Can anyone put out a list of trust worthy dealers, I am now into getting some of the harder to get Roman Emperors and do not want to worry about purchasing them, Thanks
Same for Vcoins. London Ancient Coins has a huge inventory, and both times I have ordered from Aegean Numismatics there have been no issues.
Dealers on Vcoins are usually reliable (I haven't had any problems with them). Some other good dealers of ancients who aren't on Vcoins are Classical Numismatic Group, Harlan J. Berk, Stephen Album, and Frank S. Robinson. (These are all mainly auction sellers, some have at least some fixed-price coins also.)
Akropolis looks like it has some very nice coins at reasonable prices but when i open the site my computer tells me the site is "not secure". What does this mean in practical terms?
Mine does the same thing, I have it set for HTTPS and when a HTTP site pops up, it says not secure, so I do not enter the site unless I trust it!
As noted above, it has to due with the internet protocol. With https, all traffic is encrypted end to end. With old-school http, traffic is "in the open". It is unwise these days to make online payment or transmit sensitive data without a "secure" https connection. Browsing is generally ok as long as your machine is up-to-date.
Yes, mine is "old school." I created it 19 years ago as a greenhorn, using Microsoft FrontPage 2003. http just happened. I knew nothing about https.
Here is a list (which has been on my site for many years, continually updated) of dealers: http://augustuscoins.com/ed/dealers.html People who have any trouble are able to report to me if a transaction goes wrong, and I have never had such a report about those dealers. Be aware that it does not include eBay which has many fakesellers.
I don't even bother looking through coin stores (or BIN Ebay listings, etc). When I compare the prices to what I feel would be expected at auction, I find myself repeating, "WHAT?!, WHAT?!, HUH?!" That's probably because a lot of the coins in the stores were purchased in public auctions (where "fair" market price is actually determined), then marked up at a fixed price for the purpose of making profit. Never would have occurred to me that such a thing would be successful, and I wouldn't have done it anyway if it had. I much prefer waiting for the coins that I want to show up in auctions. At least then I know that another person was willing to pay nearly as much. This is assuming that the auction houses or sellers aren't pulling some kind of shenanigans, that's not necessarily always a given
I just checked its links and reorganized it a bit to put the more-useful links higher on the list. If you know of other sites for buying ancient coins, drop me a private message and I'll consider adding to the list. It is easy to modify.
