot.
Don

I agree with Don. I think that most collectors would prefer to buy stamps without making much effort to educate themselves, diving right in to the buying, shunning books that could easily educate them. But I think they abhor spending their money on anything but the stamps and it becomes adictive.

In our public auction career, I can't begin to calculate how often we got consignments from collectors who never bothered to get expert help and ended up with a collection worth only a tiny fraction of what they believed it would be and generally, much, much less than they paid.

While sad, the old saying "you can lead a horse to water, but can't make him drink". As an example, we put printed flyers in our return mailings to customers using our expert service, for two very important CDs that are offered at a fraction on the real book price, yet sales of these are very, very slow and in relation to the number of flyers, tiny. Which tells me that the same guy who just submmitted 3 fake flat plate coil pairs doesn't really want to learn by buying a book that can teach them what to look for and what to avoid. Aquiring "stuff" is first priority. No matter how valueless.

Sorry to take this thread away from the actual subject, but Don's remarks inspired me to rely to them and expand a bit. I apologize. Back to Mr Langs.......

When businesses routinely over-charge customers IRL (In Real Life), they fail.

We might take a look at what is present IRL - and is absent on ebay - that allows a different outcome.

I would agree with Albert that 10,000 sales with <100 unfavorables would give me a measure of confidence about, at least, getting what I ordered.

If I want confidence about the price I am paying, I have to shop. If an hour of shopping saves me ten dollars, and I do not like shopping, why can't I just accept that there might have been ten dollars to save, be happy about getting what I'm ordering, and leave it at that?

My new rule: I never look at anything that I have bought until I have forgotten what I paid for it.

After all: it's my hobby, not my sport.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

I do not wait until I've forgotten what I paid, but I don't pay any attention to it. As an economist, you know what a sunk cost is. If I see something of Lang's that interests me, it doesn't take an hour to find out if someone else has it a lower cost. Only a few minutes. And I'll routinely save more than ten dollars buying it from someone else.

As for the time spent shopping, like you said, it is a hobby, so I don't really measure the time spent in terms of opportunity cost. Even if I don't save anything, by buying nothing, it is usually educational.

Basil

Fair enough, for you & me.

But we have an old saying in sales that precedes the first Nobel Prize in Economics by decades: "There are two types of customers. The guy who buys from the first salesman [anachronism] who walked in the door [/anachronism], and the guy who buys from the last."

The shopping burden is not the same for everyone. We all agree that many of our colleagues are, well, in their golden years. These folks figure-out how to use one site, or one seller on one site, and they may never budge again. Think of the "2.34 million people [who] still subscribe to AOL's dial-up internet service", and smile.

I wonder how many folks can a) find something they need/want on ebay, and can b) then search other sellers, on ebay or otherwise, and can c) find their way back to Point A.

Yeah, sure, the SCF Frequent Flyers can do it; but, like the children in Lake Woebegone, surely we are all above average?

Q/ How many times would someone have to be unable to work their way back to Point A before they decided to never again leave a page without buying what they want?

The burden on us to explain how it works for Mr Lang (et al), not to exclaim our astonishment that it does not fail.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

The seller under discussion has a great many items available at any given time in my specialty area. I would not classify his Buy It Now asking prices on this material as bargains, but I find most of them within the bounds of reason. I always make an offer for what I think is a fair price, and have had good results.

Collector's are not all dumbos. Very few.......

"He has a 99.9% ebay rating with more than 10,000 items sold so that must say something good about him?"

Bill W can speak to this, but I have read where ebay manages the feedback of their bigger sellers, removing bad feedback if the seller issues a refund. In other owrds, that % is meaningless as to whether you can expect a properly described stamp or not.

ikey - you are just making wild guesses.

"it is getting harder to acquire new material" - he has no trouble finding new material to buy. He buys regularly from auctions.

"s/he is getting bored-to-death (etc) with scanning & describing stamps, or with preparing invoices & packing & shipping" - he has people who do some or all of it.

"s/he is experimenting with varying markups in order to discover the business model most comfortable, most profitable, etc" - her has been operating this way for may years, he is not experimenting.