Are Others Seeing This Trend On Ebay, Too?

There seems to be less material and even fewer better than average items being offered at auction on ebay in the last three weeks? Is this due to changes in ebay policies and charges or broader changes in the market or ... ?

That's just the way the platform and the human minds work.
"Good" stuff sells quickly, while "bad" stuff doesn't sell and is relisted times and again in the hope it will sell. Some sellers are pretty stubborn and offer their unsellable/way overpriced stuff indefinitely so if you watch ebay long enough, you'll get to know the bad apples.

In this context, three weeks must be an exemplar of statistical insignificance.

I would suspect that a lot depended upon what you were looking for. I have topics that I may not see for several months, and then half a dozen will show up all at the same time from different vendors. I might become concerned if I did not see an broad category of an item type in six months if I was accustomed to seeing it once a week in the previous year.

All sellers are constrained by what they have in their immediate inventory, and what they have acquired recently. If you are looking for registered cover from Indiana to Europe, and don't see one, it's is likely that no one has sold one to a dealer in a recent sale.

Patience is the watchword. Feast or famine is the reality.

It's true Russ. I've been noticing it for many many months.

I look on ebay for New South Wales stamps available for purchase in Australia and from day to day there are next to no new listings. Indeed, there are days when nothing is listed at all.

I'm (finally) at the point where I generally don't bother with ebay.

If the price trend of a collecting area is on the rise, expect to see less stock available. The opposite is true. As an aside, cheap common stamps are becoming increasingly hard to sell.

[quoteThere seems to be less material and even fewer better than average items being offered at auction on ebay in the last three weeks?][/quote]

Yet yesterday I picked up three items not normally seem on ebay.

1. A small mourning cover with many bells and whistles of which I have never seen an ebay equal.

2. A single use of a special stamp, the domination of which I have not recorded.

3. A piece demonstrating a uncommon usage and stamp combination during a brief window of a couple of years.

Only the last went for more than I first thought it would realize.

That said, I am not chasing common space filling stamps.

Now I do pay attention to what certain sellers are offering, lets call them the brick and mortar bulk auction lot breakers, and they are still churning out material in their normal range of volume.

One cannot offer for sale what one does not have, nor if a business, one cannot offer to sell at a loss for very long. There is also a herd mentality in the sellers. For example, a serious holding of US Liberty postal history is being offered over many weeks by a seller. However, while little in they way of that postal history is offered normally, suddenly many other sellers are offering up the same related matter. The best time to sell is when a certain area seems to have more interest than normal.

Edit: To do this "y" to an extra "y" I typed.

There is always something good on ebay. Just do you have the pockets to pay for it all. You must be looking at specific areas.

Well, for the last year I have been experimenting with selling stamps and covers on hip stamps. I have not listed on ebay. I know that many of my friends have also transferred their sales business to hip as well.

Hello Bobby… I was wondering if you collected perfin stamps from NSW

Not actively dllimoges, but I have a few that I've picked up over the years.

Agreed. No meaningful argument or conclusion can be made using three weeks as your universe. Even three months means nothing when discussing trends on a platform that's been in existence for 28 years.

Three weeks or even three years is a relatively short period of time.

I signed up to ebay in 2003. It's been steadily going down hill since about 2008. I've made on occasional great find since then but I'm taking about overall trends.

It was almost like there was a generational shift in material, coming from deceased collectors just after the turn of the century (with ebay hitting its straps after the dot com bust) and gradually disappearing into new collections, to the point where the material on ebay is drying up.

I've little doubt the story is different for bricks and mortar auction houses and dealers, but there are less of them now across the world than there were 20 years ago.

Peaks and troughs eh?

Maybe there is something else going on with the market place. Premium and specialist material seem to get higher and higher prices at auction houses lately. So do the dwindling supply of well filled 19thC albums. A search for stamps on ebay will result in 99% dross. ebay has become the bargain basement and there are very few folks around that collect the dross. Once it was schoolboys who were are market for common stamps. Todays collectpr is more.discerning. They go to a trusted source where they can find reasonable stamps from a person with knowledge at a reasonble price. My suspicion is that those people are moving away from a place that has become a bargain basement

I also think that since the APS has linked it's store to hip stamp that it has influenced the market to some degree.

Hello Bobby… I know that there is a very active perfin society in great Britain. I purchased a vast holding a couple of years ago at an estate sale. The only way I could find information about some of the material that was in the collection was to go to their association site.