You know, I am completely stumped on how to get a site competetive to eBay off the ground. Yours is at least the 50th wannabee site I've looked at over the past decade, and like all the others, it does me no good at all.
My specialty is modern Japanese, including Japan-related Chinese and Korean issues. As of a few minutes ago the eBay "Coins-Asia" category had 443 Japanese listings, 2,923 Chinese listings, and 266 Korean listings, almost 3,800 possibilities to search through.
My secondary interest is an OFEC collection. Relevant eBay listings:
- Africa -2,201
- Asia - 6,978
- Australia & Oceania - 2,412
- Europe - 22,034
- Middle East - 1,262
- North & Central America - 4,239
- South America - 1,955
(Of course, as I already have an example, I can safely ignore all 167,102 listings for US coins.)
So I ask you, should I concentrate on your site, which has no world coins listed, on sites like Coins4 U, which has 3 world coins listed, or eBay, with its 41,121 relevant listings (ignoring completely the thousands of bullion, replica, etc. listings)?
It truly is a vicious circle. Buyers will never flock to a site that lacks a critical mass of sellers, but sellers won't list on a site without enough potential buyers to result in profitable sales.
I truly and sincerely admire your pluck, but the bottom line really (and sadly) is that no matter how much we hate them, 800 pound gorillas are very, very, very hard to dislodge from the top of the heap!
