Questions About Selling On Heritage Auctions

The buyers fees on coins and currency is 17.5% That is added to the winning bid and is kept by HA (That is one of the ways they make a profit) So if something sells for $7000, the buyer pays $8225. $1225 going to HA.

You can either consign your coins to Heritage. You send your coins to them, they appraise the value and the reserve. If they feel that they need to be slabbed, they will send them to PCGS for you. They collect the money, package and ship the coin for you. All for a fee of course, This fee can escalate upwards of 30%.

Or, you can use HA as auction portal, sellers fees are negotiable but usually are @15%. They collect the money, but it is up you to package and ship and insure the coin.

All fees depend on coin, it's auction price and how much HA really wants to list and sell it.

The buyer on ebay can always claim SNAD. Then send you back something that isn't what you sent him. ebay will side with the buyer...all the time. Really, I mean ALL the time. The buyers are helpless little sheep and the sellers are money hungry wolves. The buyers can do no wrong, and if you think otherwise, you prove ebay's case about sellers being wolves.

Selling things on ebay aren't always bad, but if it's something worth a lot of money, then if you want to take the risk, do it. If you don't want to take the risk, then take your item elsewhere.

Plus, if you take a multi-thousand dollar coin to HA, you get access to people who have money and are interested in higher-end coins. You get a better chance to get top dollar.

not as described; they file a claim with ebay, return something other than your coin, get their money refunded to them, & keep your coin for free

Thanks for your replies...
I know the danger exists but how would that happen with a PCGS slabbed coin?

Why not look at GreatCollections? Better fee structure and all they will execute the transaction for you just like HA. HA is at 17.5% on their fee, you need to have some real good stuff and high value to negotiate a better price.

You also get paid much quicker via GreatCollections.

Judging from above posts, there is an inferred risk in selling through ebay in that the auction winner may make a fraudulent claim that the coin was SNAD which I guess is an abbreviation for not as advertised.
I take it that the scam involves the winner of the auction switching the graded coin with a lower graded one.

How would this work in the case of a coingraded and slabbed by NCGS? Would the recipient open the slab case and switch the coin out.

Is this a real ebay auction risk that happens regularly?

I assume you mean the SNAD/eBay return thing...

You need to remember that being in a slab or not, being a coin or being a piece of high-priced technology, or being anything valuable, or really any item on ebay (but it's the high values where buyers tend to play games)...all a buyer needs to do is provide ebay with a tracking number that gets delivered back to you, the seller, and ebay will side with the buyer. The package sent back to you could be 100% air (i.e., empty)...it doesn't matter. It'd be up to you to prove to ebay the buyer sent you back something else/nothing at all. And that's really hard to do, since buyer protection trumps seller protection virtually 100% of the time.

Plus, I'm not sure if you have an ebay account, or if you've ever sold anything before, but if not, ebay does set pretty strict selling limits to new sellers. In order to increase those limits, you need to become a more established seller with positive buyer feedback, since ebay needs to protect buyers from nefarious sellers.



Yes, they charge you for slabbing the coins. They'd probably be cheaper since they'd probably get bulk slabbing discounts, where you wouldn't, plus you'd have to get a membership with the TPG's (maybe not with ANACS, not sure) before you could submit coins or you'd have to find someone who had a membership (like a coin dealer) who could submit on your behalf (but they might charge you more for the grading than what it would cost since they need to make a living themselves)

As the risk to the seller, I could be wrong, but I'd say that HA is much safer, most auctions are, than ebay. After all, if they have return policies, they're set in stone (i.e., if they had a policy of 3 days, and a buyer tried to return it on day 4, no dice, no exceptions). Plus, if a buyer tried to return an item that wasn't what was sold to them, it wouldn't fly, after all THEY know what THEY mailed out, they don't need to worry about you mailing the items to a winner, so if someone should try something, they have the upper hand AND the the resources to seek justice. Again, I could be wrong, but that's how I've viewed it.