Interesting going's on . . .

Interesting . . .

I won a conditionally rare coin on eBay (yes, I actually buy coins too) from a long-standing seller (a prominent dealer, who I will not out publicly), paid with PayPal, and awaited delivery. A couple of days after it should have arrived and hadn't, I looked for the tracking number, and it hadn't been uploaded to eBay, but eBay did indicate that it had been shipped on time, so I contacted the seller asking for a tracking number.

After another couple of days, and no reply, I contacted the seller again, asking if my inquiry had been received. I also dug into their feedback, and discovered that they habitually cancel transactions which, according to their disgruntled buyers, they cancel because of low prices realized, and then make up excuses like items were sold off-line, or lost or the inventory levels were wrong.

After my second message I got a reply indicating that a former employee had stolen a bunch of coins, and that they were working with the police to determine if mine was among them. They said they needed a day or two to get back to me, either with a tracking number, or a refund. Things were beginning to smell a little off to me . . . I wasn't sure at that point that they didn't intend to cancel the sale and find another owner at a higher price . . . how should I respond, I wondered? They deserved the benefit if the doubt, right?

I waited a day and then messaged back that, since I was an involved party, if it was indeed a theft, I required a copy of the police report. I was quite confident they wouldn't file a false report if the coin hadn't been stolen.

Sure enough, this morning I got a message indicating they'd found the coin had never been shipped, and uploaded a tracking number to eBay.

. . . I'm holding my breath.

PS: As an aside, I found an on-line thread complaining about bad coin dealers, and was VERY surprised to find this widely recognized dealer has a lot of very dissatisfied customers.

 

There's good and there's bad out there, always has been always will be. And it's not always the most well known names who are the good, or the bad for that matter.

I've never been one to pay a whole lot of attention to what most refer to as feedback for one simple reason - unless you personally know the person providing the feedback, it's pretty much worthless because you have no idea if they are even qualified to leave feedback.

In other words, before references, in either direction, can mean anything you have to know if you can trust the person providing the reference.

 

It's pretty simple, how can one possibly know if they had a good or bad experience if they don't know anything about coins ? For example, you buy a coin and are quite happy with it, so you leave positive feedback. But what you don't know is that you paid 3 times more than it was worth, or you don't know that coin was harshly cleaned, or you don't know that the coin was grossly over-graded, or you don't know that the coin was a fake ? And there's a long, long list that can go on and on.

That's why you have to be qualified.

 

Another simple example makes my point. One the largest sellers there ever was on ebay was abon, aka abon.com. He had hundreds of thousands of positive feedback records, probably sold over a million coins. He had one of the best ebay records in history. Yet this guy was the biggest scam artist numismatics has ever known.

So how is that possible ? It's because his buyers had no idea what they were doing. They were not qualified to leave feedback.

The vast majority of coin buyers, and not just on ebay, are not qualified to leave feedback.

 

I agree. But when you ask someone do you ask a perfect stranger or somebody you know and trust ?

You see that's my point. It's one thing when you get a reference from somebody you know, it's quite another to accept the word of perfect strangers. And 99.9% of those people leaving feedback are perfect strangers.

 

It was just as meaningless back when buyers could leave negative feedback and it was not removed.

But yes, in today's world it is even worse.

 

USPS estimates next week.