Is it possible to search sold items in MA shops? Items still exist- I can see links to ones I purchased- but I haven’t been able to search for sold items that were not purchased by me. I am doing provenance research and would like to be able to search sold items. thanks!
I don’t think it’s possible. I wish they would offer this possibility, even if there is a fee involved. I wish coins sites, like MA-Shops and VCoins, would create a paper catalog if every coin sold and print it, in a small edition, for a few major numismatic research libraries such as the ANS. It would be cheap and easy to do, and leave records for future scholars.
Sometimes, sold coins' listings from V-Coins and MA-Shops have shown up among the results for Google searches, with no particular consistency, rhyme, or reason.
My MA-Shops bought page includes all three the orders I made through the site. One of the coins I can click through and still see (this amazing modern Rubik's cube commemorative from Hungary). The other two aren't available. I've noticed the same thing with VCoins. Some dealers allow their sold items to remain on the site, at the old URL locations. Others do not. I would be curious to know from the dealers who operate via consolidator sites what inspired them to make the choice they did regarding a public record of old sales.
I think V Coins dealers are able to archive their past sales on their home page. It would be nice if as the OP is suggesting that V Coins and MA Shops would have sales archive like E Bay but more specific. What irritates me is when dealers don't remove sold coins from their price lists. Two months later and the sold coin is still there with the "SOLD" label.
[QUOTE="tibor, post: 7568784, member: 73385"It would be nice if as the OP is suggesting that V Coins and MA Shops would have sales archive like E Bay but more specific.[/QUOTE] eBay's sold coins "archive" only covers the last 90 days and thus does not have much value for research. If you know a little bit about HTML it is easy to capture data from MA-Shops. For example, from the command line, you can do curl 'https://www.ma-shops.com/shops/search.php?searchstr=obol&days_new=3' ... to capture a search for "obol" uploaded in the last 3 days. eBay has a user agreement that prohibits capturing and saving data using tools. You can only save data manually, which is too much work! I would encourage anyone doing research, die studies and the like, to collect data from sites that allow it.
I've seen a number of "Sold" signs show up on coins marketed by vcoins when doing google searches. Have not seen this for m-a shops.
There is a difference between the systems of both "shops" In vcoins all sold coins are transferred to a catagory "sold coins" automatically. The dealer can decide, wether to keep his sold coins in this category or to delete them whenever he wants. Some dealers use their vcoins store as some sort of inventory and keep the descriptions for further use, others just don't like to present information of running their business. MA-shops just marks the coins as "sold" and keeps them in the shop for a short time. They then will be deleted automatically.
From MA-Shops here...thank you for the feedback! While we don't feature a view of all sold coins, I do have a tip which may be of interest If there are coins you are watching (marked as favorites) these coins will not be deleted from your view, even after they are sold. They should be available to you for years.
