Here are some interesting things I've learned throughout my NGC submissions. If anyone else has any tips for submitting to NGC, please post them here. If you need a coin reholdered and the coin is a variety, consider variety attribution instead. Reholdering costs $10, but variety attribution is only $15 and comes with free reholdering. If you're reholdering the coin anyway, it doesn't take much for a $5 variety attribution to be worth it. You can request that orders ship with each other to save on shipping and insurance. Sometimes they still ship the orders separately, but you only get charged the combined price either way. You can catch mechanical errors before they happen by verifying the Year, Country, Variety/Pedigree, and Denomination after your order posts as Received and before it is finalized. If you see something incorrect, call customer service. They are happy to do this, since they would rather fix it before it leaves NGC than have a coin shipped back at their expense for correction. If you submit in person at a show you save on one way shipping and insurance costs. They also much prefer that you use the manual forms over the printed forms, since with printed forms they have to fill out each copy separately. With manual forms, they only have to write on the original and it copies through to the layers below. If you ship an order that you know will be slower with an order that you know will be faster, the faster order will finish first and will sit at Quality Control. It won't proceed to Finalized/Imaged/Shipped and post up the grades until all the orders it's shipping with are also ready. However, right after it goes through Quality Control the coins are imaged, so you can see the grades by doing an online cert verification for the coins in the order, even though the grades are not yet posted. In this way you can look at the grades and designations and catch mistakes before the coins ship. Just call customer service if there's a problem. If you're submitting multiple coins of the same type, list them in order of ascending quality (including designations). This seems to improve the chances of a higher grade on the later coins as it puts the later coins in a more favorable contrast when compared with the proceeding coins. Having said that, keep premium quality coins with premium quality coins; don't mix in problem coins on the same order. Unless your coin is overgraded, it's usually better (and cheaper) to just crack out and submit the coin as part of another order, rather than trying to cross it. If you don't have enough coins on an order to submit as Economy, you can pad it with filler coins to reach the minimums. For US coins, Economy will save you money if you submit 4 or more coins on the order. For world coins, Economy will save you money if you submit 3 or more coins. If you are submitting in person and don't have enough to meet the minimum for Economy, ask. It's cheaper for them to just let you submit Economy with 3 or 4 coins than to grade a couple filler coins that you don't care about.
If possible try and do error coins in their own group, they don't make you do that but they will significantly slow down your order. Also don't bother using express service with error coins if you don't have too.
At least one finalizer at NGC grades the box from back to front so he is not caught in the trap of ascending grades. Some professional graders also grade coins while holding them upside down! One professional grader writes that he examines virtually every coin using a microscope. Whatever works...
This is a good point, also I always ask about turnaround times before submitting an order to see how to group them. For example if I'm submitting errors and they say the error guy is on a trip to one of their other foreign offices, I know it's going to be the slowest of my submissions.
Using what website? I just tried for one of my orders that's been in hold for like 2 weeks now and it says coin not found when I just tried. *as far as seeing the coins grade before they're posted
Go to their cert verification page. The cert number will be your order number then the - then the line number for the coin. They may not be there yet but sometimes it'll appear a bit early.
Also a good point with specialty items like that to check and see if their people are even there to do it at the time. Another one I would add would be double check an variety attributions to make sure they actually recognize those. Just because PCGS does them doesn't mean NGC does as well. Found that one out the hard way on a dime making the assumption they had added them as well.
I have verified now that this trick doesn't work anymore (with one exception below). Likely it stopped working when they upgraded their website a bit ago. There is still one instance where this does still work, and that's when coins are submitted for review. I would imagine that the cert lookup now suppresses displaying photos until the order status is set to finalized, however, for coins that have already been finalized on a previous order, the photo display never gets turned off when it comes back in for review. So when they take the updated photo it simply takes the place of the old one and is viewable immediately, regardless of order status.
