Why HipStamp Is About To Suffer A Huge Store Exodus.

They tell you exactly why they are increasing fees. They are asking sellers to partially fund the growth of the company.


The tradeoff in accepting outside institutional investment is that those investors will insist you show quarter-over-quarter growth, and eventually a return, so they can "exit" with strong profits. If their $3.5M offering (need for capital) is under-subscribed at $1M, then the capital to placate Series A investors has to come from somewhere.

Financing summary from the leading VC tracking site:
https://www.crunchbase.com/organiza...ip-ecommerce

Related article suggesting they seek to ride the wave of interest in collectibles that has followed press on NFTs:
https://wraltechwire.com/2022/03/23...ollectibles/

SEC filing to allow up to $3.5M in private equity offering:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/...mary_doc.xml

Always preferred Delcampe to Hipstamp to be honest, much larger inventory (Delcampe 25M+ listings vs Hipstamp at 6M+). It is more Europe-oriented to be sure but can often find good prices on Commonwealth and USA items, in part due to most sellers not being specialists in non-Continental Europe material. Have done dozens of transactions on Delcampe and all have been satisfactory.

My experience selling a few US items on ebay has been that they're real turkeys - so bargains to be had in the UK for US purchasers, I suspect. I imagine that the same applies to Delcampe.

I heavily utilized Delcampe when I was collecting Russia and liked it. I tried Hipstamp for a while and stopped bothering due to lack of selection AND they really ticked me off with their aggressive and non-stop spam which continues even now after dozens of complaints and emails with Hip. Based upon my interaction with Hip customer service regarding the spam I 100% conclude that Hipstamp lies like a rug, and I despise liars. They will NEVER see me again.

Hipstamp has come to their senses thankfully. From an email I received - "given the feedback we've received regarding the listing counts, we've decided to not modify the tiers. We will no longer be changing the listing counts for the Basic and Featured subscriptions, so they will remain intact. Basic will allow up to 10,000 listings and Featured will allow for up to 100,000. Given that, you won't need to change your subscription."

Obviously enough people complained to get through to them.

~Greg

I find that a bit bizarre, did they not bother to get a feel for the change before pulling the trigger? Did their need to increase revenues just go away?
Don

Glad they came around. But like Revenuecollector I abandoned them when ebay sync broke. I'd love to have a second outlet after ebay but I don't see any other platform that would have enough value-add for a US classics seller outside of ebay.

I love the smell of napalm in the morning !
If you look at the HS message board, the number of stores that said they were shuttering was staggering, so I think HS saw the writing on the wall (they would lose out in the long run since HS would become a ghost town).
Yes, the strength of all the stores together managed to get this turned around.
And, fwiw, before this revised email arrived, I was offered a 35% discount in store fees which still would have almost tripled my annual costs, so I rejected it and asked if they could do any better. And they did (because they HAD to)! LOL

I've been organizing a ton of lesser/moderate value duplicates as well as country material I am no longer focusing on in order to sell on some online sales/auction site. Not valuable enough or concentrated enough to interest one of the main auction houses, such as I used for my complete U.S. collection. Given the discussion here about the concerning/strange chain of events and on other threads referencing HipStamp, including the one talking about their own store, I'm wary of using that venue now.

If it were my company, there would be some people clearing out their desks and going home without jobs.
Don

Me thinks that Hip has a self-image problem. They look in the mirror and see a Ferrari when in actuality they are a Transit cargo van.

The Necromonger in me agrees with you, but the Furian in me makes me wonder if it wasn't a scam set-up to make the increased rates more palatable (note that the monthly fee for a Basic Store went from the proposed earlier $9.95/month to $11.95/month in the revision, albeit keeping the 10K of listings available).

"wonder if it wasn't a scam set-up to make the increased rates more palatable"

not a very wise way to do things, getting your customers all riled up and them trying to talk them down off the ledge with a more palatable offer

It is having some growth issues. The reviews at glassdoor have some interesting tidbits:
Posted March 15, 2022.

Sounds like the price of a beer, tea or coffee could produce an interesting conversation with that employee or former employee..


Also the sell by date for a "startup" is five years. Hip ecommerce passed that a couple of years back but still thinks of itself and its corporate culture as a startup. If Hip can't make the hyper-space jump soon, it will just become more internet space debris.

Its real issue is that it was not snapped up by a large buyer and now has to make a go of it on its own. The fact is there is no large buyer out there for specialty collectible item retail-internet sales companies. Not to mention the corruption in some of the collectibles markets, even ebay took a hit with that subject.

And just a reminder that circumstances change even when the is a bigger buyer, or multiple bigger buyers. Remember "Myspace" is still around but so are Model T cars.

Hip needs to remember when you are making a common product, if you don't achieve at least one of these, less expensive, better value, faster, an improvement or more inspiring to your customers you are wasting time and money as well as just stroking your own ego.

Edited to add one " " " and nothing else.

As a buyer, HIP has been become more and more attractive to me. Until very recently, the quantity of decent higher value material that regularly comes up for auction has been better than ebay. It has dropped off considerably in the last month or two for some reason - mostly junk now.

Their newest feature, "live bidding" is pretty good, except the lots are too close together and it goes way too fast (interval between lots should be at least 30-45 seconds, showing end result of one before moving to the next). I think it would actually be better if slowed down to a third of current pace. It could also use a help button to explain how it works for first timers.

Hip's search is weaker than ebay's (doesn't AND or OR search keywords)
Hip's SORT/Order is MUCH better than ebay (except there's no sort by most/least bids or the ability to find items with 0/1 bids, etc...( ebay advanced search).

My favorite HIP feature is to order by catalog number.