Advice For Selling An Inherited Collection On Ebay

Every day I look at the worldwide collections on ebay, I often see items that claim to be inherited and in most cases these collections are outrageously over priced. However the offering I am going to talk about seems very sincere and with a few improvements to the presentation may be well worth the opening bid.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/28240215123...RK:MEBIDX:IT

Let's look at each picture;



Picture 1 shows 2 pages of large US plate blocks with a face value of $16 which is worth about $8 on ebay. What I need to know is how many of these plate blocks are included and what is their approximate face value? I also would like to know if these are stuck down.







Picture 2 and 3 show pages from the Minkus albums with Hungary stamps. It would be much better to show a couple pages of China or British Colonies or some early stamps from some countries, Hungary stamps add nothing to the value.





Picture 4 showing Canada Albums is good but we need to know what's in them, are they full of stamps or are they empty albums?





Picture 5 shows UN, again like Hungary there are many better areas to show perhaps pages from the Canada Albums.







Picture 6 shows some of the WW albums, again what is in them, how many stamps?





Picture 7 shows a nice pile of Russia albums. Russia is popular and could add a lot of value to this offering and we need to know what is in these albums.





Picture 8 Useful as is.





Picture 9 shows boxes and boxes of glassine but we need to know what's in them.





Picture 10 OK




Picture 11 is bad any collection that includes these subscription items is suspect.

It is very difficult to adequately show a large collection with just 12 pictures. If you are limited to 12 pictures you can make up for this by counting items or face value or using more detail in descriptions. The real problem is that building an effective ebay listing is very difficult for a person that isn't a collector.

I hope the person selling this item will see this post and perhaps can improve the listing and make a sale.

Note; If the moderators think this post should be in the "Auctions" area I understand

So why does subscribing to commemorative pages seem like a red flag? They are not worth that much but nothing wrong with them.

I guess it's a personal opinion but there are 4 things in an auction description that keep me away. The worst is water damage, after that I avoid 'Many CTO", "includes UN" and "Subscription collections". The UN can just be bad luck but CTO and subscription collections indicate to me the level of the collectors interest. I watch many auctions on SAN and I often see items that include these items sell at low prices.

If it were only, or substantially, those sort of things, I'd agree, but I know that, as part of my collection of French stamps, I've picked up various things of this kind. Doesn't mean I don't have the odd good stamp there!

The loudest red flag to me is that the plate blocks appear to be stored in one of those awful sticky photo albums and are assuredly cemented to the page by now. Not even worth the time to soak 'em for postage.

You can sometimes get good value buying messy collections, but unfortunately these photos aren't showing much positive (more pictures of the A-Z glassines! more inside the albums!)

Not having enough pictures would be a deal breaker for me, I'd bid on what I could actually see, rather than pictures of boxes and albums.

Yes, I often bid on items unseen at real auctions, but $2,500 is very high to take a gamble. It IS a problem showing any sort of collection on ebay, though, unless you have the scope to use more than twelve photos.

I don't think I'd even try to sell it as an entire collection unless you could picture all of it, or nearly all of it. If I could only do 12 pictures, I'd probably parcel it out in smaller lots that would fit with that many pictures. You'd probably get more money for it that way, anyway. If I bid on collections, I generally only bid on what I actually need for my own collection, with maybe some minor consideration for what the duplicates are worth. In other words, I'm only bidding based on a portion of the total value of the collection. If it were a smaller lot for which I needed all or most of it, I'd be bidding based on the full value of the lot. I know I'm not alone in bidding this way, and yes I do win auctions, though certainly not every one I bid on.

I've been selecting and bidding more conservatively this year, with effect. My only successful bid was a whimsical £30 for a bunch of 1830s prints. These proved pretty disappointing, but they're already at more than double what I paid on ebay. But I really am at the stage where I don't want to house more piles of duplicates, let alone pay for them.