The other day, someone posted a thread about 99c eBay auctions and I believe the question was: have you ever won one. I feel the need to post this, mainly because of all the negativity that gets posted about the sellers of coins on eBay in these threads. A day or 2 after posting a comment or two on that thread, I ran across several Indian head cents with starting bids of 99c with combined shipping of $1.59. They weren't bad pictures or coins, all with full Liberty and though all the diamonds weren't there, there were several karots in the bunch. I bid them all, 19 of them total, and added a little to the bid for a little insurance. Well you guessed it I won all 19. The total shipping and all was $32. A few days later I got them in the mail, but it was the next evening before i got a chance to look them over. Before I had a chance to even open the envelope, I got an email form the seller stating that he had made a mistake and had failed to ship one of them, but it had been mailed separatly that day. I was thrilled with the coins but almost felt as If I stole them. The next day I got the missing one and he had paid another $3 bucks or so for the postage on a penny that was obviously worth a great deal more than I gave for it. I thanked him for his honesty and his response was that's the price he had to pay for a mistake and for me to enjoy the coins. I actually felt sorry for the guy. He is on top of my go to list for sure and I will give him the chance to make some money soon. I have no clue whether he is a member here, but if he is and reads this, I'd like to thank him again.
At least you didn't get 19 pictures of Indian heads it's nice to hear about a good Ebay seller for a change
I picked up two 2009P FY Lincoln WDDR-006 for .99 each plus $1.29 shipping. Both MS65's. Very pleased.
In the past, I've run into auctions like you described. Win the first coin in their group, and essentially everything else is free shipping. After a few successful transactions like that, I ran into a seller that wanted to charge me full shipping for every coin I won. If I recall correctly, I won six coins of his within a 20 minute period that totaled about 25 or 30 bucks. Taking for granted he would combine shipping, I asked for an invoice with the new total. Shortly after, he sent me an invoice with the total shipping price of around 40 bucks. When I contact him about it, he initially refused to combine shipping, saying "he doesn't do that," and expecting to get the entire 40 bucks. Frustrated, I told him that I would be very disappointed if I paid that price and each coin came in one box. Rather, I would expect each coin packaged and shipped separately, since I'm paying for that service. He eventually relented and grudgingly reduced the shipping cost.
$32 for shipping seemed rather high. No wonder he was willing to pay the added $3 for shipping the last coin. He was still ahead by $20 or more. Chris
Correct. Some of them I won at 99c. The rest at a little over a dollar because I did bid more than the starting bid and someone else bid on them too. The total for the 19 coins, including shipping was $30.
I got two PCGS silver state quarters, a 69 and a 70, for $3.98 shipped BIN. Right after I bought, I sent the guy this message: He replied immediately: You can bet I left him glowing feedback and star ratings.
That's great. I had an experience similar to that I won 45 auctions in a matter of minutes from a seller for .01 each. Now they weren't Indian head cents they cuts from mint sets still in the original cello. Both PDS cents and PD nickels including proof nickels from 60-64 and 65 SMS all in original packaging. Total face value was $2.27 and the end price was $2.95 I didn't need but couldn't pass em up. Then to top it off the seller sent them 2 day priority mail. 45 great feedbacks left for him.
Yes, I have also won .99 auctions. Similar to your story, though, was a seller recently, (a couple of months ago), listing a series of Turkomen bronzes. What they are is not important, but they typically go for around $40-100. I set up snipes on all of his auctions, putting in what I considered very lowball prices, like a quarter of what any other seller asks for them. Low and behold I won every single one for less than half my lowball bids. Just goes to show, if you put in bids and know what you are bidding on, sometimes you just get very lucky. You have to keep trying.
I have won a number of eBay stamp auctions at 99c, and I think you see that strategy because stamps are cheap to ship (you can easily ship 100, in a strong cardboard mailer, for 91 cents).
Thats part of the gamble you risk in any auction. I've sat in on live auctions with Heritage and Stacks and watched coins sell for hundreds of thousands less than both estimates and what the seller paid. They know the risk.
You shouldn't feel bad about the costs though. $32 isn't bad because if the coins were only in good condition (even though they were better) then it would have been about right and pictures aren't %100 most of the time. When I buy on ebay I always grade lower then what it looks like and don't bid over that and sometimes I get gems. If he sold them to a local dealer then that's about how much he would have gotten anyways. However if you still feel bad then you can always send him some shipping money through his PayPal. BTW give him the best feedback on it and let others know how honest he was if you haven't already.
