New Member Here, With Question About Scott Catalog Values

Have collected primarily American stamps, and primarily prior to 1920. A question that's been bothering me is what is the meaning of a Scott catalog value? I've never seen anything sell for more than a modest fraction of SCV. Is it just a seller's tool to suggest to a buyer what a great deal he or she is getting by buying so far below SCV?

Lots of theories (like that one), but no good answers.

I guess a dealer will buy at half value to sell it at three-quarters.

I think it depends upon a number of things. The catalog prices listed are supposedly determined by input from dealers and auction houses. For dealers, these are retail prices for stamps that are typically VF centered and sound condition, or that have been identified as a specific catalog number. Some higher-end or scarcer item pricing may depend on auction realizations.

If you are buying on ebay, or similar on-line venue, then there are many non-dealers selling and you only see the listings on-line before purchasing (not in hand), so pricing would be expected to be lower than catalog value. Many dealers also generally sell below catalog value to move material and to be competitive with other on-line venue sellers. Also, many of the stamps being sold are not VF and sound condition.

Common stamps are readily available from world-wide sources, so to move them one needs to be competitive.

On the other hand, if the stamp is higher grade than VF and is sound, I would expect the pricing to be greater than catalog value. In fact, I sell many stamps that fetch greater than the VF pricing (on HipStamp).

paynehgg,

Collecting for the enjoyment of collecting, whatever that might be, is the name of the game. Don't hesitate to ask questions especially if you need basic information and especially more advanced sources of information for any possible topic. You should be able to find folks on this board a little further along on their collecting journey glad to share experiences.

My personal bias is a used stamp loses the story of its journey in the postal service when it is removed from the cover it transported to its destination. Collecting postal history adds a whole new aspect to your journey in our hobby. Sounds like you are a perfect candidate to become a postal history collector?

Wishing you many enjoyable future days in our hobby. Russ

The Scott catalogues include an explanation of their valuation process in the front. You may find a copy at your local library and be able to review their explanation for the valuation process. Also, fairly recently, the American Philatelic Society journal had an issue that discussed all the major catalogs and their valuation approaches. You may also find that helpful and you can access it if you are a member on their website.

Catalogue publishers are often, themselves, sellers of stamp collecting materials like albums, pages, and even stamps, so they have a stake in getting the best price possible for what they are selling. Scott, for example, was for many generations a stamp company as well as the publisher of the famous Scott Postage Stamp Catalogue. The same is true of Stanley Gibbons in the UK which even today remains a major stamp seller as well as the publisher of the main UK stamp catalogue. Do you smell a conflict of interest here? Of course you do. But stamp collecting evolved from originally publishing price lists of stamps into making those lists into a catalogue, and even today, it's not always clear how separated those who work on the catalogue and set prices are from those who sells stamps and stamp-related things.

As for the prices a catalogues use, publishers have always been a bit silly about this. Despite all the attention to checking common dealers' sales prices and auction prices, it's almost never the case that stamp prices in catalogues reflect their "real" values, but are typically their "best" values for flawless stamps. And stamps do not usually sell for their catalogue prices. Except for real "gem" stamps with everything in spectacular condition, for the vast majority of stamps, selling for half or even one-quarter of catalogue is much more typical. And we've all bought stamps from time to time at tiny fractions of catalogue prices. Prices do have to be high enough, however, for the stamp dealer to make a living, so also keep that in mind.

In fact, the publishers of the Scott Catalogue only a few years ago realized that their prices had gradually crept up to silly and unrealistic levels, so they announced an across-the-board price reduction in their catalogues, a policy that momentarily may have produced more realistic prices but which has now, after some years, seen those prices all gradually creep back up to often the same unrealistic figures. We've probably all bought $100 stamps for $20 or $30. I recently splurged well above my usual price level (I'm a retired teacher!) on a set of Belgian stamps the catalogue lists at $1,000 in MNH condition. I bought that same MNH set for $220 (22% of that) with tax and shipping. A bargain? Yes, but not unusual, either. You could do this same thing with most of the stamps I own as well as nearly all the stamps in the catalogue.

Catalogue publishers have little to no incentive to lower catalogue prices. After all, that would devalue by millions of dollars a huge number of collections and would likely hurt dealers' income. So no one wants to get into that sort of argument, so prices remain high at often silly levels. They might even get sued! Not that Americans sue each other much.

Another example: The Scott catalogue I have is a bit out of date (2018), but it lists U.S. #1 and 2 (used in good shape) at $375 and $800, respectively. If anyone would like to brag that they've paid those prices for their first two U.S. stamps, they're welcome to do that, but I don't know anyone who has. I have both stamps, purchased just a few years ago as a retirement gift to myself, and I paid $100 for a very nice #1 and about $250 for a really nice #2. That's around 25-30% of their catalogue values. It makes me look like a great businessman, but really those are the prices they were listed for.

One general rule is that as stamps become more common and lower-priced, you can expect to pay closer to catalogue value. There's hardly any profit to be made by a dealer on a $1 stamp, so don't expect them to sell it to you at 10¢. Scott even uses a minimum price for all stamps, so even a stamp that is actually only worth 2¢ is going to be listed in the catalogue at that minimum price which currently is "around" $1.00 for a common mint stamp and 25-35¢ for a common used stamp. Dealers need to make an income, after all. And you're basically paying for their service of buying the stamps from someone else, storing and listing them, and advertising them before you buy them. For all of that, even a common stamp is worth more than a few cents -- one reason a lot of collectors buy entire pages or even entire albums full of stamps to keep per-stamp costs down and not have to buy one stamp or set of stamps at a time which gets very expensive very fast. Most of my collections are based on buying a few albums of stamps for a country and then consolidating them into my album. Much cheaper that way. Buying one-by-one gets really expensive really fast.

Have fun!

No! Not at all. Stanley Gibbons, in its catalogues, clearly states they are prices at which they are willing to sell the listed stamps if available. Any merchant can publish a list of prices at which he is willing to sell his merchandise. That is what a catalogue is for.

There is not the slightest conflict of interest in drafting your price list. Suggesting there is a conflict of interest there is like going to the supermarket, looking at the price displays and accusing the supermarket of a conflict of interest, or calling the IKEA catalogue a conflict of interest.