Hi, I am new to these forums, so I will do my best to follow etiquette. I have been collecting US circulated coins for two decades now and it is a great hobby that keeps me coming back every few years on a fresh (gulp) buying binge. I also tend to be a quantity over quality kind of collector and I really like getting a lot of different coins, though this is expensive as I really prefer Silver and Gold over clad. In any case, I have been really dissatisfied with type of info available online at the various sites. It is either a pain in the but to navigate or loaded (and I mean LOADED) with advertisements. So my question was simply "what databases do you guys use to fetch information about coins you are looking at acquiring?" In my frustration I went ahead and built my own database of all circulated US coins and launched it. So, what I would like to know is what other collectors like and don't like about the online databases that already exist so I can improve what I built to be useful to others. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
My most used is the top one catawiki http://www.catawiki.com/catalog/coins/59793-countries Here are some others http://www.pcgs.com/Photograde/ http://en.numista.com/catalogue/index.php http://tokencatalog.com/index.php http://www.ngccoin.com/price-guide/world/
I'm not positive what you're looking for but as far as grading coins I use http://www.pcgs.com/photograde/ As far as pricing coins either http://www.pcgs.com/prices/?gclid=C...XRlT_xlef5ogpM9spnmZan7OGjCufRi-JYxoCrrbw_wcB or http://www.numismedia.com/fmv/fmv.s...LUGb-0OB1kZmotyVpoN8oWmk9fLGkGRQ5QaAqrY8P8HAQ will give you comparative prices.
Exactly what kind of info is it that you want ? I'm asking because it would be much easier to answer your question if we knew that.
OK, made a lot of progress on this. Catawiki - seems to steer you straight to their auction site. It seems clear how these guys make their money. As soon as they get you to click into an auction area, you can't get back to the catalog. Yuck! Photograde - Great for grading. For checklisting, notsomuch. PCGS in general - Pay to play? Not interested. Numista - this one is useful for research. Great graphics and information. Gets old being asked to 'Buy Gold the Smart Way', and not really easy to build a checklist. NGC - Hard to use. Really just a way of advertising their grading service. Numismedia - More of a price guide. Designed to help you guage a price once you have decided what you want. Their are also a lot of other totally ad-infested sites with good data sets, but annoying usability. I agree the most useful is catawiki, but their navigation really blows. I suppose it accomplishes what the investors want, which is to steer people to their money making auction site, but I prefer to buy on eBay thanks. I incorporated what I like most from catawiki into my checklist and then added links to eBay so I can verify how much coins have sold for recently and see any that are up for auction currently. My goal: assuming I am collecting Mercury Dimes, I want to know which years, mints and mintage numbers are available. I want to know how much they have been selling for as of late so I can bid and buy competently. I am quite happy with the result for my own personal use, but I am loathe to link it here as that falls under 'self-promotion'.
Link to what ? The only way anything falls under self promotion is if you are talking about buying, selling, or trading. Or if you are posting links to your own sales sites or your own ebay auctions, things like that. You want to post a link to Catawiki or any of those you mentioned, have at it. That's not self promotion.
Got it. Since I am not buying or selling anything, I guess it is OK to share the link. I am using eBay's developer API to show visitors what is for sale and what has sold reently, but since none of the auctions are my own, I guess this is OK. http://www.trovestar.com/us_coins/index.php?CirculationType=Standard Let me know if this is useful and if you have any suggested improvements, I would welcome them.
