Unpleasant Ebay Experience

Hello All,
I am sure I'm treading on familiar ground concerning ebay and suspect material. I was searching for "Inselpost" items (Germany WW2 feldpost stamps and covers from the Aegean Islands) and found several from one dealer. But the problem were the cancellations from 1942, but the overprinted stamps weren't distributed under late 1944 and early 1945. I contacted the dealer about one particular stamp from Leros and pointed out the glaring discrepancy between the cancellation and issue date. I got the reply this morning essentially saying "i sell these as not expertized ... I am not an expertize ... don't bid." I had no intention to bid, but trying to help. I guess it just bothered me that a number of individuals did wind up winning several Inselpost material. Maybe they're building a forgery collection.
I apologize for this venting.
Kind regards to all,
seafarer

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

Seafarer, I understand your feelings. I have tried the same thing you are doing but with different stamps, to no avail. Some of the folks that sell on ebay are just not as honest as they should be.


Peter

At least twice a week I contact ebay sellers who have misidentified a US Scott #24 as a more valuable type. The majority respond positively, but some do not. These either ignore me or thank me for my input and then do nothing. The reaction of seafarer's interlocutor seems excessively rude.

SEAFARER ---Sorry to hear your past experience with a seller on ebay . But this type of seller behavior has been around for the past 150 years and it is more common than you think .
There are many types of buyers and it sounds like he is fishing for the right buyer , YOU ARE THE WRONG BUYER .
Just to give you a explanation of one type who would buy what he is selling is the WA-LA buyer . This type of buyer only buys cheap mixture lots and packet material ,it is offensive for him to pay more than 50 cents a stamps . This poor souls needs some wow factor in his collection to show his wife and kids and impress friends who come over to his home .
So he goes on ebay and see a Inselpost stamp that catalogs at $2200.00 selling for $17.00 which is high for a fake overprint. If you press him ,he would admit it could be a fake but hope against hope he thinks the seller doesn't know what he is doing but he has no interest to have it expertise . He digs deep and buys the $17.00 stamp and mounts it in his collection .
Next Christmas the family is over for dinner ,so he pulls out his collection to show his family what a serious collector he is and a expert on stamps . Then WA-LA shows everybody his $2200.00 stamp and a catalog page showing $2200.00 he now feels like a serious collector who has a valuable collection .

I also have contacted sellers about descriptions, but also just to offer advice to the ones who obviously know little about stamps and are selling some ratty thing asking big bucks.

Last year some guy in Utah listed a Scott International with an utterly appalling collection of cheap stamps, asking thousands. I tried to explain he had it way overpriced, he threatened to report me for 'interference'. Said he knew it was valuable because he got catalogs from the library, went through and added up the full value of all the stamps, etc. He closed with 'have fun playing with your stupid stamps.'

I backed off but had a lot of fun watching him relist it 5-6 times, going lower and lower. Last I saw he was asking under $50 with no takers. There are a lot of - frankly- morons out there selling junk they find at garage/estate sales who know nothing about what they are selling. The seller referenced by the OP sounds as if he does know what he is doing, making him worse than the guy I interacted with, IMO.

Seafarer,
If you were writing to a seller in Germany, it's possible his English isn't very good, so possibly his rudeness wasn't intentional. When I have to write in German, I'm never quite sure if I am coming across as rude, or just stupid.

Don

As a seller, I like it when someone contacts me if I have something not described correctly. There's just too much philatelic knowledge out there for one to know it all. It's a way for me to learn.

I have noticed that German translated into English can sound demanding and rude.

Then again, I fear some of the folks in Germany I have interacted with were indeed, rude.

Hello again,
Thank you for taking the time to reply. It's always good to get additional opinions and experiences on eCommerce.
I guess what really bothered at the time was thinking inexperienced or naive buyers spending good money on bad material. I know I was a "victim' in the past, but it spurned me to dig into my little world of philately a lot deeper than I would have imagined.
Personally, I think the dealer's English was very good. Greedy? Maybe not. Open-minded? Definitely not.
Just two cents more on my part and I'm moving on my quest for late WW2 Field- and Feldpost.
Kind regards to all,
Seafarer