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.
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"Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done." -- Louis D. Brandeis
Edited by paralyse
04/05/2024 12:34 pm