Amos Publications Survey

Amos is sending out a twenty or so question survey to subscribers, apparently someone is thinking they need to begin offering 'bonus points' or some buyer's club to increase sales. I took it and wound up sending them the following comment:

'I spent several minutes on this and could not get your system to accept it. Question #6 has four parts, I could only check off one at a time. Every time I went to the next line and checked my prior answer got deleted.

Maybe you need to offer vouchers to customers who waste their time answering a poorly designed survey. '

A little harsh, perhaps. But I hate spending time on something like this and then not being able to submit it because of some glitch that ought to have been caught. Fair warning.

*** Moved by Staff to a more appropriate forum. ***

I got the same survey and had the same issues and was just as annoyed.

I did reply to the email telling them about the issues but whether it does any good or not who knows.

I did find out with experimenting that some of the questions with four choices had to be filled out in priorities. In other words rate the four choices from 1 to 4 and not use the same number for more than 1 choice.

Very poor survey to send out and I hope they have not paid any one for it yet.

If this is what they got from brain storming, it is a big oops to be polite.

I suppose it's for the better that I've never given them either of my e-mail addresses.

I think they are lost ----------They are stuck with a huge inventory of product that is not selling . They have to be lost to figure out pricing of stamps for their catalogs ,sure high quality stamps have auction prices, but if dealers are not making price list and not running full page ads for sell offers how does a catalog determine price ,other than the stupid idea of raise prices 2-5% each year .

they are not arbitrarily raising prices 2-5% per year

EYEONWALL---You miss read my posting . Let me help you understand the 2-5% thing .Back in the 1970's there was a written article in the APS journal or in LINN'S Stamp News about catalog pricing . The author was interviewing a few stamp dealers and catalog publishers about stamp pricing . The idea for selling better stamps to customers ,was that catalog pricing needed to show a steady increase year in and year out to both sell catalogs and stamps the market needed to show higher prices. It was also claimed that if actual prices couldn't be found that a number was used to show a 2% to 5% increase in pricing .
So today catalog publishers are hard press to find any establish pricing from ads and price list , so with the need to sell next years catalogs ,they can't just take the old standard of using the 2%-5% numbers of the past .

In some ways, the current situation warrants the need for good overall price list. In olden days it was easy to use a popular dealer's price list that was updated regularly to use a reference for pricing. Catalog prices were always considered optimistic. Dealers loved it (recall the 1988 Scott discussion?). My benchmark is Scott 1053. Brookman lists at $75 and Scott lists as $50. You can get it off ebay for $25 (fix pricing),

Now, most all are online in estores and cannot easily get a list. For example. Bardo stamps is a mostly full stock US dealer (after Scott 500) but no way to just get a simple price list. I use their site. If anyone knows others, I would like to know. Now, for Scott 1053 Bardo sells it for $57 so over Scott.

As an aside, for more common US single issues (less than $1), I find ebay seller pricing to be higher than the traditional dealer...not much selling for less than a $1. I am sure this is due to ebay fees.


The other observation is that we used to have dealers that ran several comprehensive full page ads (recall Raymond Snitow) in Linn's. Now if a modern dealer tried this, it would be many pages just because the number of US issues so not affordable to publish a list in Linn's.