Help With Searching On HipStamp

Can anyone help on how to search on Hipstamp for Great Britain Sg 1 to 54 ?? Can this be an all in one search or do I have to enter each catalog number separately? I've tried to search Great Britain , regular issue there sort by country & catalog number category, but clearly the results are jumbled....

Still no answer from Hipstamp on how to do this and their Discord.com site is terribly confusing for me.

Thanks for any help on how to do this search..... Wm.

Basically, if information has not been entered, a search algorithm is unlikely to find all relevant stamps.
Have you considered looking for Great Britain stamps and entering the relevant range of years?

I dont understand this. I tried that, I think I entered 1840-1849 and got this:




I haven't looked up the year for that stamp yet, but know its not a #1

It is from 1951. All these sites are full of items for which incorrect details have been entered. If you search for Great Britain 1840 - 1858, you should not be surprised if the result includes German stamps issued in 2015. At least that one has the correct country added.

Simply put 'excrementum init, excrementum exit.'

Exactly. The search engine is only as good as the data that the sellers enter. At least you can use a range of catalog numbers in the search on HipStamp, I haven't been able to do that on eBay.

You are on the right track, keep going. Note that your search returned 95,525 listings. And you are correctly using the sort by Country/Catalog Number menu. The first few pages especially are going to be garbage with badly entered data. Click the page numbers at the bottom of the results to jump to page 5 or something and the list should start to get more organized with fewer bad results mixed in. You may still see Jersey #5 and Guernsey #5 mixed in with GB #5 so it's not perfect, but with 95K search results you're going to be paging through a lot of stuff anyway unless you use some of the filters for mint/used/cover/price/etc. to limit the results a little more.

It's not perfect, but there is a mountain of material there. Once you find some items you like, you can even try searching a particular dealer's listings for good quality results. Keep in mind that some dealers have 200K items themselves in a single store, including hundreds of copies of the same 25 cent stamp.


Be patient and happy hunting.

There is less GIGO* on eBay is my suggestion.





*GIGO = Garbage In Garbage Out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garba...t#References

IMO, Hip is much easier to search for individual stamps than eBay is these days, but you might try searching with the Scott cat number instead of the SG cat number. If the seller doesn't list by SG, and my guess is that there is more Scott than SG, so you may be just banging your head against the wall.

Hope this helps, Ray

Everything about HipStamp, especially its search and sorting functions, gives me a headache. I avoid it like the plague, and don't understand why people use it. Between SAN, eBay (US and several international domains), Delcampe (sadly not available for me any longer), and a few specific dealers, I've never been stuck for very long.
There's no excuse these days for anyone to use a site that is a hassle.

ridiculous - GIGO. Hope they didnt spend a lot of money on it! I tried again for GB, SG1 and all I got was 1d reds.

I quit. Too many other options.

Why search for SG1, when 'Penny Black' does the job?
SG1 is rarely used, since it is the intense black variety. The basic Penny Black is SG2.

It was just a test to see if I could figure out the "system". I just didnt expect to see all reds as results.

If you simply search for "Great Britain" from the home screen, then sort by "Country/Catalogue number,' you will get 8400 results starting with "#1."

Searching with "Great Britain 2-54" yields about 7,700 results and can also be sorted by catalog number. Slightly more manageable. You will see almost a page of incorrect items but quickly see results with Scott #2 onward. Searching for Great Britain 1 yields 760 results today.

Would this be acceptable? Searches are limited to 50 cat numbers, so you may opt for 2 separate searches, e.g. 1-27 and 28-54. This gives a few more results. You may even want 4 different groups between 1 and 54 to ensure max results and fewest missed opportunities.

Searching by year isn't effective on Hipstamp as many if not most sellers don't bother putting the year of issue in the description. Plus, the search "X-Y" only works on Scott numbers, not year ranges (that I know of).

I use and buy from Hipstamp all the time with no headaches at all. Be sure to enter what you're looking for as simply as possibly.

I often search by a year date if I can't find a stamp by its Scott catalogue number. It's a good idea because some sellers use SG numbers, some use Scott numbers, and so on, so you will miss stamps if you search under just one set of numbers. So I might search for "Great Britain 1885" to see all stamps listed from that year -- but only if sellers included the year in the title of their listing. Which is the weakness with this as some sellers don't do that.

I never search a span of year dates (1880-1900) but I suppose that might also work. I'd be afraid, though, that it would turn up far too many stamps to be convenient to view.

If I search for a range of catalogue numbers (and Hipstamp does this far better than Ebay) I write the numbers as "190-200" or "250-60" and Hipstamp will show all listed stamps between, and including, those numbers. I've never had any problems doing this.

It all depends on the seller's information and the title they give the listing. If they don't include a year date, a catalogue number, or a title for the stamp, then searching for that will not turn up that listing. It's not up to Hipstamp since how is it supposed to know? It's up to the seller. If I were selling an 1855 Queen Victoria stamp SG #63, and I omitted the year date and the name of QV, and I neglected to include the stamp's catalogue number, no one would ever see it. I don't think we should blame Hipstamp for sloppiness on the part of a seller.

Thanks for all the tips. I, going to play around with it a little today and see how I do.

I enter Great Britain 2-45 and change results to 96 per page. It's at about page 7 that I start to get more accurate resultes….. tks!

Well, I've heard back from Hipstamp on my query on how best to use the search feature. I had explained what I had done and what the poor results were. They responded and told me to try exactly what I HAD ALREADY TRIED AND GAVE TO THEM IN MY QUERY TO THEM. It's like they cut and pasted what I had sent them and just sent it back to me to try?!?!


Think I'll come here first. I've better help here! Tks again.....