Best way to organize stamps for sale

Hi all,

I’m working on listing stamps for sale from a collection that I got. Most of the stamps are older than 1990 and pretty much all of them are not valuable.

Since they are of low value I was thinking of selling them in bundles based on topic.

My questions are what are some of the most popular topicals? Do people who collect topicals care about age and country too or just the stamp topic?

Lastly, I’ve found that I kinda like stamps printed by the American Bank Note Co and think listing a world bundle of those might be interesting but I don’t know if it’s something anyone would even want.

Any thoughts/opinions would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Comments

  • 5 Comments sorted by Votes Date Added
  • Hi Becky...
    Wow have you hit a difficult point.
    Here's the thing about collectors that I have learned over near 40 years as a collector, dealer, expertizer... Collectors are F-ING WEIRD.

    Predictability... hahaha, hardly any such thing.
    I met a guy at a show who only collected used multiple with maps on them. (And I had one!)
    So to divide to topical, I think will be difficult. (We don't do it.)
    It's neigh impossible to determine what "topicals" people will look for. I have another client who only buys items with tomatoes on them. (That could be stamp, cachet, cancel).
    So it's very difficult to "Group" by typical in a lot.
    If the lost is post 1990, how much of it is unused? If unused, you may be best to simply sell it as a "postage lot". Usually you can get 70% to 80% of face value for this unused material, and if you have a big lot of it, it can yield some $$$s.
    It will be faster to sell the full unused lot this way, and you will get as much or more as you will trying to piece it out at 10c or 15c each, and have a LOT LESS administrative mess. When you have that kind of face value, you just mound it all up, tally up the total value, and then post that up. You have 2 options then, start it at something like $1 and see if people drive it over the 70% margin, or start it at 70% and see if you get 3 or 4 bidders for it. Either way, over and done with quickly.

    If it's used (or 50/50) than make 2 lots, 1 used, 1 unused. For the unused lot, proceed as above. For the used lot... do something similar, and list it for $1 and let the bidders go after it. In this market, it's an easy sell. People are bored, may have less disposable income, and looking for something to occupy their time.

    That's how i'd go about it...
  • My 2¢ as moderately experienced collector and newbie dealer (who ironically enough seems to be in a similar position to you)

    I'm not sure how Hipstamp would handle topicals. As Scott's post seems to imply they aren't really set up for that. (BTW Scott, are you affiliated with Hipstamp in any way other than a seller or buyer...just curious)

    Taking the time to actually identify the individual stamps SHOULD get you better value. I'm lucky in that one of my collections is already indexed by Scott number, but this newest collection that fell out of the sky still needs to be identified.

    If you want to market them in lots, I would think grouping them by country rather than topics would be the best strategy, but again, I'm a newbie when it comes to selling.

    As a collector, I would be interested in any Space topicals you want to part with.

  • If your stamps are mounted on album pages, one way these could be sold is by groups of pages, possibly separated by country or by year(s). Many sellers do this, especially on eBay, if they want to move collections quickly. Of course, the caveat here is: know what you have and its value, and offer at a reasonable price (which can be partially determined by looking for similar lots for sale here and elsewhere).
  • When I'm searching for topicals, I usually just search on the term "dinosaur", "tiger", or "baseball", for example. I'm rarely looking for a very specific stamp, or even a specific country or date range.
  • @Kris Weinschenker

    Nope. No affiliation with Hipstamp. Just a passionate timbromaniac.
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