How Much Does HipStamps Charge For A Sale?

Is it cheaper than ebay? I just wonder if there is a cheaper place to sell stamps. The average 10% ebay+paypal fee is really high.

Seems like you ought to ask Hipstamps that question.

Peter

@Petert4522

I was hoping that some people selling on hipstamps can answer the question :)

Tang:
Let us know if this is not what you are after.
I have not sold via Hipstamp.

@rod222

Thanks. Wow, it is as expensive as ebay. Why would I go to a smaller market place if it does not have a price advantage?

The standard fee on ebay is 10% if you don't have a store ($20 or $25/month, depending on your commitment), so you're paying that ebay store fee to get a comparable rate. And that store fee gives you 250 listings, if I'm recalling correctly, right? Plus 250 auctions, if they're in one of the collectibles categories. So you're paying quite a bit more on ebay for 250 fixed-price or auction listings and another 250 auction listings.

On Hipstamp, for $5.00/month you can list up to 10,000 items, so it's a pretty low-cost way to offer a lot of inventory. ($15.00/month gets you 100,000 items.)

It certainly doesn't have the eyeballs of ebay, but unlike ebay, it doesn't cost very much to "list it and forget it" until it sells.

Here are the rest of the details from the page Rodney showed you the transaction fees:

https://www.hipstamp.com/site-fees

I'm not affiliated with them except as a customer having a very small store there.

@Philatarium

Thank your for your information. I have a basic store on ebay paying $20/month. This way, the final fee is 6%. It pays off if the sale exceeds $500 per month comparing to standard %10 final fee. As a part-time dealer, I don't have much time dealing the stamps. I only have about 20-30 sales or about $1000 per month. So I guess hipstamps isn't good for me?

I've been looking at Hipstamps as well as an alternative to Delcampe. Delcampe jacked it's fees in August with a pretty hefty hike that favors high end sellers. Sales on Delcampe are pretty dismal although it doesn't cost anything to list an item.

ebay is still the best place for auctions and listing new stock, but Hipstamps appears to be a decent place to list lower priced items and have a low cost store. The interface appears to be fairly friendly. I peeked at Stamps2Go too, but it looks like a website from the early 1990's - no thanks.

ebay also has a minimum price of $1 for fixed price listings, making it impractical to sell cheap, common singles there. Those cheap stamps can add up, and they can also draw buyers to better stamps you might have offered for sale.

I have only looked at hipstamp briefly as a BUYER and the prices do not seem to be much better than ebay.

It doesn't matter which company or organization we are discussing; trying to support large numbers of low value transactions is not what any successful company wants to do. The cost per transaction is what they look at, imagine the cost of mediating hundreds of thousands of transactions under a single dollar or Euro.
Don

Also, allowing $0.01 listings with no fees for listing encourages a lot of low quality, low-value listings. That might be great for the beginner or general collector, but for others it creates a lot of trash to have to wade through.

That's a huge problem on hipstamps, and previously more of a problem on delcampe, which the fee hikes have been meant to minimize.

Being able to automate hipstamp listings based upon ebay listings makes it a low-labor proposition for the ebay seller to also have their wares on another venue, but the listing pages are fundamentaly different between the two platforms (I loathe the hipstamp approach of putting every aspect of the listings on different tabs that have to be clicked on rather than a single consolidated page that can be scrolled through).

What's worse is that listings that get ported from ebay to hipstamp frequently are not ported in their entirety. There are certain listings that I have viewed on both platforms and the hipstamp listing is missing images and descriptive text compared to the ebay version.

The best thing I like about Hipstamp is that the search results are much more usable, and you can actually sort by catalog number. You're much more likely to find the stamp you're looking for on HipStamp the first time, without having to wade through extraneous listings or tweaking your search to minimize the noise. I'd actually use ebay's search (as opposed to just watching sellers) more often if their search function worked like HipStamp's.



And boy, does HipStamp have those in spades. Shopping for low-value singles is just about the only thing I do on HipStamp, but I'm often taken aback by the butt-ugly cheap stamps some sellers offer. It's not that unusual to find a seller trying to sell some common-as-dirt 50c CV stamp with a corner missing for 5 or 10 cents. And they even took the trouble to scan the thing! I'm often amazed by sellers who have thousands upon thousands of stamps at $1 or less, all of which have scans. I can't imagine going through that much effort for nickels and dimes like that.