Why Are Featured Member Sales Prices So High?

This entire discussion has ZERO to do with why kids do or do not collect stamps. And some do, I volunteer with a group of kids every month. This thread is about YOUR problem with pricing vs. catalog values, nothing more.

Your absolutely correct, I'm sorry.

My wish would be to have a more realistic pricing system than what Scott has to offer.

As has already been explained, that is asking for the impossible. At least until all the stamps in the world are owned by one person. Then you MIGHT have a more realistic approach. Then again you might not.

You don't like 70%. I know a show dealer who makes a good living selling at mostly 80-90% of catalog value.

You do have one, a more realistic pricing system, if you have the motivation to find it. Follow and research the marketplace where you are doing business and you will begin to understand pricing.

Just an example, but, if say ebay is your market place and Duck stamps your interest, then get a feel for pricing by examining the material, the quality, completed listing prices, demand, supply and so on. Over time you will develop a sense for pricing if you stick at it. Then peg your pricing to the details in the catalog. But in the process you will likely spend a wad for the experience.

If that's too much work, then the catalog is your fall back for pricing and no one is to blame for that.

I don't mean to stir this pot, but at some point someone will put together a way to harvest selling prices and present an actual average selling price for many stamps.

We have had this discussion before and there are indeed many obstacles to do this but technology is there to pull it off. Swedish Tiger site used to compile auction results for some stamps and this approach may well represent a first step. And of course many folks manually do this when they use ebay's 'sold' search or do a lookup on Siegel.

Overcoming incorrect listings and dealing with condition variances will need to be addressed but is 'doable'. There will need to be some kind of incentive to encouragement or allow harvesting. But all of this has already been done for other industries, it is just a matter of time before this happens for philately.

A few years ago I would have thought that a company like Amos or SG would be a player in this technology but clearly this is not the case. Amos can not even manage to keep a web site functional and SG appears to be struggling to figure out what they want to be.

Stamp catalogs and albums are a tough marketplace, these items tend to hang around for many years; often passing from collector to collector before finally being replaced. We have become familiar with the 'special knowledge' that it takes to understand the actual market value based upon a catalog value. (i.e. 'it is back of book, is usually X% of catalog, is in X condition, is X rare, and cancels like this usually have X value) Anyone who can pull this together will have a substantial market advantage.

But in the same way that technology is slowly pressuring the traditional album production (print your own) I think we can expect the same for value guides and catalogs. This is an area in which technology can greatly improve the situation and probably will within the next 5-10 years.
Don

The problem is that an average price will have no meaning, since every stamp is unique to itself in terms of condition and centering. As long as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the only way to understand pricing is to study many thousands of stamps, as has been mentioned earlier.

Understood and agreed to a point. But how is that different than let's say cars? Every used car has its own set of unique attributes such as condition, mileage, after market add-ons, etc. Yet there are many, many sites in which calculate average prices for cars. Ditto for houses, every one different yet it is easy to look up comp prices for a specific area.
Don

It's not different for COLLECTIBLE cars. But ordinary used cars have a book value, just as stamps do. And the prices are based on that book value and adjusted for individual factors. People keep trying to compare manufactured products which are fungible with collectibles which are not.

One of our problems is even though we're dealing with like new material they can be different. The only material that I consider new is what I get from the postal service in Kansas City. Everything else I consider mint which by my definition is previously sold but never used. There are other things to consider such as centering which can increase or decrease the price even though the stamp is mint. And then you get to other conditions such as no gum uncancelled.

The cost to put together the catalog would be a lot of money and I fear the sales would be weak given that many would use the library along with other factors.

I disagree (somewhat). An average price would be as meaningful, more or less, as catalog values are today. Its purpose would be to give one a ballpark figure of what a stamp is worth. All but the greenest newcomer will understand that ugly copies are worth less, exceptionally nice copies worth more.

Even if someone created a chart of market values for any given stamp in every conceivable grade and condition, it still wouldn't be completely accurate in every circumstance. A given stamp might be more (or less) valuable to me than it is to someone else, I might be willing to pay more for it today than I was yesterday, etc. Maybe a more accurate or useful method would be to provide a price range for stamps, low to high. I don't see catalog publishers doing that anytime soon, for a variety of reasons.

I agree with Artful. Any metric can be argued against; metrics are simply numeric generalizations. And like any generalization, it s easy to come up with exceptions.

I think metrics make some folks uneasy but in my opinion a metric can provide a good information if you are flying at 30,000 feet. Key is to use the metric properly, understand how it was generated, and keep in mind that there is always more to it then a single number.

But like an Old Car Price Guide or a Red Book for coins, a accurate price catalog has its useful place. Having to have 'special knowledge' to be able to determine the actual market value of a stamp is just silly in my opinion. Coin price guides seem to be better able to reflect true market prices; and many are based upon the value of volatile metals markets. I think we have been cutting Amos too much slack, but given recent events I guess we ought to just be grateful they are still in business.
Don

" All but the greenest newcomer will understand that ugly copies are worth less, exceptionally nice copies worth more".

Exceptionally nice by whose standards? Ugly by whose standards? And how much less, or how much more? That is the problem in a nutshell. Those are all the variables that are decided by the buyer and seller, and no one else really matters. You are simply changing one standard, catalog value, for another less useful one, average value. Which cannot be accurately measured in most cases because for most common stamps (for the sake of discussion lets say cat value $100 or less) the average dealer will have several (possibly dozens or more) at different prices and unless every transaction from every dealer plus ebay plus auctions plus collectors selling to other collectors is included it will not be a real average, just a made up number based on a relatively small number of sales. The answer remains, see lots of stamps and know what they are worth in various conditions, and don't be fooled into thinking a stamp must be scarce simply because it has a high catalog or retail value, because 95% are not.
And in any case one could argue that catalog values are no different then averages would be, just a baseline from which to start, just a guide.

If you don't like the price, make an offer. If you don't like the offer, move on. Dealers often price things based on what they think are hot with collectors. If you want what everyone else wants you may have to pay a premium. It's a free market.

"Coin price guides seem to be better able to reflect true market prices; and many are based upon the value of volatile metals markets".

But those metals markets can be checked every day to adjust prices. And coin conditions are much easier to see and more difficult to fake then stamps are. Unlike stamps, it's very hard to repair a coin invisibly. And all coin values are for specific grades that do not appear to be as fluid as stamp grades are.