Recommendations Please For Selling Melt Value Silver

This is sort of the problem with so called hoarding any metals or other such items. I mean you always hear buy this or that and someday it will be worth a lot. Yet so many never think about just where would you sell it? Always sounds so good in those advertisements about stuff like Gold, Silver, etc. Yet when it's your time to sell, just where do you sell it? Always was easy to buy but now sell? And then so many find they eventually loose, not gain. My avice too is to try a place like ebay. You might only make a few dollars but sure is better than nothing.

Thanks guys! Good info. I've been looking at the listings for junk silver sold listings on ebay and I don't see a big difference over melt value but at least there's the satisfaction of knowing they aren't melted down.

I am confused about selling using face value vs. just calculating the amount of silver in the coin times the spot price. I'm guessing it's a way to make it easy for the average consumer to calculate but is it really comparable? (If this is covered in someplace in general info on the forum please let me know )

@walking, chafemaster makes a good point about shipping costs.

If we take as an example selling $10 face value of U.S. silver coins, this will be 9 ounces of coins that you need to ship, which, if we factor in another 2 to 4 ounces of packing materials means you'll pay $5 to $6 to ship it by First Class package.

So, from whatever price you are able to get, you need to subtract about 14% in ebay and paypal fees, and take into account the $5-6 for shipping.

This is why some people just prefer to find a dealer who will pay a certain percentage of the spot price. It may be more efficient.

Either way, you are making pure profit, since it is silver you inherited. You don't need to care whether silver price may go up or down in the future.

to the Community!

If you live in (or near) a large city there will be at least one buyer that will pay 90-98% of spot. Fees on ebay for coins are 6%. PayPal gets another 3%. I did business with Midwest several years ago & I'm not a fan. Sending junk silver to a refinery doesn't necessarily mean the coins will be melted. Coins have a set purity & a readily established market value which makes them easy to resell without going through the hassle/expense of refining into 999 silver.

Thanks for the welcome and all the insight! I was thinking along the same lines re costs associated with ebay would offset most of the gain. I just got back an accounting and check from Midwest for test of a couple of rolls of quarters. They had the same weight I did, and paid 90%, all seems good except for, no fault of theirs, the spot price had dropped $3 from the day I shipped to it's arrival. I'm thinking now that with the quantity I have it's probably worth sending overnight so the spot price wouldn't likely move all that far from where it was.

and trdhrdr007, could you share what the issue was you had with Midwest if that's something you're comfortable doing?

And any other trusted refinery suggestions would be great.

Thanks again!

I've had a store so long I forgot there were fee differences.




When I dealt with them several years ago the price of silver was very volatile. Price movements of 3-5% a day were fairly common. It could be a coincidence but every time I sent a shipment it either arrived or was processed on a down day. I was fairly new to the game & was sending sterling which has to be melted & assayed. There's a certain amount of weight loss during the process. IMO melt losses were slightly high & assays were slightly low.