I bought there in the early part of this decade and the prices seemed too high for me. How are they now? Any thoughts on teletrade welcome.
I've seen some pretty good deals on there. Imo the one big problem is still the pics, sometimes they're accurate, and other times they're off.
Here is my take for what its worth.... I buy most of my coins from Teletrade nowadays. I feel that, for what I collect, they have the best variety of all the online auction places (except maybe ebay) and I get my coins at a fair price sometimes even less than ebay. The buyers premium is high IMO, but if you think that is bad, take a look at Heritage or DLRC auctions. Those are a bit higher. I still go to ebay first, but for the harder to find coins, Teletrade usually gets them. I have only had one problem with a coin I bought off of Teletrade and I called them up and told them that I wanted to send it back because I felt that what I purchased was not represented in their pictures. They refunded the full amount plus buyers premium. Keep in mind that this is minus $5 + 5% for anything under $200, then $10 + 5% for anything over $200. They didn't have to do that for my order, but they did and because of that, they will keep my business. I was out shipping both ways which was no more than $10. Once you win a coin, they usually ship it out within a day. So if I buy anything at Sundays or Mondays auctions, I will definitely have them by the weeks end and sometimes with Wednesdays auction as well. I like them and would recommend them to anyone.
I agree 100% with Joe's comments regarding TT. TT runs a very decent business and customer service seems to be high on their priority list. However, I've never had to return anything so I can't speak to that. Yes, the premium seems high to me too, but only when buying small value items, say under $100. I wish they had a tiered system for lower value items or let you build up several items across several auction dates, like over the course of one month, before paying for all items won in order to save on shipping fees. I feel it always takes a full 10 days to get my coins delivered from TT, going from Cali to NYC for me. Even though parcels come via USPS 'signature confirmation' I wish they had a tracking number so I could monitor the parcel's in route progress. These are all really minor things and they only reveal my excitement and anticipatory needs in the process. One last thing, I have found after a few orders that it's pretty easy to adjust to reading their photos when judging coins 'eye appeal' and looking for marks. TT does not have "the" best coin photography around but it's more than sufficient. TT gets a big thumbs up in my book. :thumb:
Krispy and Joe I should have added that when I have purchased from them (not often recently), I always found they had very good customer service. I have also had good experiences selling with them.
And then they hide the "auction" information of coins that fail to meet the "reserves." That said, I still buy things from them from time to time as there is some good stuff there. But to say it's better than Heritage or the others is stretch in my opinion. They charge the SAME 15% buyer's premium as the other guys but they don't give me a free catalog and they rarely have lot viewings of their items in advance that I'm aware of.
