We Close Our Eyes & Still See Stamps.

Thanks Donna.
Yes the florals are very well watered.
It did take a lot of effort. Going off on the wrong tangents was very frequent.
I was in a position where I had to find a way to do it.
We would still like very much to hear from you. We share so much. John and Family

Great method avoiding chemicals John! Thanks for sharing.

What kind of soap are you using? Dish soap (mild) or something stronger?

Hi Puzzler!
A small amount of Dish Soap.
Just a few drops does so much.

Thankfully in Australia we only have water based gum to deal with.
It is nice, to still be able to take stamps off paper. John

Thanks KGV.

I haven't tried to soak any modern Australia self-adhesives off paper yet myself.

Are they similar to Canada self-adhesive stamps in gum makeup in that there is a water-activated layer between the gum and the stamp Or are they all gum?

Canada stamps soak in lukewarm water (perhaps a bit of soap would help?) (mostly) in 15 minutes I think. There are some harder ones and I think with this modern type of glue it is designed to become more one with the objects adhered to over time, so that a stamp on paper for years takes longer to soak off than a stamp just applied recently.

I have worldwide kiloware here but haven't delved into it too deply yet. Not recent but mostly older (1990-2005) I think. Recent stuff is so expensive. It makes me droll (ha) but it is easy to restrain myself at the prices.

I really do not know for sure Puzzler but that is the way I have looked at it.
The first soak to me seems to be dealing with the gum in between the stamp and the self adhesive gum. It just will not work if the stamps on paper are not totally dried out from the first soak.

One of the other directions I went in to get these stamps off paper was to freeze them. It does work but damaging the stamp is very easy to do when the stamps are frozen. John

The next step is to make a packet for the market place. Plastic containers have the bundleware for 500 different Australia Decimal stamp packets.



The best way we found to make the packets was in plastic containers. Makes it all neat and stops the summer wind from blowing the stamps about.



This is the way we store and mail our packets.



A packet of stamps spread out for an image to list the stamps into the market place.



Happy stamping John and Family.

John:

Isn't there something masochistic about taking a huge pile of stamps, organizing them into little identical piles, and then shuffling them all up again ???

Don't we all shuffle stamps

After mounting, into which goes a lot of
sorting and shuffling, sundries get placed into the
duplicates file, all messed up again.

We should have a world wide "circuit sheet" service,
we place all our duplicates (under $1) on sheets and
mail them around, take the stamps you want free,
replace them with your own duplicates and mail 'em
on to the next fella/gal.

I'm all for it - Rod how do we get it started. John and family - absolutely mind boggling story. And John would would send me all the stamps, so I can put them under my mattress. WOW!

Not sure how I missed this thread but what an amazing job. Your very fortunate to have family that gets involved . I have 3 of my grandkids interested but if I had them help they'd be thrown in the air and jumped on like a pile of leaves. ( the stamps not the kids)
I'm looking at 5lbs on paper and not sure if I want to take that on or not . For some reason I feel the on paper has at least had less eyes going through it.
I still have that KGV medallion here for ya just send me the envelope. I think you should wear it as you over see the family workings!

It is now 8 weeks ago that we started to sell our first stamp packets.

ebay was a real challenge to post a halfway decent listing. We are now listing in .com, .com au, .co uk and all are different in the way they want you to list. The cost to list changes also .co uk is the most expensive by far, .com is the cheapest by a long way, .com au is in the middle. At the minute .com uk is not charging us for the gallery picture which basically halves the listing cost on the cheaper offers. .co uk is our weakest link and the cost of listing will most probably stop us listing with them.

In 8 weeks we have sold 15 listings and at the minute we are listing 15 lots per week. A couple of days ago we finally received an ebay sellers rating.

For my wife it is great stuff for her after sorting 50kgs of stamps off paper and learning the ways of ebay to see her account grow a little from the sale of the stamps. Now my wife can use this money to help our 2 daughters. One with song and music and the other in the mission field. This is what started this amazing journey. All working towards the same goal and all the little bits have added up to something solid that we can do to help our 2 daughters.
Always Happy Stamping! John and Family.

Thanks for keeping us up to date John,
fascinating stuff.
Please keep posting on how you perceive selling
because this is new and very interesting to me.

I have just hired a dummies book on ebay
for a read.

Rod I have not forgotten and am still trying to get ebay listing right.

But for you to start I would recommend the free listing offer for 99c starting prices. You get 15 free ones per month. We have started listing 5 of these per week to help with our oldest daughter.

It is easy to come up with the stamps for 99c listing. We put up 150 KGV 1d greens all have faults. It was listed for 7 days, on day 5 the listing went from 99c to $10.50. Another 99c one listed at the same time has a bid of 99c for 150 world condition varies, I do not think this one will go up much more.

Your image knowledge will get you over the line. If you can get an image up on SCF you should be able to list your image on ebay.

Title and description is the other part to get together.
If you are selling Australia stamps it must be your 1st word in the title. Australian when you search it has 300 choices, when you search Australia you get 3,000 choices. So Australia wins!

Other title words like international post stamps does not bring up anything but high values does. Only 55 characters to use here so it takes a bit to get the swing of it but it works.

The description is where you can have a more fuller description of what you are selling.

With the free 99c listing we are using .com.au because of the high Aust dollar.All our listings now are with .com. The cost of item A is 70c to list on .com but costs $1.20 on .com.au. for the same service.

When we search Australia stamps on .com.au all the .com listing come up as well. 95% of our .com listings are sold to Australian's.

Have a go Rod! All the best to you. Always Happy Stamping. John

Extra Bit!

Just below the image listing spot there is a spot called gallery.
This is a must to have with your listing as when people search they find your title and gallery image. If you do not have it nobodies going to click on to an empty spot. And that part has been free as well with the 99c listing.

Cheers,
mixed results then.
You should get 10c each for your world, surely,
you will probably get that on SCF.

159 sideface greens is OK, perhaps a little low
I think you would get a little more perhaps
at a WA local auction.
I suppose depending on the pmks.

Going by the perceived state of the US economy
and possibly losing their triple A rating,
seems everyone over there is broke. :(