Substitutions On Ebay

I've been buying coins through ebay for ten years or so and during that time, netted over 400 coin items. (Coin shows are my favorite venue by far) I've not yet experienced a switch, nor have I returned any. One item did get lost in the mail, and the seller gave me a refund. I generally avoid sellers with less than a 98% rating and/or less than 50 items sold. I have far more complaints about ebay policies than I do about sellers in general.

I have had this happen to me buying collectible millitaria items and it is always a chance you have to take. The cheaper the buy the harder it is to recover your money as your shipping charges eat up all of your restitution. Thankfully some millitaria forums build databases of those ebay sellers, but it still goes on, you just have to research. Unfortunately I think coin sales are so huge on ebay that building a database like that for coin "dealers" would be unthinkable.

Hmmmm, pretty much everything I am reading here boils down to being intelligent about how you buy your items, coins or anything else. I have not been taken once, and only once did I have a complaint with anything and I was refunded the money upon return of the coin. No biggy. We have purchased a LOT on ebay, and sold a lot. There is no doubt there are swindlers there, but as with all swindles, it requires a lax buyer to work.

If you "made a few bucks" after sitting on them for ten years you almost certainly lost money when time value of money is figured in. If you spent $1K on them, after ten years you would need to have sold them for between $1300 and $1400 just to break even.



Yes there are crooks on ebay, so some people say for this reason you shouldn't buy coins on ebay. There are crooks on Craigslist so we shouldn't buy coins there either. There are crooks running websites so we should stay away from those as well. There are crooks at coin shows and B&M shops, so don't buy coins there either. And you know sometimes even another collector will try and stick it to you, so we can't buy from them either. So we can't buy coins from other collectors, dealers, at coin shows, off of websites, Craigslist, or ebay. So just where are we supposed to get our coins?



You also have the problem that no one is willing to host a "bad dealer list" because of liability problems. There are dealers out there that will sue a host for being put on such a list. Sure in the long run the host will most likely prevail, but at the cost of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. No one wants to risk that.

I have been quite successful on ebay too, and am happy about 98% of the time. However, even with good pics and a seller with good feedback, there are times where the pics are deceiving. After at least 500 purchases, I have only returned one coin and it was recently.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/15071177596....m1497.l2649

The coin looks nice and fairly original from the pic, at least to my eyes. In hand however, it is beyond "harshly cleaned" and actually quited polished looking. I purchased this coin to replace a cleaned example in my collection, and this one was worse then the one I had. The photography did a good job of completely hiding the cleaning. So I returned it. Shipping was free to begin with, so no biggie.

There is no fool proof method, but there are lots of ways to mitigate the risk.

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My coins are not Heritage or the "high brow" auction house material. ebay has been good to me for the most part; I have had to return a few coins, but always got my purchase price back, and one lost coin, which I got the full (shipping included) price back. You come out ahead on some items, and you get the short end of the stick on others. The buyer dictates what the item is going to sell for, hopefully the seller takes good images to properly illustrate what is on the auction block. If the images are blurry, ask the seller to post some better images. Otherwise...take your chances and bid with sellers who have a return policy and decent feedback.