How often do you browse for coins?

The most exciting type of watching - or should I say, stalking - for coins is when I decide to participate in an auction and I select a number of coins as main targets and secondary targets.
Usually 1 or 2 coins are the main targets and depending on the importance they have for me, when the auction is close sometimes I check them 7-8 times a day to see if there is a change in the actual bid and wondering how many other people are doing this. And of course wondering what is the actual prebid or proxy bid.

I choose coins that are, in theory, in my price range. Watching a coin that will certainly sell for 1000 euros and hoping nobody will see it and I will get it for 50 euros is useless.

 

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you mean people stop browsing for coins?

 

Hi, I had some issues with a dealer on Ma-shops, they have listed a coin with an option to make offer, so I did, let's say the coin was $78 and I asked for $70, nothing much drastic, but rather than responding to my offer, they simply marked the coin sold. Now it is possible that the coin could've been actually sold, but I think it's highly unlikely given that coin was buried deep in the listing and I was watching it for months!
I didn't want to complain officially, but given you are in this thread, what are your thoughts?

 

But how do they benefit by marking the coin as sold if they didn't actually sell it? It would have been simple enough to reject your offer if they didn't consider it sufficient, and leave the coin up for sale for $78. Obviously they could wait a short period and then relist the coin at whatever price they want, but again, what's the point or benefit for them of doing that?

 

That seller also has an ebay store, I've seen coins sell there like hot cakes in their auctions, maybe they wanted to relist it on ebay?!

 

Perhaps the dealer saw the $78 price, and thought "Oh wow! That's way too low!", or "Oops! I shouldn't have priced that coin so low!", or "Wow! I must have priced that coin a long time ago! I really need to update that price, because the ancient coin market is hot right now!", or something like that.

 

P.S. : Or, maybe the dealer recognized the coin, and remembered that he/she had already sold the coin (perhaps sold on Ebay), and somehow the coin was still listed as available, so the dealer changed the listing to "sold".

 

When I am at work/ usually between 10:30-11:00PM/ but when I am unemployed Dec/Jan/Feb/ Mar probably 2 hrs checking for goodies to bid on.

 

@Jay GT4 , when I was collecting modern coins I had similar situations 3 or 4 times.
I was browsing for modern coins on various websites and when finding what I wanted, at a decent price, but not ridiculously cheap (often offered by sellers who were not specialized on that area) I was glad.
First time on eBay, I found a scarce coin, acceptable condition for the issue - $50. Would have paid 60-70. Bought it, without asking, paid it and after 2 days I received an email from the seller advising me he cannot locate the item, it was either sold but he can't recall or lost. Got a refund. I don't think it was because of the price.
After this, when buying from sellers I didn't know I always tried to communicate first - to be sure if item is still available. Some didn't bother to reply at all, some marked the item as sold with or without replying.

I would give the seller the benefit of doubt - I suspect the coin was indeed sold and he/she forgot to mark it as sold. However it's polite to reply so I would just avoid this seller for future.

 

Both VCoins and MA-Shops offer a want list feature that will inform you automatically if there is a new offer that matches your search. Using your own crawler is not very economical since it causes unecessary traffic and work load for the servers (imagine everyone used their own crawler, the sites would have to scale up their infrastructure to handle the extra load).

 

While technically true, I'm using far lower resources than a normal page viewer as I'm not recursively downloading images, adhering to 429/503 and other status codes, and back off exponentially on slow responses. I've built many web crawlers over the last 20 years and this will be unnoticeable to their normal volume of users. Plus, it only benefits the shops as I'm then more likely to purchase from their dealers.

As for the wantlist features, I would love to be able to solely rely on them but, as a generalist, the number of keywords I'm looking for is unsustainable and the cadence with which notifications are sent out is too slow in many cases for highly contended pieces.

 

I agree that your single crawler probably won't make a big difference. But still:

This may be true for traffic, but not for the work load generated by your search requests (e.g. on their database). And if their want list notification cadence is too slow for you, I assume your crawler cadence is, consequently, high(er). They probably chose the lower cadence for a reason. Again, if everyone used their own crawlers, they would certainly notice

And, at leat for VCoins, using crawlers is against their terms of use and against their robots.txt (if the crawler is targeting the search).

 

I browse every few hours during the day. I generally don't have alerts, because I want a general overview of what's available. Several times while searching, I uncovered a coin that fit into my collection that I was previously unaware of. For example, I found the coin below while just browsing. Before that, I had no idea there was a coin that referenced both Philip II and Alexander III.

One could argue that, had I had catalogs, I would've known about this coin. However, I would never have even thought to look through coins of Mytilene.


Mytilene EL Hekte
332 BCE. 10.5mm 2.57g 12h
Ex CGB

I look at vcoins more often because browsing is simpler. On the homepage itself it shows the most recent coins with ancients at the top. Maybe once a day I'll look at ma-shops.

The only notification I receive is for CGB, and that's directly from their site - because they tend to have interesting coins (such as the above).

For several of my favorite dealers on vcoins, I go directly to the dealer site because:
a) Coins are typically posted on the dealers' sites before going on vcoins AND
b) Those same coins are listed higher on vcoins, presumably due to fees

Here's another I found through browsing.


Ketriporis, King of Thrace (356-352/1 BC : Ae Unit
Obv: Wreathed head of Dionysos right
Rev: Kantharos with King's name around, thyrsos to left
16mm, 5.1gms
Ex Bargain Bin Ancients

I've since found resources online to ensure I'm aware of all the coinage of Thracian kings involved with Philip II, but at the time I was only aware of Kersebleptes, Amatokos II, and Teres II.

 

"Marked as sold" and after a while "relisting" is forbidden and monitored by MA-Shops. If you have a concern with this in the future, please convey your concern to service@ma-shops.com

 

Hello, can you please comment if you used the "Make an offer" or"Question about this item" button?

 

Every single day I scroll through new listings on Vcoins/Ma-shops as well as any new auction posted on Numisbids/Sixbid/Biddr. If anything stands out, it gets watchlisted.

I’ll go over these watchlists every few days to let them sink in, but usually with a special coin I’ll know right away.
If the same coin continues to resonate over and over again it will get a bid..

 

I only buy NGC slabbed coins, so my avenues are pretty limited. Heritage typically has an ancient coin auction on Wednesdays, so I go through those. Other than that, I check Ebay to see if any roman coin auctions (I don't even bother looking at the BINs) are getting any bids, I look through those to see if there is anything that I need.

I typically check Heritage on Monday and Ebay on Friday, so I guess twice a week pretty much covers it.

ps: I blew up my budget on an auction about a month ago, so I haven't really been checking at all lately

 

I do that all year I never regretted spending $$$ on rare coins.
John

 

I check all the new auctions posted on biddr/sixbid/numisbids/bidinside plus I get emails from numisbids when a coin i’m seeking is getting listed….so much addiction‍