Dear Ebay Sellers...

I think its because ebay rules state the Obverse and Reverse of the slab (not everyone follows this rule) has to be shown in the pictures, but they only give you one free photo to upload. So to place Obverse and Reverse of the slab and the coin is uploading 4 different pictures since ebay requires the first two. When I sell I will upload the free picture of the coin in the slab and then upload from a hosting site in the description but there are some internet users that just do not know how to do this

I figure both pictures have value to the buyer of a coin, which is why I always supply both a front and back picture of the slab and close up pictures of the coin only. I know that a lot of my customers use the picture of the whole slab so that they are assured the slab will not be switched for another as the slab number is clearly visible in the pictures.

I can understand not providing closeups on cheap coins but for multi thousand dollar coins there should be no reason to not provide closeups. I am sure that anyone considering a major purchase like that would like to make sure the coin is exactly what is being presented. Buy the coin and not the slab.

Or collage the obv with rev into one photo. At least you still get both sides in one photo.

There are quite a few "mega" coins on ebay. Go to U.S. Coins, highest price first. There are several in the 6 figure starting price. I think the most I have seen a coin sell for on ebay was $60,000.
I personally would go with Heritage even though they nail you with the sellers fee.

I had a 1917-S SLQ ANACS AU-53 with 3 bids that was a few hours from selling. I had the front of the slab and 2 detailed shots of the coin. I also always use links to view the coins on Flicr.com so that you could see highly detailed shots.

Because I didn't include the full reverse of the slab, someone turned me in and ebay pulled the auction. I had to re-list the coin. My bad, I didn't know that the reverse was required because I didn't read the details of selling slabbed coins. It was 100% my fault, but it still made me mad.

I've looked at 100s of other sellers and they don't seem to have to follow the same rules. I don't know why, but they are "Top Sellers" so I guess ebay lets them get away with the front of the slab only.

ebay wants BOTH sides because the reverse has the TPG logo. I also see seller that cover the logo with a sticker, but ebay doesn't do anything about them, because they are also "Top Sellers."

ebay gets to set the rules and enforce them as they see fit. That makes me feel like my sales don't matter.

I got a call from ebay telling me all about the new rules for selling coins. ebay has the market, so what they say goes. If you want to use ebay, you'll have to pay for each photo, front, back details and slab. The new rules won't allow us to use links to show photos, so if you don't pay ebay, you can't show the coins in as much detail as needed and because of the limited size of the ebay photos, some details are hard to show.

Listings will cost more if you want to show more photos, but what they say goes. I have a web page, but I don't know if ebay will even allow me to use my email address because buyers might figure out the site name from my email.

*sigh*

On a happier note, I did sell the coin on the second try for $45 more than it would have sold for the first time.

I use ebay TurboLister for all of my auction listings and it is very simple to add Photobucket links that appear in the auction as embedded photos- no extra cost to me at all.

Some sellers are lazy alright, and others showing poor photos are trying to hide something. Like why do they have to "tilt or slant the coin"--to hide the flaws or marks?