Coin Flipping: Bought On Ha/Gc Selling On Ebay

"Buy it Now"

Did it sell on ebay for $245 or is it being offered for $245? There is a difference.

But yes you could just skip ebay and buy directly from the Heritage auctions there is nothing stopping you. The thing is good deals are where you find them. All you have to do is out bid the dealers and other collectors. This guy bought the coin on Heritage for $195 but he thinks it is worth more and he put it on ebay. Maybe he is right and maybe he isn't. As Bstrauss shows sometimes what you buy on Heritage ends up later selling for less money. You often see that on big name collections. When they are initially sold there is a lot of hype and prices go high, then later prices return to regular market levels. And as Pacificoin says most of the better coins you see in dealers stock came from auctions like Heritage and they have to sell it for more than they paid to stay in business. A collector doesn't have to. He can sit on it and hope/wait for the market to go up, a dealer can't.

Will this practice eventually put dealers out of business?
If more and more collectors find out it is better/cheaper to buy directly from large auction websites like Heritage and Great Collections, nobody will buy from dealers any longer.

1. It is true that heritage is taking some business away from some dealers, more so in the high-end market. However, there are dealers on many scales, from the vest pocket to the monster ones. Local dealers of a modest size should continue to be OK. These smaller dealers tend to get material from the general public which ranges in quality from junk to valuable. The general public is not going to send their $200 of mixed stuff to Heritage. Many local dealers can do OK with this plus the usual "junk silver" and gold.
2. it is not necessarily cheaper or better to go to a big auction house. When you are dealing with a minimum shipping cost of $25 or so, the entire small market is outside of the Heritage sphere of influence.

Hey, I send a couple of my random $300 coins to GC!

Nothing says an LCS can't expand and do both. One of my local shops does over half their biz on ebay. I think he also uses GC occasionally.

Good for you! Probably that is close to the minimum that makes it worthwhile to send it to a large auction house.

Also, here in Canada our auction companies are on a rather smaller scale and do not yet have the same effect on dealers. Cross-border shipping costs are a real issue which eliminate an even larger share of the low cost market. There is no denying that Heritage or GC are the go-to places for maximizing the sales on high end material, especially US.

I have spent a lot of time in coin shops, and aside from gold that is only worth bullion, not many $300 items cross the counter.

A lot of estate collections come in, and most of that is coins collected from circulation, mint products, or tourist money. The sellers are not interested spending hours work and months waiting to get $100 more even if they can, and are quite happy to take their money now.

In fact, where an item is very valuable and the market is thin, my LCS may suggest that the best alternative is an auction.