Another reason not to purchase from ebay

It's a shame that the ancient and medieval coins sections of eBay have become such crap. Other collectibles areas that interest me such as exonumia and stamps are doing just fine. Considering that eBay will be under ever-increasing pressure from the cultural property lobby, I wouldn't be surprised to see the ancient and medieval coins categories vanish altogether in the next few years.

 

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My really issue with e-Bay is the shill bidding that goes on. I can't believe some people have to do this to make a buck, but then I guess I am a bit to honest for my own good. I still enjoy bidding on coins and sometimes winning as long as I keep it within my limits. Regards.

 

I throw scratched up, corroded, ugly wheats into the coinstar every time I go. I've thrown a few dateless buffalos in there too.

 

Shill bidding is possibly an issue on eBay - especially since it’s a buyer’s market. But overall, hammer prices are substantially below retail and there are bargains to be had.

 

eBay can’t seem to get out of its own way. They offer a strong money back guarantee to protect the buyer, which enables fraudsters to make a living cheating sellers. They offer an authentication service for collectible watches, but only those over $2K. You can guess what the fake watch dealers do. They have a fake reporting mechanism, but it is ignored, even the submissions by experts. There is a review system, but it is rendered valueless because it is trivially easy to game positive reviews and purge negative ones. A US location means literally nothing, as goods can be freely drop shipped from anywhere by a foreign seller with a Mailboxes Etc street address. You can buy a slabbed coin, see it relisted the following week, and buy it again. Shill bidders are inevitable and easy thanks to how you game the review system. A bargain priced it or an auction ends at a low price, expect an email telling you the item was damaged preparing it for shipment, or lost, or the seller’s dog ate it. It’ll be back up in a month at a higher price.

eBay is a minefield for both buyers and sellers. I sold my fidget spinner collection at the height of the boom, and half the winning bidders tried to cheat me. Over a quarter got away with it, using eBay’s own policies against me (no, I won’t say how, though literally anyone at the time could do it). The fidget spinner audience isn’t the ancient coin audience, but my point is we vilify sellers when the buyers are not all honest either. Legitimate sellers have to work hard on that platform and their pricing usually reflects that. (I don’t consider High Price Deserves Low Rating a legitimate seller, though the coins are real it’s a designed scam.)

As others have commented the number of legitimate sellers has fallen dramatically. I spent a fair bit of money (for me) compiling a list of reliable sellers a few years back, receiving a lot of fakes in the process. I just checked, and of the 58 reliable dealers on my list only 14 are still active. Make that 13, since one of those 14 is a VCoins dealer who dabbles in the dark side by consigning coins sight unseen from unreliable sources.

I did a test a few years back by buying the 50 most recent reasonably priced (for me) buy-it-now listings from unique sellers in the ancient coins category. The percentage of fake, misidentified, aggressively cleaned and retoned, damaged, misrepresented, not-the-coin-in-the-photos, and grossly over-graded coins was shocking. I don’t recall the exact numbers (I made a post on it), but it was so high a random purchase was tantamount to wasting your money. Hardly the experience we want new collectors to have.

The situation in other categories was even worse. Please don’t buy an antiquity, a stone tool, an arrowhead, a dinosaur egg, a trilobite/megalodon tooth/mammoth hair/mammoth tooth/dinosaur skin impression, or a meteorite on eBay without doing *extensive* research or lining up an expert to authenticate it the day it arrives (despite what they say, time is of the essence for not as described return disputes). Your chance of buying a real dinosaur egg from among the listings, for example, is literally zero most of the year.

Best of luck eBayers. Deals can be had, but caveat emptor.

 

I agree about EBay being a buyer's platform. I used to be a seller on EBay as well some years ago but gave up on that because overall, I wasn't making enough money for it to be worth it. High EBay fees, high shipping costs (Canada Post, enough said, sorry @Terence Cheeseman), EBay refunding people who complain they never received your coin directly from your account; people paying by credit card then cancelling the transaction once you've sent the coin, EBay withholding funds, etc...Just too much hassle for it to be worth it. Best to be a buyer.

With regards to all the fakes, I don't think that EBay really cares whether something is fake or not as long as it sells and makes them money. In the early days there used to be a site where you could identify fakes, and I actually traded e-mails with a real live person at the other end in those days. Today, there still is a process for doing so, but there are so many fakes that it's not even possible to declare them all. A few times I tried, but the e-mail likely went into a bottomless pit, and those sellers merrily continue to peddle their fakes. I don't think that EBay realizes that curating their site like Catawiki does may actually help matters. To them, it's not worth the additional cost.

 

I can’t say I’ve had such negative experiences. I keep my searches narrow and specific, so I’m only dealing with manageable volumes. I don’t buy coins that I don’t know well, and I don’t buy from sellers who:
- appear untrustworthy or unknowledgeable
- have fakes among their inventory
- appear amateurish
- have any negative or neutral feedback
- are located in countries with poor reputations (China, most of Eastern Europe)
- overprice their inventory

Stores with a bricks and mortar presence I trust more.

I agree it’s a jungle out there, and not for everyone.

 

And possibly a new collector is born. I like it.

 

Be very very wary of buying ancient coins or "old French" coins from China. Several years ago a Chinese company sent me an email asking whether I had certain ancient coins for sale in very good condition (they sent me a list - the pillocks didn't realise that wildwinds is a database and not a shop) because they wished to make "replicas". Yeah, sure, replicas, like they make "replicas" of just about everything from Omega watches to Bosch tools. I sent them a harsh reply.
About a year later they began flooding the market with fake rare "old French" coins, about which CGB (France) warned people in one of their newsletters.

 

I do my research and only buy certified coins which I am reasonably assured of their authenticity (checking for fake slabs, too, of course.)

And, I am mostly buying French Colonial coins from Morocco.

 

I generally really enjoy using eBay, and it's the place where I buy most of my coins.

That said, I saw this coin listed today.

You know those really cool antoniniani of Otacilia Severa, with a hippo on the reverse, that was minted to commemorate Rome's 1000th anniversary?

Forget that, and look at this.

 

At least that's not going to fool anybody!

 

I only buy NGC slabbed ancients, which I know isn't an absolute guarantee of authenticity. But one of the benefits is that my level of confidence is the same regardless of the source. I like to see coins pop up on Ebay because they tend to go cheaper than through Heritage etc.