Postal Historian Daydreaming Of A New Ebay Photo View Option

This is a complete pipe dream as I have seen how ebay caters to the stamp collecting crowd. However, I find that I have more success finding postal history in the postcards section rather than the stamps section. I spend countless hours digging through postcards, clicking to (hopefully) see the back, trying to find that needle in a haystack.

What if there was a view option to click "Show 2nd Photo First"? Obviously this would not work for the people who don't scan the backs. But how cool would it be to scan through the postcards section and be able to look at stamp usage, postmark, routing, auxiliary marking, etc.?

I know of at least one online postcard seller who has a "show backs" option they rolled out in the last few years. I quickly went back over all their stock and it was a complete joy. Even found a rare marking for a collector friend of mine.

All those countless apparently irrelevant postcards could be a potential holy grail if I was looking at the back instead of "Best Wishes" or "Greetings."

A man can dream...

You can also stitch the photos for the front and back into one picture for the gallery image. The free program - IrfanView is good at this.

I appreciate the dealers that do show both sides in the gallery image. As well as the people who really describe their item and say stuff like "PM 1906," "mailed", a town name, and the like. Most of them seem to be scanning the back just to show condition of the card overall, not really to sell the philatelic element. Talking to postcard dealers, most of them are oblivious to what happened on the reverse (or "front" in mailing terms), it is all about subject matter and condition.

Some dealers postcard or philatelic may or may not take the time. I've picked up some nice bargains from antique dealers who don't care a bit what's on the back. I sell on ebay myself and I make sure no stone is underturned when describing items. Example - https://www.ebay.com/itm/Sweden-194...AOSwLopapVhn It's work, but usually my sell through rate is higher.

I must admit that, whilst I collect stamps, my interest in postcards lies in the picture on the front. When I sell cards on ebay, I try to scan the backs of those that have been postally used. As a seller, this is a bit of a conundrum. Do you target your stuff at the postcard collector or at someone like Arrows who's interested in the postmark.

Great work, Battlestamps. Learning from an item by researching and selling it can be almost as much fun as collecting it. Hold it, gain from it, and send it to a new happy home.

And my proposal is the answer to this conundrum. Scan both sides, put the image side first and the back second. List it in postcards and it defaults to the postcard collector. The postmark collector comes along and clicks "Show 2nd Photo" and I get a gallery of used backs. And if the front matches the back, a huge added bonus and higher bid!

If there's one thing I've asked ebay sellers for more than anything in recent years it's the non picture side of a postcard. I've picked up some lovely postal history as a reult!

Un-ashamed self-promotion....

https://www.hippostcard.com/store/docgfd-postcards

Morning all,

What if besides listing the condition as used or unused also providing a place to enter date of postmark, state and post office name? It would be great if these were searchable items, too.