Anthony's Llc Dismal PF Report Card = Follow Up To 10/23/17 Discussion

Actually that makes perfect sense to me. All things considered, if I want to put an item on extension, I would rather the auction house submit the item themselves rather than sending it to me and then I submit it.

It's actually better for all parties involved:

1. Saves time in transit.

2. Presumably, the auction house can gang items and save on shipping/insurance costs, not to mention if they have any sweetheart bulk price deals with any of the expertzing firms.

3. As a buyer, you only pay for the cert cost (at full price, natch) if/when the item comes back good. In other words, you're not fronting the cert cost.

I don't have a problem with an auction house having different parameters or restrictions if they submit versus if you submit.

revenuecollector, I agree about having the auction house send the stamp for expertization. Less trouble, less mailing cost, less mail exposure for me, usually faster return overall from expertization, etc. I always just follow the lead of the auction house, however. If they want to ship to me and have me exercise the extension I will do it that way as well. It could just be a function of which auction houses I use most, but the great majority of the time with my auction purchases, the auction house ships the stamp to me and has me exercise the extension.

That clause is for items that fail the first time around. The auction company reserves the right to try again...

One more action item for ebay: Allow buyers to specify certification for higher priced stamps and covers. The buyer would specify the service from a list, pay for the cert with the item and ebay would instruct the seller to forward the item directly to the expertizer. If the item receives a good certificate, it would be sent to the buyer. If not, it would be returned to the seller and the cost of the failed cert would be added to the seller's ebay bill and the buyer would receive a full refund. ebay has the necessary infrastructure to track shipments and could conceivably negotiate better certificate rates.

If ebay required sellers of higher priced items selling for more than a threshold amount, say $500, to be enrolled in this program, some of the worst listings would disappear. The threshold would have to be applied to the initial asking price or price realized if an auction. How many of the lots we now see on ebay would have to be offered, sold, expertized and returned to the seller before the abuse would stop?

The logistics would potentially be a nightmare. If it comes back with a good cert, presumably the buyer pays for the cert, but when? Up front? If not, it would be a mess.

Scenario 1:

Buyer agrees to buy item on extension. Pays for item but not cert fee. 2 months later cert comes back but buyer has changed their mind or somehow cannot pay. Now seller has to eat a cert fee for a cert that they never asked for.

Scenario 2:

Buyer balks after the fact because they didn't realize that the cert would cost 5.5% of the $10,000 Scott value of the stamp, and only wants to pay $40 not $550. Seller has to eat it.

Scenario 3:

Remember now, all of this has to be AUTOMATED, no human intervention here: Item was listed as having a major fault. Cert comes back with an additional smaller fault. Buyer balks. Seller has to eat cert cost.

There is a reason why auction houses have the policies that they do... and those don't align with ebay policies:

1. No refunds on lots if it comes back with a good cert ( ebay allows 180 day refunds for darned near any reason).

2. Items listed as having faults cannot be returned based on a cert revealing other (lesser) faults.

You have to remember that ebay is RIFE with buyers' remorse returners. Adding the expense of certification to the mix would be a disaster.

Reading through the thread again with Scotch in hand it is striking how many suggestions for cleaning up the stamp categories in ebay there are. Some are relatively simple such as ebay actually putting a bit of effort and responsiveness into reviewing items reported for being not as represented or for Cartel type listings where the same stamp is sold over and over by different IDs utilizing shill bidders etc.. The certificate requirement suggestion is infinitely more complex but rather elegant. For every suggestion there are multiple rebuttals. There seems to be two general camps. One wants something done. The other is for the status quo more or less. It is what it is and let us just work with it. Given that ebay has actually gone backwards over the years in the policing area it would be a herculean task to affect change where ebay does not want change. It is a money maker for them and so why tinker. Buyers need to get smarter. The bad actors are here to stay. Heck, even the merits of a PF opinion are up for debate. I believe that it will stay what it is now and it will hurt the hobby in the long term. There is no real way to quantify the number of people burned and driven away by their ebay experience but I would surmise that it is not inconsequential. No way to predict what will happen or has happened when those people go to sell their stamps and find out that they are not what they thought they were. Or they resell the same stamp to another up and coming collector. Or their heirs take the hit. Things like this haunt the hobby in many ways and for a long time. Inaction or not trying is the easiest way to deal with it. I believe that most of us are better than that.

Sigh. You're missing the point. All of these Utopian pie-in-the-sky " ebay needs to protect EVERYONE!" mandates are utterly unrealistic from a business perspective.

You can wish for unicorns and rainbows all you want, but you have to be REALISTIC from a business cost-benefit standpoint!

Newsflash: ebay is not here to make you, me, or any other buyer or seller happy. They are here to make money and keep shareholders happy. That means that any policing/requirements program MUST be feasible from a cost-benefit perspective. It must be automated *OR* be able to be enforced by minimum-wage workers overseas. It cannot require specialized knowledge.

That's the brutal reality.

All these blue-sky idealistic morality plays on how ebay SHOULD do things cannot and will not ever take place if ebay cannot do it in a cost-effective matter, which means that unless it is a policy they can apply to all or a majority of categories, it won't fly. They have special requirements for ebay Motors (large chunk of ebay's revenue); they have the VERO program for copyright/trademark infringement (does not apply to stamps).

About the closest thing you've got is in the coins categories, any coin priced above $2,500 must be certified by NGC, PCGS, ANACS, or ICG. But coins/bullion are much higher volume/revenue than stamps.

It has absolutely nothing to do with inaction or not wanting to "fight the good fight", but so many people here are blinded by idealism and want to completely ignore the profit-based realities of operating a business... and all of this pales even more so when you realize that stamps constitute 0.X% of ebay's revenue stream. They simply are NOT going throw money into special programs that fix a "problem" that effects such a small percentage of their revenue base.

That's not being negative. That's being realistic.

If you want to exert man hours or your own dollars tilting at windmills, be my guest, but it is an exercise in futility.

You can gnash your teeth all you want and raise your fist at evil ebay for not protecting everyone, but much larger and more organized efforts have been tried and ultimately failed.

Even if you got the APS leadership, the ASDA leadership, the boards of all major expertizing companies to march in lock step and issue policies or statements re: ebay, it STILL would not be enough to make ebay change anything. In fact, they would be much more likely to say "Screw it, the pittance that is coming from stamp revenue isn't worth the hassle" and simply remove stamps from ebay.

I realize my viewpoint isn't popular, but hey, sometimes reality sucks.

P.S. About the only thing that MIGHT work is a policy similar to that of coins, where any listing above $2,500 would require expertization, but it would take a huge lobbying effort, and the difficulty lies in that in coins, certification is nowhere as fragmented as in stamps, in terms of the number of companies involved. In coins, you've got PCGS, NGC, ANACS, and ICG... that's it. With stamps you have PF, PSE, APEX, PSAG, and a myriad of non-U.S. based and specialty expertizers to deal with. Getting ebay and the major philatelic entities to agree on policies and expertizer inclusion would be a tortuous process... even assuming that the philatelic entities in question would be willing to undertake such a battle to begin with.

I was quite clear in my post:







False. Except for the APS, other US expertizing services offer reduced rates for faulty stamps. Also, if a stamp was altered, it would have minimum value and the cert fee would reflect the lower value. Since the buyer will pay up front, the cost would be known in advance. On the off chance the stamp is much more valuable, like a seller offering a Scott 449 line pair as a 450 line pair, the cert fee would not increase. Most buyers would likely pay an additional fee if the stamp was better than the seller assumed.

Condition is tricky, but ebay could add (or reintroduce) condition item specifics. For a while ebay supported "Unused" and "Used" for the Stamps category. Later "unused" disappeared. "New" is not generally applicable to stamps unless they are still shrink wrapped. An Additional condition values for hinged, no gum would be helpful if based on expertizer and Scott catalog recommendations. In addition to the stamp and the application, the title, Item Condition and Condition Description would be forwarded. Any variance from the Condition Description making the item worse than described would be grounds for returning the stamp to the seller unless the buyer agreed to take it anyway. Failure to note hinging or paper damage would imply that the seller believed the stamp to be never hinged or without paper faults. Obvious faults visible in the ebay image should not be allowed to replace a written description because images require interpretation or may have been altered.

I would prefer to see comments along the lines of helping to make a perhaps incomplete or infeasible proposal more complete or feasible and stop heaping abuse on someone else's proposal, defined as making objections based on falsehoods or facts not in evidence, a strategy too often seen in the political arena. This is still a hobby and it should be fun. It would be more fun if buyers got better value for their money. Stamp dealers are in the business of selling dreams, so why lie?

At the very least organizations like the APS and ASDA could put some effort into educating unaware collectors of the potential pitfalls of ebay specifically. All I ever see are rah rah articles on the greatness of ebay, the variety, the great material for exhibits to be found, the amazing world that the golden goose has allowed the little man to participate in etc.. If anything exists like that it is darn hard to find it. They should make it hard to ignore. They would not have to name names and put themselves at peril of legal action by bad actors (I think that threat is overblown anyway) but simply spell out to people that do not realize what goes on the ins and outs, what to look for and all of that good stuff. ebay is not going to do it. Rev and I are on the same page in that regard.

Time for a refill.

Any idea, plan, or scheme that punishes honest and knowledgeable sellers because of the actions of crooked dealers and stupid collectors is a non-starter in my book. I reserve the right to call it what it is - a bad idea. Now, if the expertizers could only get there act together and produce something more accurate and trustworthy and stop gouging collectors, we might have something to talk about.

Why is it that this collector knows enough to avoid two expertizing companies like the plague and have serious doubts about another and nobody really says a word? Why should anybody be forced to submit to them? There is a protected class but it isn't ebay sellers or the "little guy", believe me.

Furthermore, despite all of what I just said, nearly every bit of Clark's idea is already available to collectors. They just need to send the stamp in. It's that easy. The only difference is that in Clark's plan, the seller gets charged for the bad cert which would be fair most of the time.

ebay would greatly improve if they actually vetted accounts, not allow the transfer of accounts to others, and not allow multiple accounts. (These are all things that APS does with their membership yet they have struggled with turning this into a competitive advantage.)

In ebay's eyes any solution has to be binary; in other words it has to be able to be coded. The least cost effective solution is one that requires them to hire support people. The least efficient solution is one that requires a human to make subjective decisions.

ebay has 12,600 employees handling 171 million accounts and $82 billion in transactions. It has over 1 billion products listed, 81% of that is new merchandise.

So if every employee worked in customer support that means each employee would handle over 14,000 user accounts!

ebay lives and dies by its ability to automate procedures with code.
Don

They do, but I believe (someone please correct me if I'm wrong) you have to submit the item under that particular tier of service; a faulty stamp submitted under the normal service tier does not fall back to that lower rate. And therein lies another problem: differing tiers and speeds of expertizing services. Unless ebay were to negotiate special rates or services with the expertizer(s), the customer selection process could be fraught with user error, e.g., selecting the wrong service for the item in question.

Then we get to the economies of registered insured shipping. Most collectors and dealers gang their expertizing submissions in order to defray costs across multiple items. Under this system you would be paying full two-way registered insured shipping per item, unless you purchased multiple items to be expertized under the same transaction. Now you're adding $40-60 round trip shipping to a $29 minimum cert + handling fee.

Then there's APEX, which has a two-tiered pricing schedule for APS members vs. non-members. Does APS membership number now become part of the ebay demographics model? Who vets the validity of the user-provided APS number?

There's a reason that the numismatic categories enforce the certification requirement in order to list the item rather than making certification part of the ebay purchase process; too many variables and pitfalls.




And I would prefer not being lectured to that I have no right to disagree... and now disagreement is "heaping abuse"? Good Lord. Overdramatic much?

Seems to me a lot of this can be addressed with a more rifle shot approach. Have a 315? Can't sell it without a certificate, or at least without a warning screen that a seller shouldn't sell, or that a buyer should only buy that stamp with a certificate or a guarantee of authenticity, etc. I'd rather see specific targeted items that are typically problematic rather than a value level threshold.

Of course, that requires ebay to be able to recognize what is being sold,or for there to be a catalog number field that actually works....

That also assumes that the seller (1) knows the exact catalog number of what they are selling, and (2) is using the Scott numbering system.

What about someone selling U.S. stamps via Michel or Stanley Gibbons?

I think what you would end up with in this instance is nefarious sellers getting around the requirement simply by omitting references to any catalog number, e.g., "Rare blue Franklin 1-cent stamp LQQK!"

So, from the linked 8A from Anthonys, I follow the link to check it out on ebay.

Today, I get an email from ebay titled "US Stamps # 8a F Scott Value $800.00 NO RESERVE is listed by an experienced ebay seller, David".

Wow! Thank you, ebay, for the recommendation! Good to know this is an experienced ebay seller. So, ebay isn't complicit??

OK, yes, just a rant.