Will A Loss Of Bidstart Cause A Rise In Stamp Prices On Ebay

Will ebay have enough competition from other stamp buying sites that offer BIN, to keep them from having a "monopoly" on BIN and BINOBO listings?


-IBFS

What are BIN and BINOBO?

I thought that bidstart was simply being folded into Gibbons's marketplace?

Yup, Bidstart is not going anywhere any time. And BIN is Buy It Now. BINOBO is a mystery to me also!

Peter

I think BINOBO means "Buy It Now or Best Offer".

to make prices go up any good amount you would need a lot of new people to start collecting. Stamps dont have an intrinsic value like gold and silver.

Delcampe is growing big enough to be a more than adequate replacement to Bidstart should Gibbons decide to do something silly and close it (or something similar in function) as they integrate Bidstart into the company.

Bidstart is currently so tiny that its disappearance will have zero effect on ebay business or pricing. Delcampe may be a viable alternative to ebay for certain collectors, but for others it is a complete nonstarter. For the material I collect, Delcampe is useless.

BidStart may be morphing but it's not going away. PayPay will go away as an official payment form, however.

Bid Start tiny ???

There are 3.6 million stamp listings on Bid Start, 3.7 million stamp listings on ebay.

Delcampe leads them all with 18 million !

The total number of listings is probably not what the poster meant when he said 'tiny'. Understanding the financial situations of both ebay and SG is fairly easy and from a financial (size and performance standpoint) ebay is huge and SG is tiny. If anyone doubts that SG is financially struggling they can read this SG article "More random thoughts after reading the Annual Report 28/07/15" http://www.stockopedia.com/content/...0715-103726/

In this article the author outlines how SG has changed direction and how their basic earnings per share has dropped, how their dividends have dropped, how their philatelic sales have dropped, how their visitor numbers have dropped, and how their expenses have risen. BidStart/SG is clearly struggling while ebay is growing and thriving financially.

Of course SG and ebay are very different companies with very different approaches to making money. ebay recently has shedding off companies while SG has been acquiring companies. SG sells products and provides services while ebay mostly only provides services.

But on any financial level, SG is tiny compared to ebay.
Don

Number of listings is a red herring. It's the actual sell-through rate that matters.

While I cannot speak to Delcampe, I know firsthand that the sellthrough rate on Bidstart is MUCH lower than ebay. Several years back back I ran parallel inventories on ebay and Bidstart, and the sellthrough rate on Bidstart was less than 10% of ebay. That was just raw numbers of items; if you factored in dollar amounts it skewed even worse. I sell more in a month on ebay than I did in 2 years on Bidstart.

Knowledge is power. Thanks for the replies!




BIN= "Buy It Now"

BINOBO= "Buy It Now Or Best Offer"



-IBFS

Delcampe lists the number of items sold per month on its front page (post cards and stamps). The total for October so far is 469,331. Delcampe has more than twice as many postcards as stamps listed, so a fair average might be approx. 150,000 sold stamp items. It's also interesting to note that Delcampe has over 1 million members.

And I use Stamps2Go.

Thanks for identifying the acronyms.