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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Silverlock, post: 7885811, member: 98181&quot;]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. </p><p><br /></p><p>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.)</p><p><br /></p><p>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. </p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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. </p><p><br /></p><p>Best of luck eBayers. Deals can be had, but caveat emptor.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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