Getting tired of auction houses

I'm used to book auctions where costs are about 25-27% plus 5% for Invaluable, and sometimes huge amounts for shipping (famously, some years ago, 300 euros for shipping a book from Sotheby Paris to Amsterdam. We went to Paris to pick up the book, see the Eifel Tower and had a delicious lunch for two, all for 300 euros).

So most coin auction costs are not too bad in my eyes. Except for the British ones with high costs and tricky pound exchange rates (will be worse in future). I'm doing British auctions only when absolutely necessary.



This Alexandria tetradrachm from Gordian III's short spell as caesar is from a Roma auction in London.

 

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I just sat thru 4 major auctions. Some coins went for insane amounts. One example, a Dutch India AV Pagoda (catalogue value in UNC ($300) sold for $1900. Another coin I was after, sold 20X catalogue. This is not from some obsolete 30 year old edition/ we are talking 2018 ed.
Conclusion, all high quality/ great eye appeal material is hotter then ever. But getting back to comm. fees, when you think of all the cost in sending out catalogues/ creating the websites/ all the staff involved in setting up the auctions/ accounting/ postage, maybe the 12-20 percent fees are not that outrageous. We here in the "Great White North" have a much greater challenge, called exchange rates....
1UK Pound=$1.70 Can.
1US Dollar= $1.32 Can.
1Euro= $1.45 Can. You guys/ gals in the UK/ Europe/ USA are SO LUCKY.
Of course the banks mark up the conversion rates too. But then thats normal for banks (reason they make billions in profit @ quarter.

 

Transferwise beats the pants off the banks for exchange rates

 

Quite, Transferwise works well. But it's not so easy to persuade your business partner to go to Transferwise. In the case of Paypal, the seller pays (about) 4%. Clients don't realize that, unless the seller passes on his costs to the client. With Transferwise, cost is much lower, I believe 0.5%. But it's the client that pays, here you have the problem.

 

Actually, my calculations shows that buyers pay less using TransferWise even while the seller gets full price. The TW fees, which are paid by the buyer and might seem to increase the cost to the buyer, are less than the extra amount a PayPal buyer pays with the poor exchange rate they give. I challenge others to do the type of calculation I did and reported on here:
https://www.cointalk.com/threads/paypal-fees.353286/
and here:
https://www.cointalk.com/threads/paypal-fees.353286/#post-3996170

If you use PayPal, the seller gets less than PayPal says you are sending (the well-known PayPal fee. That is expected.). It is less well known that you pay more for those currency units than you should (the not so well-known poor exchange rate.) So you pay more in dollars than you would with TransferWise and the seller gets less.

Read the posts at those links for a detailed explanation.

 

Yes, but I think (?) there is, or was, a bigger problem that people in the US may not be aware of (?). From the UK I joined Transferwise a few years back and was immediately given 6 bank accounts. ($, £, and Euro) in two sets (business and private). Now electric transfers in the UK are fast and free, and in much of the Euro zone its much the same - even to £. But the problem remained getting funds from $. So I approached a few US dealers suggesting they open Transferwise accounts also. But they could not. US banks were making it near impossible it seemed.

Actually I saved quite a lot when traveling in the US on exchange rates using a Transferwise bank card - so that part worked. And it sounds like people are now getting good access to the Transferwise payment system from the US. Has that happened recently (?)

The real deal with Transferwise was however the getting of multiple currency accounts and the ease of transactions that creates. You could stack up funds in $ and then move them out very cheaply once they accumulate and its not clear that is yet being allowed in the US?