Proposed Merger Of The APS And Asda

If I may ask, what are the fundamental differences between membership in ASDA and membership in APS as a dealer member?

What would APS have to do to make the APS dealer membership more akin to belonging to an industry trade association?

RE: Online buying education
This is what is on Stamp Smarter
https://stampsmarter.org/BuyingOnli..._Buying.html

This is what is on APS
https://stamps.org/services/how-to-buy-online
https://stamps.org/news/c/news/cat/...h-confidence

In my opinion, discussions/articles on informed online buying needs to be realistic in presenting the potential pitfalls. This means avoiding the 'rainbows and puppy dog tails' spin that is typically seen in our hobby. Just recently in an email thread, one dealer strongly made the case that only the positive aspects of ebay should be presented. His passionate opinion on not putting a light on the level of fraud in the hobby was apparent.

Given that his company has a lot of influence, and that I assume that other high-powered dealers feel the same, it is little wonder that organizations like ASDA and APS will not stand up to them. Follow the money.
It also explains why I have little hope that we will see change from the position 'everything is great, misrepresentation and deception is rare, promoting informed buying decisions is not needed'.
Don

Edit: Let's call ebay and HipStamp what they really are; a 'flea market'. they are not a 'store'. With a brick and mortar store a merchant signs a lease, invests in inventory, pays for power, heating/cooling. With online flea markets like ebay and HS, I can simply sell my picked over material a few times a year. It is just like me driving over to the local flea market on 2-3 nice weekends a year to sell my unwanted stuff. The flea market management does not really care if the buyers get taken by some guy who misrepresents that used chain saw or lawn mower I purchased last weekend. They really only care if the sellers have paid them for the flea market 'space'. For the unethical, what a better place to unload crap than getting a 'space' where you know that the buyers have no real recourse with you. With a traditional brick and mortar store, this was/is not the case. You are trying to build a customer base; you know that if you screw someone they are likely to walk back in the door and confront you.

Yes, there are some good, ethical sellers on eBay/HS who try to do long term business the correct way. The issue is that they are mixed in with the those who are not and especially inexperienced hobbyists typically 'sort by lowest' to 'find bargains'. The biggest sellers on ebay have enough followers that they can start listings at $0.01 and they know that it will get bid up. As the rest of us know, you can end up giving material away doing this if you do not get a lot of traffic to your listings.

So it is little wonder that big sellers do not want anyone to point out the there is significant amounts of fraud, misrepresented, and mis-described listings on these venues. They are not too concerned about the optics of being mixed in with the unethical sellers in the 'space' next to them.

Don,

One issue I have is this implication that "professional dealer good, ebay seller bad". Not just here, but in philatelic magazines and in conversations with dealers at shows, etc. Sure, there are caveats and disclaimers from authors, but the tone is clear.

But it's incredibly hypocritical: some (definitely not all) of the highest profile traditional dealers are the worst offenders when it comes to misdescribing and/or overpricing material. As bad as (or worse than) the " ebay riff raff" sellers that are so often denigrated.

As an (informed) buyer, you actually have GREATER protections buying on ebay than buying from a traditional dealer directly. A 180-day return window on ebay, and with the latter, you are at their whim as to whether you can actually do a return or refund. Sure you could file a complaint with APS/ASDA and hope that something gets ruled in your favor months or years down the road, but how reliable of a consumer protection is that? If you paid via credit card you have some chargeback protection, but that is limited in scope and time, much more so than ebay's return policies.

But in all cases any recourse is completely contingent upon the buyer (1) recognizing that they have made a bad purchase or been ripped off... and then (2) being willing to admit this in order to act upon it rather than burying it out of shame.

If you are an informed buyer, it matters far less where you buy or from whom. If you are a clueless buyer, you are just as much at risk buying from traditional dealers as you are on ebay.

But this isn't new. This was the case before there was an Internet. One would argue that buyers have far more resources at their disposal today than years ago when it comes to philateicl research... but it completely depends on their own due diligence. No ASDA/APS/Whatever badge logo is going to solve this.

The ASDA doesn't police its own members, why would I have any confidence that some merger would improve this when in all likelihood it's going to be the same "movers and shakers" that are making the decisions?

Hi Dan,
Understood, I hope no one took away from my posts the implication that "professional dealer good, ebay seller bad". My intent was to promote a realistic perspective of educating hobbyists to be informed buyers of not just what they are buying but also who they are buying from.

eBay/HS or other vested interests have a motive to not promote informed buying and instead to make it sound like 'rainbows and sunshine'. eBay/HS especially want to make it feel like you can safely buy from an unknown seller halfway around the world without risk.

While you make valid points about being able to often get your money back from ebay or a credit card company; I am less sure that HS will do the same, that buyers will use a credit card vs. a cash card, or that there is s significant amount of buying going that never sees 'the light of day' until years later.

Please also note that having a credit card company or ebay refund you does not mean that the fraudster is not also rewarded. Nor does ebay and your credit card simply 'eat' the loss, they pass theses costs on to all of us with increased fees.

Lastly, it ultimately hurts other sellers/buyers on the venue and hurts our hobby.
Don

Agreed, that is why I have often said the only real weapon in the war against online fraud is education. The trouble is little education is being done. And when it is done, we have some who push back and maintain that there is little fraud, that eBay/HS is risk free, that having unethical sellers' listings sitting next to APS listings is not an optics issue.

ebay marketing is strong and clearly effective at putting traditional consumer common sense aside (don't worry about buying something basically slight unseen from a seller in Kathmandu). Just as obviously it helps ebay, the question is... is it helping our hobby in the long run?
Don

Oh yeah, I was speaking strictly about ebay. Hipstamp is such a fustercluck on so many different levels, and their policies so obfuscated and tenuous that I would never buy a high-dollar item there unless I were 100% certain about it. If there was any question about it, expertization/extension, etc., I wouldn't.

Hipstamp is effectively "Bob's Stamp Shop and Lawnmower Repair" masquerading as a legitimate philatelic entity. I don't trust the owner/leadership at all; their history with respect to transparency and communication is poor, not to mention their track record with respect to user data.

This outsourcing of the APS eccommerce to Hipstamp has greatly diminished my confidence in the APS moving forward.

If someone is dumb enough to do that, I've got no problem with it. A fool and their money and all that. Now that assumes that there is no coercion and no fraud going on. If the ad says "this is worth $500" then that's fraud if it's not. The idiots out there trying to sell common Washington/Franklins for absurd amounts of money are con men. I'm not talking about them, as I've said repeatedly. Crooks aren't covered in any of this. However, in an auction, you can get people caught up in the heat of the moment and pay many times over the value of a stamp. Whose fault is that? The dealer who put it up or the people without self-control? In every transaction, whether anyone likes it or not, there is a certain amount of buyer beware. That goes for stamps, that goes for coins, it goes for toilet paper. If you're willing to pay a ridiculous amount of money for something that isn't worth it and there is no coercion going on, then who do you have to blame but yourself? Get yourself educated. It's as simple as that.

Yes, those people exist and there's no way to stop them, at least not in every situation. You can't do it as an individual, the APS can't do it as an organization and even ebay can't do it as an auction site. Ultimately, the responsibility has to come down to the individual buyers. Dumb people are dumb. We can try to educate them, which is what I think the APS and other organizations should be trying to do, but you can't really argue with stupid. Anyone who gets on ebay and thinks that if they buy this really expensive stamp from a complete stranger, they'll be rich, they deserve what they get. These are the same people who are sending money to Nigerian princes. It's a shame but we are not responsible for protecting people from their own stupidity. We can try to educate them but you can't make them listen. Is it ethical that these people get taken advantage of? Absolutely not. Can you stop it? Not a chance.

The 'buyer beware' opinion only carries water if you do not care much about the future of the hobby or those of us who are working hard to educate others.

Allow me to paint a cautionary tale comparison to another hobby that I am familiar with; aquarium hobby. The aquarium hobby is similar to philately in that it relies a lot upon education. Keeping a home aquarium successfully (nice, relaxing tank with a minimum of maintenance) requires significant knowledge about chemistry, biology, animal husbandry.

Decades ago (1920-1970s) the hobby thrived as small brick and mortar aquarium shops invest time with hobbyists to teach them how to properly maintain a tank and purchase compatible fish; my wife and I owned one of those shops. We lived in a small rural town with several other retail aquarium shops and we all had strong businesses. By the 1980s, Walmart came to our town. It (and other 'Big Box stores') literally crushed the aquarium hobby both here in our town and across the rest of the country within a few years.

They decimated the aquarium hobby by selling cheap 'starter kits' for $19.95, selling fish out of poorly maintained fish tanks by clueless 18-year-olds who offered no education to hobbyists. They sold millions of these 'starter kits' in which even a highly skilled person could not keep fish alive in. The 'feedback' of a smelly fish tank and dead fish was immediate. Many folks, especially parents who had to deal with these 'swamp tanks' and kids upset with tanks full of dead fish, would then go to social events with friends and families and bad mouth the hobby. It was literally a death blow to the hobby which today is barely a shadow of its former self.

And decades ago we had small brick and mortar stamp shops. But these largely dodged the 'Big Box store' massacre of the 70s and 80s since big box store never established 'stamp departments' and flooded the marketplace with useless 'stamp collecting starter kits'. This allowed the small brick and mortar stamp shops to hang around a while longer; at least until the internet and ebay came into being. Now we have unethical online sellers doing the same things that WalMart did, offering no education paired with substandard products. The 'bad mouth' stories can have the same negative impact to philately.
Yes, we can play the 'buyer beware' card and just ignore that fact that NY Stamps is flooding (and dominating) ebay with questionable listings. There is a forum 'down under' which highly chastises the new and inexperienced hobbyists as 'bunnies'. Who cares as long as the highly experienced hobbyists can slog through the trash and pick out what THEY need?

Well, some of us do care and are trying to do our best to educate others and help the hobby. It is largely what many of us do in this community and with non-commercial educational websites. It would be nice to get some support.
Don

No. Some cases are family members of non-members who inherited a collection only to discover the collection was not what the collector paid for.

I won't comment on active law enforcement cases, but we were contacted by the FBI because a gentleman had purchased perfectly common stamps at catalog or higher. He'd spent a million dollars purchasing from a Las Vegas firm before realizing something was amiss. He'd called to complain multiple times before he was contacted by an attorney representing he was filing a class action against the company but needed a $50,000 retainer, which he paid. You can guess what happened next. The lawyer was a fraudster. There was a successful for wire fraud against the "attorney" and connected it to an individual at the firm who sent the information as a side hustle, but that's where it ended for the FBI.




We require a resellers license or tax ID to become a dealer member. There should be a bit more of a rigorous process. There are some other defined standards that need to be added, but that's a broader conversation.




I wouldn't even know who I am supposed to be standing up to in this situation. In the proposal I put together, it's a call to be more aggressive in the online world. At the roots of the APS, white hat dealers and collectors worked together, including elected leadership in the APS.

Here are the summarized critiques so far:
"You're never going to make XXX company change their ways."
"You can't protect every transaction."
"We tried and failed."
"Dealers and collectors can't work together."

Don, you know this, but stamp buying is progressively decentralizing, but the organized philately side is locked into the remaining centralized piece watching it shrink and wondering how we can save it. Meanwhile, the notion is to let the infrastructure decay on its own rather than trying to planned or deliberate contraction to allocate the resources more effectively. Risk aversion is a powerful and compelling message in all worlds.




I think this point is perfectly fair. Just because someone is selling on ebay does not make them less than anyone else in the business. I stand up and say, "Today, anyone can sell and we should be reaching them to be a part of a community, and here is one move that can make that happen."

14-pages later on this forum alone and little to no consensus to a solution. My underlying premise is still the same, but at some point, I owe it to our members to get us to a "what" and "how."




I've never understood the principle that Hip or anyone else has to be perfect to everyone before we can work together. Or the secondary belief that "we're going to water down our Code of Ethics."

At the same time, ebay and other platforms have evolved into a simple transaction site. Unless we engage them meaningfully, we should never expect to have leverage. But no one will believe we can until we institute some meaningful change online. That is not a reason not to try.

Meanwhile, online sales proliferated while in-person sales appeal to a shrinking audience and that's where a good bit of bandwidth is spent. To this day, there is a remarkably vocal small group demanding we restart the Winter Show, which lost money for 14 of the 20 years we held it - tens of thousands of dollars.

You have to understand that there are things that are happening that you can't do anything about. You can't educate people who aren't interested in learning. You can offer. They can either accept or refuse. It's fallacious to think that somehow, magically, all of the scams are just going to go away and all of the collectors are going to become educated and we'll all live in harmony and sing kumbayah together. That's not how the world works and it isn't how any hobby out there in the real world operates.Scott is right, the hobby, indeed all hobbies, are diversifying and in that diversification, you lose centralized control. People need to realize that things are out of their hands most of the time and that's not what's killing the hobby. There are other things that are killing the hobby, but some scammers preying on the ignorant on ebay isn't it.




You can't live in the past. I'd love to go back to the days of local stamp dealers and bustling shows. I'll be at SESCAL this weekend and it'll be a mere ghost of what bourses used to be. Complaining about it doesn't change anything, we have to live in the reality that we actually have and do what we reasonably can to keep things balanced. What you describe has happened in every town, every interest and every hobby. The past is never coming back. It's time to deal with it.




Support with what? What constitutes support, in your opinion? How many people actually agree with you? You're looking at things from a particular perspective, and certainly you're welcome to do so, but philately isn't really what a lot of people who have been in the game for a long time think it is anymore. It's got to move beyond the stereotypical "old, wealthy, white guys" idea. If you go and look at YouTube, which is a decent indicator of the kind of people getting into the hobby, who will be the future of the hobby, they're not old, they're not necessarily white, they're certainly not all men, and most of all, they're not rich. These are not people out there buying multi-thousand dollar stamps. They might develop into that down the road, there's no way to tell, but that's not the future of philately, at least in the short term. Just because you and I grew up with a particular view of what stamp collecting is, that's not true today. Most people aren't having massive problems and getting scammed online. Should we address that? Yes. Should we try to educate people? Absolutely. But we also have to recognize that there's a limit to what any person, group or business can reasonably do about it. I think we're at a time where the ASDA has outlived its usefulness. We might get to the point where the APS isn't necessary. People no longer need to go to certain places or buy from certain people like they used to. There's a whole new, different set of skills that people need to learn. It's great that we try to educate people on the risks, but beyond that, there isn't a whole lot that we can do. Nobody has to like that, but it doesn't change the fact that it's necessary.

To understand the scope of the problems you have to understand the volume of sales on a platform such as ebay.

Just today, which is not even finished yet, the available sales records in the stamps categories stop at 10,000. There were more sales, but ebay will not allow you to go beyond the 10,000. How many more sales were the beyond the 10,000? I do not know but if we use the 10,000 figure and extrapolate it out over the course of a year, we have 3.6 million sales. Probably safe to say that the actual number is multiples of that but let's use 3 million.

The APS has approximately 26,000 members and the ASDA likely has a membership in the low three figures. Multiple sources place the number of stamp collectors just in the United States around 5 million. Whether or not you agree with the 5 million number the volume of just ebay sales lends some credence to the number being in the seven figures. That is not a stretch.

So how do the philatelic alphabet organizations impact cleaning up such gargantuan sales? They don't. It will never happen. They hold zero sway with these internet sales platforms. They are dwarfed financially and legally. The platforms could care less whether or not a small group of collectors will only shop with a seller that flies an organizational flag. It has zero impact on the bottom line. Ironically, the large ebay stamp sellers such as NYStamps, Noble and others which are the ones that should be watched over hold far more sway with ebay when it comes to policy than the APS/ASDA ever could hope for. It is the classic fox watching over the hen house. I don't blame ebay. They are revenue driven. Why would they give themselves the headache of allowing an outside non-revenue producing entity access and power. It might be different if the APS had 1 million members, but it does not. In point of fact if the stamp categories became too much of a headache ebay could drop them or scale it all back and not feel any impact to the balance sheet.

It always comes back to education. That is where you get the most bang for the buck. Even then, as has been said here, you need that horse to drink the water if you can get it to the bucket in the first place. But education is still the best and most effective answer and that requires outreach well beyond membership. Showing prospective members the value you give in protecting them from themselves may actually be the best way of increasing your membership rolls.

Merging with the ASDA is just an unproductive diversion from things that really matter.

Cephus,
First, I am unsure why you think that I am somehow advocating for forcing education onto those who do not want it. Of course there will always be people who will make uninformed decisions. My point is, and has been, lets work towards making information accessible to those who want it. I thought it was clear when I posted about fighting against ebay's efforts of trying to diminish education on WHO we buy from.

And when I speak of education, I mean more than simply offering education for uninformed buyers, it means offering education for sellers too. As some might remember, Bill Weiss and I worked for several years on a project on Stamp Smarter which tracked ebay listing improvements. We both proactively contacted sellers with suggestions on improving their listings and used a database to track their nearly 2000 responses. We found that nearly 2/3's (63%) of the sellers were willing to make improvements to their listings. They were willing to add images, better describe a stamp or stamp condition, clarify their T&Cs in order to improve and avoid costly returns and/or unhappy customers. And note that this community also has a history of doing the same thing. A thread that identifies a poor listing can result in members contacting the seller and the listing is withdrawn or improved. So we know this works in many cases and represents one part of a potential solution. In summary, I feel that 'education' is much broader than trying to reach buyers who do not want it.

And as far as seeking support, I feel that we can offer educational solutions beyond here in this forum and a few websites. For example, consider the philatelic press. Has anyone ever seen an article which informs hobbyists about the 'cartel' scams that have been going on for decades? I have also never seen (but admit that I do not monitor every philatelic press outlet) an article which promotes hobbyists investing time and effort in learning who they are buying from or how to build a strong online, longer term, business relationship. It may be that the philatelic press, which counts on advertising income, is not interested in publishing anything other than positive, upbeat stories. It could be the same for the APS, they do not want to risk angering anyone with articles (online or in print) which is perceived s not being upbeat and positive.

No one wants to 'go back' and I feel you completely missed my comparison with the aquarium hobby. Of all the people in this community, I am probably among a small group which writes against 'going back' and nostalgic perspectives. I am a forward-looking person which I assume was one of the reasons I won the APS 'Future of Philately' award.

I am encouraged by APS making an effort to identify sellers with a 'Good Housekeeping' icon, I am intrigued by what may be possible with a merger of the ASDA. But as I and others have pointed out numerous times over the last 15 pages, the rub is in the details.
On the one hand this is not great because there is not yet any significant details. But on the other hand, it has provided folks a chance to float their opinions and offer suggestions in real time. In many this 'messiness' epitomizes the entire topic of improving educational opportunities surrounding online selling and buying. Burying our head in the sand and avoiding the topic has pros and cons, but at minimum we can conclude that this approach has been tried and there remains significant room for improvement. Publicly offering online selling education also comes with potential drawbacks, done incorrectly it can cause many problems and it cannot incorrectly communicate that the majority of online selling is wrought of fraud. Nothing is a clear and simple solution.
Don

There are several really good themes winding through this conversation but would I be way off to suggest that one shared recognition is that the lack of a reliable buying platform where novices won't get fleeced is key problem?

I think it was Don who pointed out the cycle of newbies buying junk on ebay and then losing heart with the hobby and giving up. Could fixing that be a made a goal of this ASDA acquisition?

If the APS was to really bear down and create a seller community (i.e. on Hipstamp or some other TBD platform) where the "stamp of approval" meant something and where people could be reasonably sure of not getting taken, it would seem to me that might be the end of stamp selling on ebay or anyplace else.

That's probably too much to hope for but it helps to have a stretch goal and if this phenomenon is really as tied to the long-term survival of the hobby as some are suggesting (see Don's Aquarium example) then it should perhaps be the highest priority. And if that was the case maybe the ASDA thing makes sense?

Clearly, education would still be an important major theme. Not to overgeneralize, but this tracks my own experience as I re-entered the hobby when I retired: Stupidly bought some junk on ebay before I knew what I was doing, THEN discovered this forum and other resources and have been picking away at my stupidity so I can make better buying decisions.

How did this in large part turn into a discussion of the merits and demerits of ebay & Hip & show dealers?

The question at hand is the merits and demerits of the APS & ASDA joining up (and if the above is your big concern, whether such a merger will make anything safer or not).

There is some suggestion ASDA might be circling the drain. If so, why? Is it just the trend away from shows, or is it partly the fault of their management?

Is there something to be gained by merging now-ish that can't be gotten by picking up the good pieces after if folds?