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GW is at it again.
Appeared on their website at issue, phone ordered only. Called and got a 'we are closed' voice mail. Now they have raised the price and are still not answering the phone.
Done with them.
edit: while typing this, they raised the price AGAIN.
Very interesting, however, Gatewest does not have voicemail! If you call Gatewest before/after hours, you just get a ringing phone. Try it right now. Perhaps you were calling Albern Coins in Calgary, which is on Mountain Time? At 9 AM Central Time these coins became available to order on phones only at Gatewest. Many coins were sold at issue price. Two staff members answered two lines non-stop, taking only about 90 seconds per order. As coins were sold at a level, the price was increased. We could have easily sold ALL of the coins at a higher price, but that wouldn't be fair. We could have sold them all at lower prices, if not for the flipper.
Oh, the flipper... Who is that, you ask? The opportunist. The person who tries to buy up all they can at the lowest possible price so that everyone else is out of luck, and has to buy the flippers coins on
ebay or somewhere else for twice the issue price. Well, we used to post even hot coins on our website on day of launch starting at midnight. However, many problems with people from the RFD site caused us to rethink this and control the flow by doing phone orders only on certain products.
If you're a collector, then you'd appreciate the chance to be able to purchase one at issue price, or a little above. If you're a flipper, you'd try and maximize profit and number of coins purchased. You'd place 80 orders just so the product is sold out, and people are forced to buy your coins which you are now listing on
ebay for twice what you just paid for them.
And just so you know, we don't get what we want on issues like this. We are allocated based on our annual sales. Therefore, if we have to purchase a set amount of product a year to be able to purchase these coins, shouldn't we be entitled to restrict them as:
1. Higher priced items for people who don't order regularly
or
2. Lower price for people who order regularly and help to bring us to the ability to carry these coins
?
It's not easy being able to even get these coins. It takes over $10,000 in annual purchases from the
RCM to even qualify to buy ONE of these coins. That's several times higher than the MC qualifications. I have read on RFD many people who have several MC accounts, who were able to buy 6, 9 and more of these coins. Is THAT fair?
To dispel another myth that spreads on this site: Dealers are not required to sell coins at issue price. Our agreements do not mention pricing. If they did, it would be illegal under the competitions act. All prices are "Suggested Retail".
As for us showing up in limos to buy coins with 6 staff members, that's just ludicrous. We are a direct distributor of the Mint in Ottawa. We source our coins exclusively through the official distributor channels in Ottawa only. No staff members buy coins for our company.
Now, I might sound a tad bit rude or angry, but that's because I am a bit angry. Sure you're angry because you couldn't get a coin. You shouldn't be angry at individual dealers, you should be angry at flippers. Individuals who (through a network of friends, relatives, and co-workers) amass a huge number of special hot limited issue coins before anyone else does. If you're reading this, and you're one of them, you should know we can identify many of you through our system. Do we do anything about it? Not yet, but we're working on it. We're launching a new internal platform that will be able to track these things in realtime and block orders from suspected multi-purchasers.
If you could only see our server logs when a link is posted from RFD to our website for an item like this, and the traffic and order volume it generates. Not to say all on RFD are flippers or bad or anything, but it's kind of obvious when in the span of 5 minutes there's 8 orders from the same IP address using different credit cards, going to different names at the same address. No legitimate collector buys 8 coins. That's a flipper. And we see quite a few of them from RFD. There was a bug that caused us problems when the Penny roll was issued. In the overnight hours, our system received more orders than could be handled (at the time, but this has been fixed) and allowed more items to be ordered than what was allocated to us by the Mint. Our solution? Cut all of the orders back to a lower quantity, cancel the obvious multi orders where people were trying to get lots, and move on. Who did this anger? The flipper. We had a few tracks on people who tried to order 100s of them using multiple accounts/addresses/names/etc. It was obvious this has to stop. This is why when a hot product is identified, online orders are blocked until we can control the number of orders for it. It may sound unfair, but in reality it is fair. Otherwise we would simply price it stupidly high, and leave it there for everyone. At least the way we do it, you get a chance at a lower price that ever increases over time/quantities sold.
Now, you might say "why don't you just sell them all at issue price, you're getting a discount anyways?". The answer; why should we? As long as there are people who buy from us to resell for a huge profit then we should be allowed to do the same. We're a business.
This was sent outside of work hours, so officially this is not official company communication. In case you didn't guess, I work for Gatewest.
Locutis
-Cam (The Director of Numismatics)
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Posted 04/03/2013 7:28 pm
