1. If the expertizing fee is $30 or $40 and up per item, getting just the top 20 items in your collection evaluated is going to cost $600-800, most likely more. For 95-99% of collectors, they won't do it. These fees are not cheap, and they add up quickly. It's too bad there's no alternative for the middle-level collector who has dozens of fairly valuable stamp items. If I could send my top 25 most expensive stamps off to be expertized at a much lower overall "package" price, I'd be inclined to do it. But for $1000 (25 items x $40), that's not going to happen. Better to ask sellers to provide certificates, but most sellers won't want to do that, I'd think, unless the item is worth at least a few hundred dollars.
The result of these fees is an expertizing regime that favors the wealthy collector, but not the average collector. A more important result of an expertizing system little used by most buyers of stamps is that a great deal of unchecked but fairly expensive items will always be floating around on retail or auction sites and end up in people's collections. In fact, if most items which should be questioned don't get evaluated (and it's pretty obvious they don't get evaluated), most bad items will never get caught. The current expensive system of expertizing stamp items doesn't do much to stop that.
The result is what we have now: Sellers of these items, who are either not checking them or intentionally misleading about them, have few problems. Expecting a retail "auction" site like
ebay to police stamp sales in a way that reduces their own income is a fantasy.
ebay doesn't even employ a single stamp expert. They don't care. Raising an honesty or quality issue with
ebay offers them no profit and wastes their time. If the money is rolling in, sellers, including
ebay, are not going to care. Between
ebay's corporate apathy and the fact that policing bad selling habits requires far more expertizing of stamp items than can ever realistically happen, I don't see many options short of hiring a lawyer. Caveat emptor. Dog eat dog. Welcome to late stage stamp collecting capitalism at its roughest and readiest.
If I were buying a high dollar item, I'd read up on it as much as I could and, unless I could afford multiple expertizing fees, I'd inspect it carefully and only buy if a return was allowed. And I'd buy only from the most highly-rated dealers (See #3 below).
In short, the system of expertizing stamps may be useful to protect investment by wealTheir collectors purchasing high dollar items, but it has only limited use for all other collectors. And waiting for
ebay to "do something" is about as useful as holding your breath.
2. I don't understand the misreading of the comment about Stamp Auction Network charging a fee. Yes, of course it's the auction house that charges the fee. Isn't that what the commenter was intending to say? SAN is simply an aggregator of auctions. The comment was intended to point out that paying a fee -- any fee, paid to anyone -- was something you don't have to do when buying retail. For a $100 retail stamp purchase, you pay $100 (probably a tiny bit less since many retailers lower prices a little for larger purchases). In an auction, on the other hand, a $100 purchase gets no discount, and also charges a buyer's fee. That makes the auction purchase $110-120 for the same item a retail dealer might charge $95 for. Isn't that clearly what the commenter meant? I'm not sure why taking the comment so literally was necessary if his intention was clear.
3. As for Anthony's (and others) repeatedly selling misidentified stamps, even cheating customers, what's the protocol on this? Why not have a forum to list the quality of stamp firms so collectors can see which have a good and bad record? Would that lead to a lawsuit or other problems? Consumer ratings are used everywhere today from consumer rating websites like Yelp, consumer rating magazines, to seller's own website where purchasers leave ratings and comments. How else are collectors supposed to know which sellers they can trust and which they should avoid? It's a consumer's right to know this.
Could this forum develop a rating forum for stamp purchases? In doing so, one suggestion: Poor customer service needs to be separated from quality of products (forgeries, misleading descriptions, altered stamps, etc.). These are two separate things and customers often mix them together misleadingly ("It's a great car, no problems ever, I love it, but I didn't like the salesman"). A list of comments about, and ratings of, auction firms and retail sellers, including
ebay, would be very helpful -- particularly if it had comments. Comments are essential because it's good to ignore comments (and ratings) that seem petty or irrelevant.I'm sure we'd all be wary of any firm that repeatedly sold misidentified, altered, or forged material. That's how you deal with seller problems. You don't do it by waiting for
ebay to "do something" they will never do. And you don't do it by relying on a stamp evaluation system that costs average collectors more than they can afford. Why not do something like this?
Posted 01/16/2018 01:19 am
