Why Do They Waste Everybody's Time?

There is a limit to how many free listings you can get per month, at least at my ebay seller level which is "lesser peon".

I find the $1 listings with $5 shipping to be annoying. We all know they are going to send the coin with ebay shipping and pocket the extra four bucks.

I don't mind the sea of auctions with 0 bids. Because they relist automatically, it's the same thing as a Buy It Now with a timer. Many listings allow you to Make An Offer.

Mostly what ticks me off is the listings with gorgeous stock photos, and that fact is buried in the text block or never mentioned at all. You can waste a few minutes evaluating a coin without even realizing that it's a decoy. That goes quadruple for listings where the stock photo is deliberately of an unattributed rare variety, which they surely do on purpose to hook careless cherry pickers (sort of a reverse cherry pick, I guess).

I find it annoying when people take bad photos, particularly of slabbed coins, but that's their loss of business and not really my problem.

Well for whats its worth this forum is saving alot of newbies from bad buys

If I remember correctly, a long time ago ebay used to charge a fee for listing. If the item sold it was refunded.

Good point Dearborn. You're right on that.

ebay still charges listing fees, last I checked, but depending on your status, you may have a number of free listing slots to use each month. There was also a Final Value Fee (FVF) for sold items. I haven't sold much there in years, though.

You can blame the sellers of the junk coins, but I also blame the morons and idiots on TV and on "fake" news sites claiming that there are rare error coins worth tens of thousands of dollars in everyone's pocket change. Most of them are clickbait but people fall for it and suddenly become convinced that their damaged junky common pocket change coins are valuable errors and are going to make them rich. They inevitably end up selling on ebay since it's the most accessible venue for new sellers.

A large group of us within the hobby were working on an alternative numismatic marketplace for collectors and dealers, but progress was stalled when we had to switch hosting providers because the original hosting company's storefronts proved to be terribly inadequate and didn't have the functionality we wanted for inventory management, selling, and trading. It was also a struggle convincing dealers to list their items on our new marketplace because most of them preferred to sell through their own storefronts on their web sites and they didn't want the hassle of managing inventory across multiple venues. So we went back to being a private buy/sell/trade group with paid membership tiers and offer dealers and collectors a way to sell "business-to-business."

I have been buying and selling on ebay since 1997 but I don't buy much of anything there anymore except very cheap raw coins I know I can make good on later; the only other things I might still buy there would be PCGS/NGC coins that are priced very favorably and have a good upside if I need to flip or sell them later, but private trading groups are better sources.

@Brandmeister - The market sets the price

An auction that sells can't be overpriced, because the price is the winning bid

Are there overpriced BIN's? Yes. A BIN listing can be priced much higher than equivalent coins elsewhere.

Are there overpriced auctions? Not really. Auctions by their very nature cannot be overpriced. Whatever the winning bid is, that sets the price.

Caveat: Don't confuse price and value, because they are not the same thing.