Stamp Collecting In Reverse

rogdcam wrote: Michael - May I ask what percentage of catalog value on average you can expect to net from an Ebay sale once fees and expenses are deducted?

Note: I am assuming that there is no hourly cost factored in for your own time.

Answer: LOL. Right. No hourly cost factored in for time spent selling or time spent buying. Time = fun.

Percentage of catalog value: Depending on condition of a United States stamp or stamp set, I listed my starting bids at about 33 40 or 50 percent of Scott Specialized catalog value for better quality (for Very Fine centering or the nebulous Fine-Very Fine) and about 5 10 or 20 percent for poor quality (for a broadly defined Fine or the dregs of Average). I sold during 2014-2018, so my memory is fuzzy. For a mint, never-hinged Lexington-Concord VF set, I went with 33 40 or 50 percent of catalog as a starting bid. For a pricey used grilled stamp with faults, I went with 5 or 10 percent of catalog as a starting bid. It took five years, but I sold everything I offered.

Condition (any fault) matters. Buyers want bargains or perceived bargains. Competition from other sellers is fierce for old but common U.S. stamps. When I sold, the buyers were out there, but my lots almost never experienced a bidding war.

As you probably know, eBay takes about 16 percent from your selling price (and since a few years ago, also your postage/packing cost). It always felt like a heavy hand was picking my pocket, but I had had my fun and I wanted my U.S. stamp collection out of my hair. Ebay delivered and paid quickly.

My old used U.S. stamps that were nice but as common as confetti I sold over three years in American Philatelic Society circuit books. I sent about a dozen circuit books at the same time. It was a slow process, but I sold much more than I thought I would. I considered it found money.

We got a huge crowd of EBAY sellers who for years purchased stuff at stamp auctions and listed tens of thousands of items to sell . But the problem with their buying is not understanding what sells and what is in demand . The story has been list everything on EBAY . Sure they got some quick sales.
But their storage space was filling up with stamps but their sales stayed the same and that is where we are at in 2024 .

That is why a lot of EBAY sellers are dumping huge box lots back at the auction houses . I like to call it "they didn't understand the few items they listed sold by 80 or 90% floats around .

As long as your collection at least in parts is organized with better material it will sell at auction. It will sell on Ebay. You won't get pennies on the dollar. If you have stamps in your collection that rarely (even cheap stuff) shows up on hip, ebay, delcampe, your set or collection will sell. You might even get gasp full cat value. The majority of stamp collections are not this. Most stamp collections esp the ones in the bargain bin are just cheap collections. Most collections are just accumulations, cheap stamps, CTOs, first day cover collections, sparsely filled albums etc...

Michael - Thank you for the insight. Interesting.

Floortrader touches upon an interesting facet of philatelic inventory in the modern era. Very little is newly added. The same material circulates endlessly while shape shifting.

I have seen this in my own material sold at auction, specifically red boxes of 102 cards. I took box lots, picked the better stamps and sets and sold the bunch at auction. Over the course of the next few years I saw those same red boxes pop-up in GB at auction as well as in the States. They were no longer together but sold by Country and who is to say how many 102 cards were removed. Some even re-emerged at the same auction house much later. It is an endless cycle. It would be fascinating to know how much, in the end, these red boxes generated in total revenue. Many multiples of catalog is not out of the question IMO.

"Floortrader touches upon an interesting facet of philatelic inventory in the modern era. Very little is newly added. The same material circulates endlessly while shape shifting." - Yes, you have to be careful what you are buying. One should try to buy lots that don't look picked over. I judge a collection from how many better stamps are still in it. If I don't see any, I pass. The few times that I buy a picked over collection is if I really want the album but not the stamps. Here is another trick. Even if you don't know every country in the World, look at the countries you do know. If those countries are in good shape, then it is likely the other countries might not be so bad. Also, look up the philatelist who previously owned the collection. What type of collector are they? It takes some time, but eventually you can judge who will have a nice collection for sale.

OP another idea is to break your collection up and sell on hip at the APS stampstore. They do all the work for you and you get retail sales.
For faster sale, break your collection into 1000 dollar lots and send to the auction house.

I'm with rogdcam on his point about new stuff not appearing in the market.

It's easy to see with all the common material--you can spot old hinges/remnants thereof, ancient glassines, bits of old black paper adhering to disturbed gum. This stuff is just a big soup of material, roiling about in an ocean of philatelic goodies, "shape shifting" over the decades from collection to collection. Added to albums only to be removed and repackaged for sale to the next guy who adds them to his album until the cycle starts again.

I got a bulk bundle of stamps last year. A couple old yellowed glassines had "50 churches" written on them. Someone had created topical packets. I don't collect that way (topical, I mean), so I separated out items I needed by country to add to my country-oriented albuming.

I'm confused as to why the poster seeks to sell his collection at this time. He says that he "...just turned 62, enjoy[s] decent health, [is] not "rich," but [has] no financial worries. Retirement looms in two years." It sounds like his life expectancy is probably another 2 decades at the minimum. He further states that he's spent $22K between 2019 and present. Are we to assume that he just started collecting (or got "serious" about it) only 5 years ago? From y perspective, if someone takes a $22K interest in a hobby, abandoning it in 5 years seems illogical. Is there some matter afoot here that I'm not seeing?

I plan to use my retirement days, when they come around, to work more on my collection. At this stage of the game, I have very few "good" stamps and not really enough of the common ones, but I still feel like I can get somewhere with my collection. I'd kinda feel like I'd have lost something important if I no longer had my collection.

I hope my observations don't offend; I just can't understand the original poster's motivation here.

Josh

The other way is to make order out of chaos. I have bought several "collections" which were accumulations of nice material, but not well sorted. By placing them correctly into a album, I have increased their value by making them easy to identify.

Or I took two or three collections of Philippine stamps, and combined them into a single, comprehensive collection. The sum is worth more than parts.

We need to understand how things have changed in the past few years . I like to explain one of these major changes .

The major stamp auction firms have been part of some of these changes ,we would agree they lost the big retail dealers who purchase better items and huge collections to be broken down for inventory . What you think would replace them would be the collectors , but we all known that is not the case because their numbers are going down .
So the question is who took the dealers place ? Well it is the EBAY SELLER . These are a different animal for the auction firms .
Their buying is not focus on building a inventory and their buying is to buy on Saturday and sell on Monday ..
They look at catalog value and full pages to sell . So the auction firms know this and adjusted to this .

I have to disagree with you , your statement you posted "about new stuff not appearing in the market "

I believe a lot of nice material has come on the market with all these great collectors of the past dying off . The market place is rich with better stuff . The thing is it moves fast and doesn't compete with all the junk that is floating around the auction houses and on internet sales . It sells fast at major auction houses and it disappears again . The stuff I am talking about can't be judged like the stuff that sits for weeks on EBAY.

You pay a premium for it and you will get the same when you sell it ,it is something that EBAY sellers refuse to buy because they live in a world of "a small percentage of catalog"

BFRomeos:

I have just seen this thread for the first time today. We seem to be in very similar circumstances, particularly with regard to having no relatives who are willing to take it up as a hobby. Also I even used the same phase "collecting in reverse" in a post back in 1917. I have a daughter who has declared that she has no interest in stamps but I know her partner would say "take it". I know the next action would be for them to sell it, probably for a lot less than it is worth. I very much agree with one poster who says sell, then enjoy the fruits of the return.

Where we differ, however, is that I am 86 years old so the urgency is considerably greater. I had a brief flurry of activity 10 years or so ago but the delay (read "procrastination") has thrown away valuable time. So a couple of months ago. I started rounding up the more interesting items (mostly from what my father passed on to me from the collection he started back in the 1930s) and have documented the first tranche of them. Now I have to decide whether to use hipstamps or eBay.

I know that this, numerically, will only be a relatively small portion of the collection, so I am also looking for ways to give away some of the more mundane material.

rogdcam:

I notice you posted to this thread, wondering what sort of results you can get on eBay. Yesterday (before I found this thread) I spent the day going through 20 pages of Australian stamps - my main area of interest - to check selling prices against catalogue values. I only considered items similar to what I have up for disposal. There were about 60 items of interest and the end result was:

• Number of entries: 60


• Single items and sets of up to 5 stamps


• Average %age of CV: 80%


• Number of entries below 50% of CV: 10


• Number of entries below 33% of CV: 8


• Number of entries above CV: 14

This was a surprise to me as I had expected a result closer to the magic one-third of CV. Now some of sellers identified themselves as stamp dealers. I really have to go back and take a look at whether this is a reasonably high percentage of the sellers. If not, the term "Catalogue Value" could easily be regarded as worth. But all of the sellers seemed to be relatively successful.

I know this doesn't meet your original desire for financial return after all costs.

Another observations:
I generally found the descriptions of items to be poor. In a number of cases, I could not even identify what stamps was being sold. And "stamp dealers" were particularly guilty of this.
Then there is the case of ordinary, everyday stamps in not particularly good condition being touted as "rare" and priced at hundreds of times greater than catalogue value.

Are you sure you are checking the prices that items actually SOLD for, or the prices that the dealers are asking/hoping to get for the items?

If you are seeing items that on average actually sold at 80% of CV then you must be looking at relatively scarce or high quality items. Listing/offer prices averaging 80% of CV I can believe.

ZebraMan:

These were non-auction asking prices, not realized prices. Some of the sellers were dealers with multiple-thousand sales. I would think that they, in particular, would have some idea as to what the market will bear and would presumably not want the bother of relisting too many lots. Most of the other sellers were likewise high volume but admittedly in their case there is the problem of whether they know their market.

I would have preferred to look at realized prices for auctions but I have to admit that I'm not sure how to go about it.