Ebay Market Place Changed About October 1 This Year?

Morning all,

About October 1 I noticed a sharp drop off of new material (covers) being listed and few if any new U.S. based sellers showing up on ebay? Several U.S. based experienced sellers keep relisting material that is either over priced for the market or lacking an interested buyer. The total number of covers especially postal history items keeps increasing due to items being listed by sellers outside the U.S.?

Is this just another factor in this era of an ageing collectors and dealers?

The Antiques Road Show on PBS recently did two shows on treasures from all fifty states. Each item from 2002 to 2015 was shown as originally broadcast with their updated estimated selling value today. The only item shown with a significant value increase was an item signed by A. Lincoln. Two-thirds to three-fourths of the items showed a decrees in value some by over half. Our material is holding its value somewhat better than most if we use this metric as a view of the general state of collectables today.

Is the ebay market just catching up with the times?

What are your thoughts?

Coincidence or ebay farking around with its search/display algorithms.

I find either of those far more likely than any actual change in the market.

Many people do not understand search engines and the intent of those who run them. Think about it, if you owned a large search engine (whether it is Google, Bing, ebay or Amazon) would you publish how it works? Of course not, you do NOT want everyone understanding how it works since they would then all rush to tailor their content to get a higher search result ranking.

But even if they do not publish how their search algorithms work, people start to figure out how they work by trial and error. After 6-8 months this information begins to spread and everyone starts dialing in what they do to get better and better rankings.

So search engines developers constantly change the search algorithms; a never ending 'cat and mouse' with users intentionally meant to prevent anyone from monopolizing the search result rankings. They plan these changes and purposely rolled them out every 6 months or so.
Don

I'm looking for covers generally, too. I did expect a surge of new stuff as "stamp season" rolled around but didn't see it, either. There have been new things that are actually desirable that sell very quickly -- check out the sold/completed sales because we'll miss seeing these unless we constantly check out ebay (I don't). Of course, the good stuff always goes first. But after seeing all the overpriced bad quality junk being offered over and over, I also wonder "where's the nice clean collectible stuff?" Pro sellers could be more involved with traveling to shows rather than being around home during the summer; but that's just a guess.

I'm not calling this a trend yet except we'll keep seeing overpriced faulty covers being offered and unsold since there's no penalty to do that. ebay has always been kind of a junkyard venue anyway. Still, there could always be a dispersal of a major or semi-major collection sold piece by piece and there's suddenly lots to try to buy.

As for Antiques Road Show stuff, you'll find that collectibles prices and interest are cyclical, and the cycle might even be longer than our lives. In 2005, a big surge of collectible prices, money was cheap. 2015 was post-crash and money wasn't so easy to throw around. There was a report from 2016 that said US buying power was at 1995 or so levels. So we could be making more in 2016-17 in dollars, but our disposable income is proportionately lower. That's our hobby money. And the metric for whatever counts as middle class in the US is down to close to 50%; those are the typical collectors, I think. So you'd think respectable stuff would be coming out from people deciding to sell, but I haven't seen that.

HY-BRASIL says " ebay has always been kind of a junkyard venue anyway" REALLY ! Thank GOD,it is . Thousands of experience collectors have been looking at ebay for over 15 years with many gems found cheap and more important many thousands of nice items found to add to their research ,study and collection .
You can call it ,WHAT IT IS but the fact remains it is a mountain that contains interesting stuff for advance collectors . If you don't like the junkyard, any reader here can go to the APS store or any of hundreds of dealers sites where stuff is marked up at full retail .
Let me give you my personal story ,I made tens of thousands of dollars from all the stuff I purchased from dealers and stamp auctions during the 1980's and 1990's ,were talking tons of collections ,yes, maybe 3 tons of stuff .Every penny plus more thousands of dollars went right back into public stamp auctions because I knew I had a marketplace to unload stuff I didn't want . So in summary it is safe to say ----EBAY gave the hobby a shot in the arm ,that it was lacking .

Not knowing what hy-brasil's intent was by this statement, I can only go based on my interpretation: IMO, "junkyard" is an inaccurate term, and one with negative connotations at that.

I would instead use the term "flea market", meaning you can find anything and everything, but finding the "diamond in the rough" may take a lot of work wading through the rest of the material.

IMO, the word "junkyard" implies that everything there is junk, which is certainly not the case with ebay.

Floortrader is correct. ebay has knocked down geographic and financial barriers for people across the planet, not just in stamp collecting, but in virtually all walks of life. If not for ebay, I actually believe many types of collecting truly would be dying if not dead already.

People who denigrate ebay tend to be stalwart traditionalists or people that compete with ebay, e.g., a certain dealer and philatelic forum owner that calls anyone who buys on ebay "dumb bunnies".

Smart dealers embrace ebay and not only sell there but also use it as a source for inventory.

To me "junkyard" implies a automobile yard where late model, hard to find parts are available.
Don

I agree with you. I have been a very active buyer and seller for about 10 years. The supplies of what I have sold well back in the beginning but I think that the people interested in my area of air mail got what they needed and moved on. Part of the problem is that there are very few new collectors. Prices have always been all over the map. I just remain selective, of course, and in doing so I am find less and less material that I need. If you wish to communicate with me more on this please feel free. Ray.

I don't know anything about the stamp market, but I know I have been selling jewelry and an occasional antique or collectible for well over 10 years - in my opinion things have slowed down on ebay somewhat, buyers are more cautious and don't want to spend a lot of money for what they want. It seems tougher to sell there now to me. Probably ties right in with the state of the economy, hopefully things will get better soon in terms of sales. And I do understand calling ebay a junkyard, there is lots of over priced junk there, but it is like Don said, some of that junk can polish up into something quite nice, but you have to be very selective when buying, my rule for buying jewelry is that it must always be signed and no damage - I learned that the hard way - I suppose there would be some sort of rules for stamps, if anyone has any guidelines for buying stamps on ebay I would dearly love to hear them :) I have already seen some stamps I would like to buy but am holding back as I go through what I have here.

It has been reported that ebay is "testing" new search algorithms and choosing designated victims somewhat at random. I noticed that search went south for a day or so in early November, returning a rather truncated set of results. The worst moment was when the search jumped to what appeared to be a virtual category tree leaving out about 95% of the expected search results. Fortunately that vanished for now, but is likely to return.

What are the implications? I am guessing that it may no longer be possible to find all stamps with a given Scott number in one search. This could be disasterous for less favored sellers. I notice that listings containing external web site links or http: in image URLs now require an extra mouse click to see the full description. Also, noncompliant listings may drop to the bottom of search or may not appear at all.

I am waiting for some other shoe to drop killing all hope of buying or effectively listing quality stamps on ebay. Buyers who wish to see the largest possible selection of stamps may be hurt the most.

Sorry, junkyard is a pretty loaded term, but I did mean that ebay has always had a spectrum of stuff that includes quite a lot of low-end and faulty stuff that would be shunned in other venues. Some flea markets have gone high-end nowadays as have a lot of thrift stores.

EDIT: Let me add that like a lot of auto junkyards, ebay is categorized but is far from being organized like a retail store. For auto parts, you need to do some research to make sure a certain model has the exact part you need, plus you need to look for alternate makes and years as a backup. For ebay, the "logical" or "easy" category is not always the category used by the seller. For covers, searches only by state and town name can often fail to find something that's definitely for sale when the category is unknown. Filters will not find everything. It probably depends on how much you like the hunting process, if that's more to you than just finding something you're looking for. I do like th hunt but there's a limit for me.



It's a regular occurrence nowadays, maybe once a week on different weekdays. It happened this last Monday. Very hard to look at newly listed stuff. Even sellers' stores get cut down. Just wait for a day when everything is up, Saturday and Sunday for sure.