Quote:eBay currently is and has been the number 1 place for selling and buying stamps for years. Forget Delcampe, bidStart and other sites they just don't equal
ebay. I agree with Don fraudulent behaviors and greed simply follow the volume. With 162 million users there's bound to be a few dishonest sellers & buyers among the main stream of good ones but any other site who could ever hope one day to match
ebay could expect the same behaviors patterns to follow.
ebay is simply the best.
Not so fast! Although
ebay is the dominant site that attracts the most potential buyers, it has many flaws, some self-imposed. For starters,
ebay has no clue about the needs of sellers of small lightweight items like stamps. Discounts for Top Rated Sellers are available, but requirements include tracked domestic shipping, a very expensive proposition. Currently a First Class Package costs $2.45 compared to 47 cents for a First Class letter. This means that less expensive stamps are less likely to be offered by sellers who care about their reputation. The Final Value Fee for stamps was reduced to 6% by
ebay in part due to competitive pressure and perhaps the realization that most
ebay stamp sellers would not qualify as Top Rated Sellers.
Fraud on
ebay was a significant problem, especially in the early days when a number of sellers were buying stamps, altering them and then reselling them under a different
ebay ID. Active intervention by the American Philatelic Society was required and for a period of time
ebay had a program to have questionable listings vetted by trusted experts. More recent reports suggest that the program is no longer active.
Oddly enough, the Top Rated Seller program may have achieved what Delcampe and BidStart have failed to do: eliminate or reduce the vast quantity of low priced items clogging the site. This is compounded by what seems to be a weak search on Delcampe and a rather opaque search on BidStart. Neither site seems to have mastered the ability to present the most interesting or valuable items first in search. As a result, sellers who take the time to create accurate listings with good images find their work buried and virtually unfindable.
While
ebay hold the high ground, almost everyone in the stamp business is hoping that a viable competitor will emerge. Larger volume sellers have started their own web sites but with mixed success. While
ebay supports international business fairly well, the Global Shipping Program presents an existential threat if it becomes a requirement. Currently it is less expensive to send a first class letter to Canada or Europe than it is to mail a First Class Package in the United States.
As long as
ebay continues to allow a few high volume sellers to offer inadequately described or misdescribed stamps a big opportunity will exist for a viable competitor to emerge. However, lack of an API for automation may deter some sellers from switching. While Hipstamp may emerge as a competitor, it lacks support for SixBit and other third party tools that allow sellers operate efficiently and avoid slow clunky web sites provided by
ebay and competitive sites.
While the
ebay site is annoying to sellers, it is also hard to use for buyers. Searches are slow and often inaccurate. Gratuitous slow loading ads often cause search pages to freeze, delaying navigation. Worse, there is talk at
ebay of presenting "personalized" search results. Does this mean that buyers won't be able to view the stamps they want to see no matter what they do?
Posted 08/20/2016 7:18 pm
