How is a 1st day Mint issue BACKORDERED?

I completed my purchase in the first hour of the initial sale.

The mint knows the date they are going sell these things well in advance

They have an idea of demand. Why not produce half of he mintage before the date?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

This is nothing new! You have to realize that institutional and subscription orders probably have precedence to mail, phone and online orders.

Chris

 

Happens all the time. Welcome to the world (mysterious?) of the US Mint.......

 

Back ordered is much better than the undesired "Waiting List"

 

..... Or sold out!


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

The big guys get theirs first and we get their returns.

 

Demand with these was probably hard to gauge, not all commemoratives have sold well.

 

Ouch! Somebody is getting it in the shorts. Oh, I better not say that it may sound too political.

 

Commemoratives are not available on the Subscription program and institutional orders (what exactly is that?) don't count either since ordering for everybody occurs at the exact same time. This is why they set "ordering limits".

The real problem is that ordering opens at a "set" time which always happens to be noon eastern time. Folks that are closer to the ordering area get in quicker. Those that are further away just have to wait.

As for backorders? It is easier to schedule an additional run after you know what the demand is going to be than it is to hold on to coins which cannot be sold. There was a lot of hype and even some false "Sold Out" cries when the HOF Coins went on sale. Some were even made available at the Baltimore Show so selling out of existing product was totally possible.

However, orders do get cancelled. When I logged on to the Mint Web site this morning, I was surprised to see that the Unc HOF Gold was available for shipping on 4/12. When I went to bed last night it was 6/15.

My feeling is that as long as you got your order in and as long as your credit card does not expire, then you should be good to go as I've seen the Backordered dates move up as well as move out.

 

The OP didn't specify whether his predicament involved a commemorative or not, so my response was a bit generalized.

Institutional buyers, such as APMEX, have often attempted to get around purchase order limits by having employees order for them using personal usernames and/or home computers.

Chris

 

Shades of the 25th anniversary silver eagle debacle............

 

Not only that, but I recall one collector who bragged on another forum about getting 20 of the 2006 20th Anniversary Eagle sets.

Chris

 

What were the limits on that set (2006) Chris? I can't recall as I ordered only one at that time.

 

I do not think that they had specific limits back then.

IIRC, these ordering limits got set up after the Washington and Adams Gold Spouse coins sold out in a day due to someone cornering the market.

 

Is that really true? The mint takes returns? What for?

 

Heck yes, they take returns. Once upon a time I used to get a mix of 69's & 70's every year, when the mint filled the order within days of placing it. The last few years all I got are damaged or less than 69's, which you could tell from the packaging, they had been rifled through - I returned them. Even though I order within the first minute of ordering, the mint usually delays shipping enough to send out the first round of returns. If this continues, I'll stop ordering from the mint and just buy certified examples from the secondary market.

 

I happen to know from 1st Hand experience that, even though the US Mint takes returns, they will not do it if you do a LOT of returns as its only a courtesy offered in case a coin or product is damaged.

In other words, if I had pockets deep enough to order 500 gold coins of which I returned 400 of them, I would definitely hear about it from the US Mint. They may accept the return of the 400 coins but they certainly would not allow me to order again.

The comment about getting someone else's return is possible but I could say with certainty that it wasn't something returned by the folks tat buy in volume. The US Mint does not support "cherrypicking" and will suspend accounts that end up costing them (the Mint) money.

Usually, he big boys have an avenue to sell off the coins they've ordered but do not want.

 

W

What 1st hand experience is that?

Why is it shipping is delayed and I only receive inferior quality with packaging that has clearly been rifled through? Overall decreased quality, with record high markups?

 

Sure they do,but those employees have to wade through the same mint morass that everybody else does. If you have a bunch of friends you can have them all order coins for you too, just like the big boys do. Many people do this on high interest coins that have household limits. The big boys also have a lot of customers that buy multiples and then sell most of them to them. That is why the big boys often have hot items in quantity before a lot of collectors get theirs.

 

Yes, I entered my order for the Silver dollars (proof and uncirculated) and the clad halves. They're all showing as backordered, even though I got them this morning. I imagine that I will get them sooner than it says, but it is the usual nonsense and inability to calculate supply and demand on the part of the US Mint. Most businesses get a pretty good idea of customer demand BEFORE they introduce a product.