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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Valentinian, post: 2023558, member: 44316&quot;]I agree that true auctions on US eBay are hard to find. This is my opinion about why. My comments are about ancient coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>I think that fixed-price sites have many dealers pricing coins very optimistically (much higher than just a few years ago), leading to few coins actually selling at those levels, but causing other sellers think coins ought to be worth about that much. So eBay sellers set unrealistic opening levels by looking at prices of coins that do not sell. It is not that actually selling prices on eBay are low because coin prices are going down, rather that the apparent increase in prices over the last few years is true for prices -- but that is an impression about listing prices, not a fact about selling prices. Coins that actually sold have not gone up much less than coins that have been listed for sale (in my opinion).</p><p><br /></p><p>Whether you think coin is a &quot;good deal&quot; or not depends upon what you think it is worth and regularly sells for. It is easy to be mislead by checking out fixed-price sites and thinking those prices are realistic and those prices are what the coins sell for. Often they are not. Even the ones that sell may not sell at the listed prices. Some actually sell at a show for some percentage off, or at a lower price offered by the buyer. </p><p><br /></p><p>Sure, there are some &quot;good deals&quot; listed on fixed-price sites and many of those will sell very shortly after being listed. But, they are far less common than they used to be as sellers raised prices faster than the market buys coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>There are other factors. One is that eBay does not make seller&#039;s pay if the coin remains unsold, so there is no financial incentive to price the coin so it is likely to sell. Just relist it later, again and again (I can cite one ancient coin listed for over $200 that has not sold in about 40 eBay listings, but the &quot;price&quot; has not come down.)</p><p><br /></p><p>Another factor is psychological. When someone first becomes a collector his standards for &quot;good coins&quot; are not as high as they later become. So, someone collecting, say, Roman Republican coins, thinks they used to be able to buy coins they liked at, say, $75 and now those types are $150. True, now the coins they like cost a lot more, but they are looking for better examples of those types than they used to collect and those better examples that cost $150 now would have cost well over $75 back then. Prices have gone up, but a big part of the apparent increase in in the better quality demanded by the collector, not just the price rise for a comparable coin.</p><p><br /></p><p>So, I don&#039;t think that in general prices have gone down or are even weaker that they were a while ago. I think they never really went up as much as the increase in listing prices suggests.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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