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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;MorganFred, post: 34662, member: 1779&quot;]Chris, welcome to the forum.</p><p><br /></p><p>For some of us, myself in particular, eBay is the <b>ONLY</b> means for selling and buying coins. I&#039;m a fulltime RVer wintering in the middle of the Arizona desert, don&#039;t have any coin shops nearby but with a Post Office about 23 miles away, so can send and receive only by mail. However, even if location were not a consideration, I would still use eBay. I&#039;ve been an eBayer for more than five years, so I&#039;ve made my mistakes, learned my lessons (and am still learning).</p><p><br /></p><p>I agree completely with neuron&#039;s advice above and will add a few of my own regarding buying:</p><p><br /></p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; 1.) Learn how to grade coins. It&#039;s very difficult to grade a coin from a photo which may not show defects in a coin, but with practice, one may acquire an estimate of a coin from a photo if it&#039;s clear enough.</p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; 2.) Watch for the red flags in an auction: too many and too frequent negative feedbacks (a Positive Feedback score below 99.5 can be very bad); &quot;private&quot; auctions in which bidders&#039; names are hidden; descriptions which are very short, vague, poorly written, or simply state (&quot;see picture; you be the judge&quot;); dissembling descriptions which give a long song and dance about collecting in general, the history of a listed series of coins, but pirouettes around the actual coin itself; fuzzy, poorly photographed, or too small pictures; lack of a stated return policy; pictures of only one side of a coin.</p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; 3.) With raw coins, feel free to ask the seller if the coin has been cleaned or might otherwise be a &quot;problem&quot; coin if this information is not included in the description. Often, an&nbsp; <i>honest</i> seller will respond with complete details about the coin. I email the seller of virtually <b>all</b> the auctions in which I am interested.</p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; 5.) If you&#039;re not sure how much you should bid for a coin, check completed auctions to get an idea of going prices. </p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; 6.) With raw coins, subtract at least one and preferably at least <b>two</b> grades from what the seller states, <b>especially</b> if the seller appears to sell a lot of coins but also has a lot of negative feedbacks. With a few exceptions, Power Sellers and other high-volume coin sellers tend to overgrade raw coins.</p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; 7.)&nbsp; Buy only slabbed coins in your early eBay career and buy only the top-tiered grading company slabs: PCGS, NGC, ICG, or ANACS. Any other third party grading (TPG) company is less than trustworthy. Later, you&#039;ll have enough grading experience to make your own assessments. <b>BUY THE COIN, NOT THE SLAB!</b>.</p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; 8.) Learn how to grade coins. This bears repeating.</p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; 9.) EBay offers numerous online learning courses and tips on how to buy safely. Read through them.</p><p><br /></p><p>Undoubtedly there are many, many other guidelines for successful eBay use, particularly buying. These are just those which come to mind at the moment.I would hope that others would add to this list. One guarantee: you <i>will</i> get burned at some point early in your eBay experience; do not let this discourage you. EBay can be a lot of fun, productive, efficient, and profitable with a lot of choices and bargains available <b>IF</b> one learns how the game is played.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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