Which Of These Four Is The Most Irritating To You?

Don

What or where is this "dedicated database"?

Jim

Hi Jim,
Stamp Smarter has a community project database with close to 2000 ebay listing reviews. Users can enter their review of any listing, it has fields for all the appropriate information including seller name and catalog number. It also supports contacting the seller and recording their response.
Don

I'm with Don on this. We all know there are guffaws, goofs, fools and philatelic philanders aplenty in on-line auctions, and while they may occasion a random chuckle, it WOULD be a better idea to database them for future searches.

Nothing meant against those who post these here, but it doesn't do much in the long run...

I took a look at the website.

I admire the desire to document listings of incorrectly described stamps.

I am unsure though how often it is referenced on a daily basis by online buyers?

My main concern is that, in most of the entries that I looked at, only providing a link to an ebay page is only useful for three months or so.

After that, the images are gone, and after a bit longer, the listing itself is simply no longer available.

So the reader is left with an old criticism that was written about a particular item that they can no longer view, to perhaps reach a conclusion of their own.

Once the percentage of "corrected" lots by the sellers are compared, the end result seems to be that some sellers are on top of things, and some are not.

Maybe the overall intent is disclose those in the latter category? I don't know.

At least here, I at least post the image and the link and/or any relevant text from the lot listing.

The end result is to hopefully educate and entertain, and also to perhaps warn other collectors what to look out for, from some certain sellers.

Lastly, I don't know what posting this particular item under discussion in the website would accomplish in the future, seeing as how the seller has zero feedback, and may or may not be around in the future.

All this being said, I might see what I can do to list questionable items both here, and at Don's website.

Jim

Jim,
Every listing review on Stamp Smarter includes an archived image (screen capture) of the listing; obviously this was one of the most important things to archive since ebay removes older listings and the images. The archived link is shown below.





When Stamp Smarter was first developed a few years ago, I came under a lot of criticism that I was somehow trying to be the ' ebay police'. But the intent of the site was to simply help hobbyists make better educated purchasing decisions. As the site has grown I hope that everyone can see that it is not a commercial site, it is not harvesting emails, it is not selling banner ads. Its intent to is address a significant issue in our hobby; buyers who might know the material but have few ways to do discovery on who they are actually buying from.

It was important to me that the Stamp Smarter Review Community Project not be simply a whine-fest but rather be a tool which could proactively seek improvement in listings and help those sellers which were receptive to making improvements. I mean, what kind of seller would not be interested improving their listings to prevent costly returns and unhappy customers?

Posting listings in this forum has value too but it can be hard to find them in the sea of other threads and posts (especially for new collectors) and there is no way to get the 'big picture'. By compiling the statistics a more accurate picture can be developed than just a single thread to draw conclusions from. I think it is important that folks do not form an opinion over a single listing.

Stamp Smarter has also championed the use of Community projects (a first for our hobby and as far as I know the only site to do this). In other words, members can (at any time) download then entire database to there own computers. I feel that when people spend their time and effort contributing to online resources, they are the ones who 'own' the content.

So for example, the folks who are contributing to the 1851-57 Plating Initiative project can easily download the entire database as a spreadsheet, PDF, XML, or Word document at any time they want to. Stamp Smarter is simply a facilitator, the content is actually owned by the entire community. I am not aware of any other online philatelic website, forum, or census which 'gives back' to the contributors like this.

On a final note, the Listing Review was the first Community project database and is need of an update. This is in-progress and makes entering Reviews quicker/easier and has improved reporting capabilities.
Don