Concerned about the worsening quality of dealers here.
I was just lured by an HS email to check out all the listings at "up to 70% off." Well, of course, you know there are those who will abuse the system, putting greatly inflated "original prices," so that they can have a huge %-Off sale. One guy has his "original" prices set at double Scott value so he can claim he's giving you 80% off. The worst one I saw was from a dealer giving (HOLY COW) 98% OFF. Even at that, his sale price was 20% above Scott.
Of course, it's easy enough for most collectors to determine the true and fair retail value, but the point is, these guys are just turning this site into another ebay, and it's going to drive potential customers away. I've seen too many comments on different forums where people were already skeptical about doing business on HipStamp. This kind of activity only feeds that skepticism. Plus it's unfair to the dealers who truly have % Off sales for fairly priced material to begin with. Search results just get cluttered up with these bogus sales.
I guess that's the price of success. There are too many dealers and too many listings now to even attempt to maintain a certain degree of integrity.
Of course, it's easy enough for most collectors to determine the true and fair retail value, but the point is, these guys are just turning this site into another ebay, and it's going to drive potential customers away. I've seen too many comments on different forums where people were already skeptical about doing business on HipStamp. This kind of activity only feeds that skepticism. Plus it's unfair to the dealers who truly have % Off sales for fairly priced material to begin with. Search results just get cluttered up with these bogus sales.
I guess that's the price of success. There are too many dealers and too many listings now to even attempt to maintain a certain degree of integrity.
Comments
I like HipStamp. I like the sellers, most of whom have been helpful and willing to answer questions.
I don't think HipStamp is going to hell. I think it is a growing stamp community and a good place for learning about the hobby.
I would not worry too much about the comments on the forums. Most of the buyers don't actually use the forums. I grew up in this business and many of the comments are the same type of comments that some of them had 50 years ago. My folks and I were one of those dealers that some of them would have given us grief back in those days because we carried a fair amount so called sand dunes and CTO wallpaper stamps. My folks started the business when I was 11 back in 1969.
One of the things my mom would do was when she got price lists from some of the wholesalers and she would have us mark sets in the lists that we liked. Part of it was that she was trying to get kids interested in collecting stamps, and if we liked the sets then she knew other kids would be too. And most of them were inexpensive sets. (It should be no surprise that none of the sets that we picked had any dead dudes in them and very little of any so called classic material.)
In the early 1980's we were able to get a table at Milcopex which is the largest show in WI. At that time the man who was in charge of running the show was having a problem with many of the sellers not wanting to be near the kids table. He asked us if we would be willing to do so and we had no problem doing so. (The schools at that time would bring kids in on field trips on Friday.) Those days were fun to deal with the kids. Once the show opened we would have kids 5 and 6 deep around our table. (And we had a lot of stuff that they could for a quarter or 5 for $1. They were small packets of from anywhere of 15 to 25 stamps.) It was more fun dealing with those kids than dealing with the grumpy old goats. (And there are both buyers and sellers that are a bunch of grumpy old goats who have a tendency to think that their way of doing things is the only proper way of doing things.)
And we also had an older gentleman who never bought any thing else other than packets. (He bought thousands of dollars worth of those things.) I have no clue at all what he was doing with the stuff but he was having fun with it and it's all he wanted to buy. There is no accounting for the buyers tastes. You can go anywhere from just buying stamps to fill a space in your book in which condition is not an issue (Including stamps that are ripped, torn or shredded) or collecting every possible town cancel on a specific stamp, up and including only collecting XF to Superb pre 1900 MNHOG classics.
That's not to say that some of the sellers practices leave a lot to be desired. Unless the sellers is doing something illegal
who is to determine what is too high in prices or shipping, or condition or any thing you can think of? Who's the one that decides if shipping an item at $6 is too high? Is $10 too high? (If he the seller is sending those items out via first class parcel with tracking is that really out of line for that service? If the seller is sending the shipments via Fedex is that really out of line?) If I as a buyer want to fill my book with ripped, torn or shredded stamps who is to say I can't do that? If I want to buy 10,000 of the same common stamp who is to say I can't do that?
And if you could go back when Stampwants was first started and go back into the archives of the threads there some of the same ones that are still complaining about this since 2005. Some of the sellers that are doing some of these things were the same sellers they complained about then. One of the sellers they were complaining about the most bitterly is still listing and selling. I may not like what some of the sellers do, but I will defend the buyers rights to buy what they want from who they want and at the price they are willing to pay. The buyers are adults making adult choices, and they have the right to choose how they are going to spend their money.
And never mind the fact that the whole premise of this type of thread comes across as the buyers are IDIOTS and need to be protected from themselves. Give the buyers a bit more credit than that. And never mind the fact that most of the people that purchase off the internet are a bit more educated about this than were 15-20 years ago.
Want to see a kid lose interest in collecting stamps, try forcing them to collect Washington Franklins. (From a kids perspective they are some of the most boring stamps you could look at. I've seen parents try to force their collecting interests on the kids and it never works that way.)
You're welcome.
It's really simple. Treat your buyers the same way you would want to be treated. List material that you yourself would want to buy, at the price you want to buy it, as if you're buying it for your own collection. Do that and you will do well.
Michael
How is a buyer to know from this whether this is becoming rampant or are they isolated cases in which it's a small subset of the sellers or a small subset of listings in a store that has 10,0000's of listings or a smaller store in which most of their listings have problems? What do you think you're doing to the sellers that have been with Stampwants since the beginning and have 100,000's of positive feedback, have 10,000's of listings and have an excellent reputation? Never mind that the vast majority of the listings are listed by reputable sellers that have doing this for years, that the vast majority of stores are being run by reputable sellers. who are human and once in awhile will make mistakes, admit those mistakes and correct those mistakes.
rrr...
It's not going to happen. There is reason why even Ebay and Amazon don't allow buyers to block sellers. As long as the sellers are the ones who are directly paying the Hipstamp fees, they are entitled to a certain amount of service in which their listings will be shown. The buyers themselves are NOT required to pay any fees to use Hipstamp services.
Did it ever occur to you the reason they don't do it is due to certain legal issues that may crop up if you allowed buyers to be able to block sellers? Why do you think it's the reason they built the filters instead of just building a block seller list? It would have been a whole lot less costly and much easier for them to do so in the first place.
For the most part, ignore the Forums. So few individuals ever read these messages that they are essentially meaningless. HipStamp supposedly has over 1000 sellers and over 100,000 buyers, but most Forums messages have been read by less than 100 individuals. So any post in the Forums is by a very small percentage (of those who actually post comments) of a very small percentage (of those who read the Forums comments) of the individuals who access this site for its intended purpose - to either buy or sell postage stamps.
And I agree 100% with Michael Duehr's comments.
My store on HipStamp probably has about the same type of material that you describe as your stock. My store sells virtually all items that I list expect for the higher priced items (greater than $20.00 list price). Mint sells and used sells. Pristine copies in Mint-Never-Hinged condition sell and used stamps that are tattered and torn sell. Sometimes multiple copies of the same stamp sell (I usually list five copies at most at one condition, so I might have five Mint-Hinged copies and five used copies). Stamps that I have listed from 3 Cents to 5 Cents sell the best, even if they are common stamps or higher priced stamps that have been marked down due to faults. Once I reached a bit over 5,000 items for sale, I have found it impossible to exceed that number - the number of lots sold equal or exceed what I have time to list. And this is after I limited my sales only to United States buyers.
The reason that I use HipStamp for selling rather than another site is because the fees are not excessive, especially for selling individual copies of stamps at 3 - 5 Cents each. Other sites often times have a per item charge for each item sold. One European site where I used to sell instituted a per item charge of what amounts to about 13 Cents - when they did that I moved over to this site. Here the percentage charge is based upon the total invoice amount, not each individual item sale amount.
And the claim is made that there are comments being made on other sites without knowing who these people are and whether or not those people have some sort of agenda. Are they ex-sellers who got booted off? Are they ex-employees? Did they just take a quick glance at the site? Are they just someone who wants to bad mouth the site just because?
Without verification to back up those statements, all you have I opinions of what may or may NOT be actually happening. Is it too much ask for people to back up those statements with proof? And can you also show any from a factual basis which is not based on personal preferences or opinion? (Outside of the one that Rene showed that has a 99.99999
chance of being fraud no one has really posted anything outside anything that could be nothing more a simple mistake)
And that could be fixed if someone wanted to do the work. Someone could come up with a subprogram that would flag any issue that is questionable and should have a cert and if it does not have a cert along with a picture of stamp, a picture the cert and the name of company that did the cert and the number of the cert, it would not allowed to be listed.
I think Ted is spot on. ..oh and by the way..it is not. .'starting to accumulate' it has been there for a while, just getting worse.
buyer beware I guess...
My main peeve with the junk dealers is that they waste my time and eyesight. I just paged through a bunch of crappy 2c & 3c on piece items, not even identified by catalog numbers ("US 3c green"), and all priced at $5. What a bargain. Then there are all the Disney/Elvis/Diana Islands and other modern wallpaper countries. I recently saw stamps from Redonda, an uninhabited speck of land owned by Antigua. (Eyes roll)
Well. I feel better now...
We have put many items in our HS store at our standard prices. We then get offers below our already reasonable prices. Unfortunately with HS you can't add any text to explain it is already cheap enough when responding to to offers. There is no point in accepting offers that would lead to a loss.
Maybe we need to increase our prices a bit so offers become viable. If you can't beat them, join them!
Except that a cat. val. of 2017 is better than an imaginary value set by a seller that wants to offer a "great discount". All my listings, all 33,000 of them have a dated cat. val., and the selling price is always the same percent off, be it a common QEII definitive or a less common commemoratives. They eventually both sell. A collector who has an empty spot to fill will pay a logical price. There is no need to boost the value to make a 70% off sale.
My sales are hitting a all time high and my customers are very happy and come back on a regular basis.
directmaildiscount@yahoo.ca
Since I have stopped buying for my own collection and changed to just selling what I have on hand, I have never looked at what other sellers have for sale. What would be the point? Base the items you list for sale and their pricing on what has sold well in the past. If you are listing material that it priced too high or isn't what buyers are interested in, you will quickly find out by having very low sales.
If you did read some of the comments about some of the complaints that some of them have about certain issues. The comments are so generalized they have no meaning unless you know what the person is referring to. Take the ones that talk about the high shipping charges, what do they really mean by it. Are they one of the buyers that think that unless you're shipping charges are only suppose to be exact postage and anything above that is excessive? There are buyers that do have unrealistic expectations about certain things.
Unless they make statements that are a bit more specific, they mean NOTHING, and they come across as nothing more then a general rant about things they don't like.
And I finally come up with an answer for some of those buyers that they didn't want to pay the amount I have postage. (Which basic is only $2 per shipment unless it's an oversized item.)
I had a guy from Waukesha,WI and where he was at was about 15 miles from me. He wanted to know if he could pick it up and I would take off the shipping charge. I told him I had no problem doing that as long as he would meet me at my PO. I told however you may want to rethink this a bit. I told him if I send it through the PO you should have it within 2 days with door to door delivery. First it's going to be a 45 minute to 1 hour round trip for you,2nd you will have the extra wear and tear on your car, 3rd you are going to use about a gallon of gas to get here and back. Now I don't know about you but I think you might be a bit further ahead by just having it shipped. (He did ask to have it shipped.) If the buyer doesn't like my shipping they can always come and pick it from me.
There is no seller that can correct any type of issue if all you get is generalized statements. Unless you know the person you talking to, you will have the same range of people posting in here are just as you have buyers have on the site. Just as you have buyers that range from some of the most pleasant people to deal with, you also have some the biggest PITA's that are so anal retentive that if you don't dot every I and and cross every T, they are going to complain about it.
And the forums are no different. You have the same range of posters that you have in the buyers and sellers on the site.
So if you do check out the forums from time to time take the statements with a grain of salt and if you can find something that will help you out, use it.
1923, Franklin, 1c, Size: 19¼ x 22½, Perf. 11, SC #596, CV $ 145762 ....asking only $1,200!
SO.... I reached out to the seller ( who was polite and very nice). I suggested that it would only be salable with certification. It is likely a common stamp worth a quarter ( at most). But WHY would someone who thought they had a stamp worth huge money try to sell it at 1% "value", unless they knew it was NOT true. Online platforms create a level of boldness in terms of dishonesty that seldom existed in the brick and mortar era. Although we don't have a obligation to call out shady sellers ( or inexperienced " I inherited some stamps" people who make mistakes), we should raise concerns if we wish for the hobby to have a modicum of accountability.