Best Way To Sell A Collection Of Coins

That is what you'll get from a dealer, as they have overhead expenses and need to make a profit as well.

Best way would be to continue to educate yourself, and eventually list them on ebay. List the better/more expensive items individually, and group the others together in small lots of like items. You could also list each coin individually, but it will take much longer (more listings to make, some may not sell by themselves and will need to be relisted), and will cost you more fees (PayPal charges a fee for each transaction in addition to their standard %).

Post some of the better dates on the grading section and see what the forum has to say.

Cheers and

I always suggest finding a coin club, preferably one which specializes in the kind of material you have, & taking advantage of their member-to-member sales. For example, if you have material from all over the world, the NI mail-bid sale might be a good fit for you. If it's mostly US type material, most local clubs are full of people who do that. And so on.

You really need to educate yourself about the coins you have. There is a very true saying in coin collecting circles, "Before you buy the coin buy the book." Basically meaning before you start collecting any particular coin series read about that series. In you case I say, Before you sell the coin buy the book.
You need to get knowledgeable as to what you have, what condition the coins are in and what the possible "Key dates" you may have.
You can get a lot of information at the library and on-line.
You could sell them on ebay, but be careful of fees eating into your profits. Follow these rules to cutting down on your fees.
1) Use all of the 50 free listing you get a month

2) Don't wast money of "listing features" or unless really necessary, subtitles.

3) List the item for the bare minimum price you will accept for the coin, if the coin doesn't generate many bids you won't be that disappointed.

4) Watch your email for the one or two promotional periods ebay has every month when you are permitted thousands of free listings during a short period of 3 day to a week. They will be either auction or fixed price. These listings are in addition to the 50 free listings you get every month. These periods are often near the end of the month, if you haven't used all of you 50 free monthly listings you can list those in the alternate manner than the promotion. So if ebay is giving you 10,000 free Fixed Price listings, you can still use the 50 free monthly listings for auctions.

5) If you going to sell a lot of coins consider opening a store since Stores are now charged 6% Final Value Fees on coins as opposed to 10% for non-store listings, just make sure you're selling enough since the basic monthly store fee is $19.95.

6) Lower value coins rarely sell because the shipping charges are more than the coin is worth. you need to bunch them up. I break open many Mint and Proof Sets and make full year sets of coins for all denominations and sell them like that. Each year set includes coins from all the mints, So for US coins there are the Philadelphia and Denver issues of business or Satin Finish strikes which I match-up wit the corresponding Proof coin from the San Francisco Mint.

I've been selling coins on ebay for years and following these tips I NEVER pay a listing fee anymore. One thing to keep in mind is to be ready for those brief free listing periods by taking pictures of all your coins and drafting the listings beforehand. ebay give short to no notice prior to the promo period so being prepared enables ypu to get in as many listings as possible quickly.

You can also open a free store at Bidstart.com, They also give you 50 free auction listings a month, addition listing after that are only Two Cents. But all fixed=price listings are free with a basic store. Their final value fee is 9%, unlike ebay, BidStart doesn't charge a final value fee on shipping charges.

Good-luck!

Check out http://www.coinsandcanada.com/coins-prices.php if you haven't already.
The more time you spend on learning, sorting, grading etc the more money you will get for the collection. The question is, how much is your time worth? Most of us here do this sort of thing for fun or as a by-product of building our own collections but you say you're not a collector so it may be more of a consideration for you. A key factor is are the coins 'raw' (a bunch of circulation coins jumbled together in a box), or TPG'd (Third Party Graded in flips or slabs detailing the grade, variety etc), or is it a bunch of NCLTs (Non Circulating Legal Tender (commemorative coins) in sets and individual mint cases?. In the first case it can be a huge investment of time just to figure out what you have with most of it not being worth very much. In the second it's much easier as most of the work has been done and you just need to list them for sale at a reasonable price (50-80% of list unless it's exceptionally scarce). In the third case you'll probably want a copy of Charlton 2014 Vol 2 which should be available in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime you can get an idea from http://www.jandm.com/script/getitem...ID=5&PID=30.

It's really hard to better ebay for exposure. Lots of people complain about the fees but any of the big specialist coin auctions will charge much more - including photography fees which can be up to $25 per coin!

For items of say £500+ a specialist big name auction house will probably bring in the biggest amount but you will pay a lot more to partake in that. ebay is the do it yourself version which works well for lower value items - and also high value items if you put them on near the value you want and are prepared to wait.

Starting to think about selling this collection again. I will see if I can get some pics in the next week or so. It's a nice collection of coins, there are many, and some are nice. Two key dates that I have found so far are a 1948 silver dollar, and a 1921 5 cent piece. Both which seem to be in great condition, but are not professionally graded. This is why I don't just take them to a dealer and except 55% of the retail value. If the collection is only worth a few hundred dollars then it's probably not worth the trouble, but when it could possibly be 10's of thousands then that makes a big difference. I'm thinking of identifying the more valuable ones and getting them graded. Does that seem reasonable? Which grading service to use, ICCS?

Thanks again for everyone's valuable input.

What would the tell tale signs of a fake be? Are fakes a new problem or have they been being faked for a long time? The collection has been in storage for 30+ years.