Curious About Webstore Anyone Heard Of Or Tried It?

Floortrader in your model who is bidding up the medium price collections at the public auctions? I saw a nice collection at Rasdale last week and it was estimated at $2500 and it got knocked down for $6500. My ebay sales are good, but I'm getting squeezed at the purchasing end, but I never see the collections I lose pop up on ebay. Where is the material going?

Ken

I think the answers are all related to the internet.

Pre-Internet
Logistics (finding and getting to philatelic sources) more difficult
Philatelic material availability lower
Prices held higher


Post-internet
Logistics simple and easy (just get online)
Material availability high (every hobbyist is now suddenly a 'dealer')
Prices pushed lower


Pre-internet obviously favored dealers and middlemen. Without the internet, collectors of every kind had a much more difficult time connecting with the objects they desired. This allowed other folks to make a good living finding and selling the items to collectors. But once the internet changed the way we connect to others, all collectables become easier to find and easier to buy.

Frankly we should be happy that prices have not completely tanked to the penny range. We are collecting little bits of paper that many times were printed by the millions or even billions.

My opinion is that being a stamp dealer today is exponentially more difficult then in decades past.
Don

Don I completely agree and I often wonder if I'm helping or hurting the hobby. My stamp purchases and sales combined are well into the 6 figures and if ebay didn't exist my purchases and sales would be 0. Is this good or bad, I am helping people who have estates to sell and I am redistributing these stamps to collectors. However I am definitely
a participant in the race to the bottom.

Some might say I helped drive the bricks and mortar dealers out of business but the ones I knew either decided it was time to retire or lost their stores to fires or lease increases, none of them said it was competition from the Internet.

Going back to a point you made a few days ago with the Internet it is very difficult to judge the health of the hobby. I think there are a lot of collectors that don't belong to APS or go to shows but are happily building their collections via Internet purchases.

Ken,
I think in years past it only took hard work to be a successful stamp dealer. This is no longer true. There are hundreds of thousands of hobbyists who work for 'free' so trying to compete with them hard.Today's dealer has to work hard but also be very, very knowledgeable to be successful.

Of course the new and easy connectivity also opened the door to more fraudulent behavior for some.

I do not understand those who argue that technology drives the loss of jobs. No doubt it drives changes and evolution. My kidney doctor told me he was fearing driverless cars and trucks because of the jobs that would be lost. He was standing there beside my dialysis chair. Oh the irony. 40 people sitting there connected to technology that didn't exist 50 years ago, they employ over 100 people in that facility alone!

I am sure that Wilbur and Orville could not have predicted that their technology would expand into the industry it has today. Or consider the automotive pioneers at the turn of the century. What they did has explode into all kinds of society impact; including auto jobs, motels (motor courts), petroleum jobs. Autos promoted growth into suburbs, allowed women to get out of the house and come into their own.

The internet is a significant paradigm shift which is not close to being finished with driving change in our society.
Don

I would qualify the negative opinions here by saying that the internet has made it harder to be a stamp dealer dependent on sales of common, lower-catalog stamps, but far better for those dealing in specialized or higher-catalog material. Broad-based public demand for common material, where every town had a retail stamp dealer and everyone knew a stamp collector, is gone for good. Yet the internet has made it easier for dealers of higher-end or specialty material to find buyers and easier for buyers to find what they need. If anything, the internet has increased demand and raised prices for better material. Dealers of higher-end material do not seem to be suffering.

Chris

Agree that the internet has made it harder to be a stamp dealer dependent on sales of common, lower-catalog stamps as put by cjpalermo1964. One point is that I sell postal history, given every item is unique when we go back before FDC and look at stamped covers in the 1800s, you'd think it would not be difficult selling. But as mentioned earlier in this thread the word 'competition'. I see many sellers maybe they are hobbyists starting their lots at just 99c. This makes it difficult to compete. They are prepared to let the item go at 99c. I see no money in it the fees chew up any profit. I get luckier with more unique items like old ship letters or penny black stamps on covers. If I relied on the common material I would not last long as a seller. But what worries me is fraudulent practices. I often see sellers with similar covers I might sell for 20 bucks with multiple bids across all their listings, some of theirs going well above the catalog price. Example common Zeppelin cover going for over $200 on their ebay site from bidding, then one just as good on my site selling at only $21. The other sellers auctions set at private listings so you can't see who is bidding, then some covers in my mind on other sellers site that have been tampered with and are not original. I see seen one cover with stamps on it recently, some stamps on the back of the cover the postmarks did not line up with the stamps properly. And it was called rarity and bids went over $100 for it. I won't name those sellers here but this practice seems to be going on. How can one seller be favoured so much to get such higher prices from bids every time when his material is just as good as mine? But my material is all original and often goes sold to cheap? Something seems fishy with some ebay sellers. Lastly I must laugh at sellers pricing sometimes, I seen a Mulready envelope on buy it now yesterday for only 25,000 pounds. These sellers think someone is going to pay that kind of money?

Duncan you have some great replies.

Your cover market has been strong for some time now even when things went soft for me like in Dec & Jan into 1st 2 weeks of Feb.

My market can be broken down into collector areas. All my main area is from the year 2000 to now.

Being S/A international Post.

High denominations.

Issues sets.

Mini Sheets

Kiloware

Mint No Gum.

S/A interpost is a great seller. But everything has been put away accept Kiloware & mint no gum. All the rest have failed.

KEN /KRELYEA -----It is hard to make a call from one lot at auction . Just to give you a idea on how it is done at FLOORTRADER STAMP AUCTION CO . our policy is if it is consign by you we offer it to our customers as cheap as possible but if we own it and list it in our auctions ,you will be paying dearly ,by one of two ways ,first with a high opening bid or a moving target reserve bid . We as a firm also place lots with low opening bids just to fill up the auction room so people think they will end up with bargins .
In the case where a $2500 lot goes for $6500 ,what happens at our firm is a customer really wanted a lot and threw in a high maxnium bid by mail and since no other bid was close we just had a staff member bid up to close to that clowns top bid but sometimes we let him have it a tick or two away from his maxuim bidding level just so he feels he won it fairly .
You know a firm like ours has to throw a bone to our buyers every once in a awhile . So we are always looking for widows and orphans who have collections that they will not sell to us because they don't want to be ripped off ,so we take their stuff and consign it to public auction and throw the bone to our auction buyers .

I know that last was meant in jest, but it makes a point. Aldrich, Apfelbaum, and Regency, amongst others all employ one or more of those tactics. Caveat emptor.

Thanks Revenue .......there is a lot of truth and educational information in that post .
My latest thing has been something I never seen before and is puzzled by it . A big made firm was selling a highly specialized collection and accumulation of a deceased collector . This collector had 15 to 20 lots in the auction with his name listed in each auction lot so you knew it was his material. But each lot due to the unusual material identified it as his . I am sure his estate was paid accordingly .
Then two auctions later there was two lots of this same material up for auction but didn't have his name connected to it .That puzzled me into thinking the stamp auction firm held back some of his stuff and sold it later as their own material up for auction .

Years ago, Jeff Purser gave me a priceless piece of advice. If you are bidding on a "I'd like" lot and plan to low-ball it, give the bid to the auctioneer. But, if it is a "must have" item, use an agent. My classic example: I gave an agent a bid of $600+, he bought the lot for me for $60.

The amount of auction houses and bricks and mortar dealers in Australia that have gone belly up over the last 15 year is really sad. So many great sellers, friends & memories. Most of them have have passed over with nobody prepared to take on their businesses.

There is a new stamp dealer in Tasmania called Sandy Bay Stamps. He is young enough to understand the digital world and old enough to be stamp savvy. Sourced a lot of stock through this contact over the last 4 years or so.

He has gone against the present current and opened a shop in the Sandy Bay business district. All the best to him.

Hi Duncan

Have you had any movement with your new listing site?

Any traffic that you can see?

Always Happy Stamping.

Yesterday I took active content out of 280 ebay listings. Took me all day, how will big sellers handle taking active content out of hundreds of listings? Whilst I amended them I noticed a large number of items simply had no views at all. Maybe Cassini has chucked me to the bottom of the long queue of seller listings. Still many regular buyers from past not returning to my ebay shop. I'm moving some from BIN to auction and hope they get seen. Terrible since we pay high fees that your listings don't get viewed. Some do but many don't. Bad luck for me? Because I spent all the time on ebay I had not got many more listed on webstore yet. The plan is to list more there but the time is always running out. A few vews on webstore but none sold yet. Will keep trying to add more if ever I get spare time. Postal history market has crashed in my view.

Duncan can you explain this for me. I have no idea. Have missed the boat here big time.