Rare! Very Rare! Ultra Rare! Actually, "as common as muck"!!
I know I may be raking over old ground here but, I have been in this `game` for nearly 50 years and to read some of the item descriptions on here, just beggars belief. We all know there can be a vast difference between Scott values and SG values but come on folks, stop attempting to `inflate` the value of items by claiming stamps to be `Rare` etc. when they are clearly `common` stamps. I questioned one tonight that has been listed as RARE and with a selling price of nearly $400 when in fact it has been repaired, has no perfs. at top (scissored off) and is in the current SG at just £65 in perfect condition! Therefore, the seller wants 4 x catalogue value for a stamp worth no more than a couple of £`s in this condition. This kind of selling, if allowed to continue, will only get this site a bad name. Some poor sod may fall for this unscrupulous sellers tricks, spend a lot of money on what they think is a rare stamp only to find out later down the line, that is has no value whatsoever. Before anyone decides to jump down my throat, yes, someone has pointed out that I have a few on my listings that are incorrect in that they are not the genuine stamp and I am in the process of finding the stamps in question to see what the differences are. If they are wrong, I will delete them! We can all be `educated` but I will not try to deceive anyone by stating RARE, etc. when they are just common stamps!
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Comments
Catalog value often bears little resemblance to actual sales pricing. I had an Austria collector offer me $10 for every copy of a stamp I could find (it was a minimum catalog value stamp). I found 2 in 4 years of searching. I bought a torn size 10 cover off a stack of 50 identical covers from a dealer for $1. I put it on Ebay and it brought almost $200. I watched a cover I passed up at $75 bought by another dealer for $150 and sold at auction two months later for $2500.
A site that takes it upon itself to try to "police" transactions will not last long. Keep in mind that many sales on this site are dealer to dealer sales. Every single MNH British Commonwealth set that I sold on Bidstart for $75 or more (at 60 to 125% of catalog) was sold to dealers for resale.
If a dealer prices his/her stock too high it will not sell - I don't see the fascination of trying to force/enforce limitations on how a dealer presents or prices stock - it's a free country. It is a very slippery slope when someone imposes their thoughts (right or perhaps wrong) on someone else's livelihood..
As in any group of users of any catalog, many do not read the information contained in it. If they did, much of the problems associated with stamp descriptions would not exist. Must of the frustrations many collectors go through to ID a stamp would go away as well.
Your translated definition of "unmounted" from the UK to the "mint never hinged" from the US is incorrect,and shows your ignorance of the Scott catalogs. According to Scott, mint, never hinged refers to unused stamps that have full gum with no hinge marks or other disturbances on the gum.
Terminology between catalog types relating to condition, colors, and other things is relative to, once again, the land where the collector using the predominant catalog lives. Collectors properly using stamp catalogs (they are not just full of pretty pictures and values) would eliminate much of the ambiguity found in the hobby. The large philatelic associations in the world could take the initiative to standardize terminology in the hobby around the world, if they would take the initiative and if they could agree to the terminology that should be used. Even if all that were done, there would still be the lazy collectors who won't read/acquaint themselves with the instructional information that is contained in all catalogs.
Basically, we are all SOL on all counts, and must rely on how willing we ourselves are individually willing to learn about our hobby. Is not doing so irresponsible behavior on the part of collectors, sellers and philatelic associations? I leave that for you to decide.
Interesting comparison of perfins by the way - in the US most dealers price them at the same level as they would a stamp without the perfin (assuming similar centering, cancel, etc). But on common stamps perfin collectors value the perfin itself. The Perfins Club has a huge catalog of known perfins numbering in the thousands - many large corporations had a different perfin for each location. Each is rated as to scarcity and there are published guidelines as to approximate values. Whenever I take the time to pull a few dozen out of my bankers box of perfins and take the time to identify them I have no problem selling most in a couple of days at 20 cents to a couple of dollars each. Better than being relegated to decoupage. When I come across a "more uncommon" one it is generally sold privately, like other better finds.
I can't recall this ever becoming a huge problem on Bidstart - it's pretty easy to just ignore (like those "graded" 3 cent commemoratives they ask several hundred dollars apiece for while one with equally good centering is right next to it at 8 cents.), The sad part is that they actually sell at shows.
And the 800 pound gorilla (Ebay) almost encourages exaggeration.
Censorship is a slippery slope and a tough sell here in the states for many reasons.
There is a lot of scarce postal history (under 10 known) that nobody collects... When "Old Joe" completes his county cancel collection all those $50 to $500 covers become unsaleable.
Back in the 80's I bought a #10 size Byrd Expedition cover off a stack of 50 identical covers - they had been held together with a rubber band and all had a 2 inch tear at the bottom. I paid one dollar for it. When Ebay took off and finally got pictures I put it on Ebay and it went for almost $200. I sent out a "congratulations" and got a rather terse "congratulations my xxx ..." response. The winner told me that there were only two people in the world who were looking for that cover - an obscure coal stop on the southern run that had proved elusive with one known copy reported which no one had actually seen at the time.
Two months later the dealer who had sold me the cover (and still had the other 49 held together by the rubber band) put one on and it brought ten dollars from the other guy. He tried another one two months later and it did not start at $5. It was a rare cover, then a scarce cover, then a common cover with no buyers ......
That is not an uncommon scenario in postal history, dpo's, machine cancels, perfins, etc where there are still discoveries to be made.
where does the slippery slope stop? my thoughts are there are med for neurotic obsessing of this type. In some countries this is the national sport.
If these are the ones you are talking about it would be hard to find fault and you would first have to go after a lot of other dealers who are priced higher.....
Of course as an individual buyer, if you don't want to buy from a particular seller, because you feel that some of their listings are priced too high - that's of course entirely up to you. That being said, many buyers do purchase from this seller, and they have a 100% positive feedback rating with us, with no negative feedback.
If this item, and many like it from this seller, were listed at $49, etc. - that would be a different story. However, as noted previously, if an item is priced under a couple of dollars, it's generally not going to run into an issue with our terms and conditions with regards to pricing.
I love it when I hear people protesting about a movie. Next thing you know, people are lined up to go see it, and it makes millions.
In fact, I should be listing more stamps to sell myself, instead of constantly reading some of this drivel.
It is very hard to find anymore. The link have for is from the One Cent Franklin Plating
Archive Site. There is a lot of good info under the Fakes Forgeries and Fraud link bottom left of the home page and from there to Scads
http://www.slingshotvenus.com/FranklinArchive/frnkln_archv_Main.html
Hipstamp is a specialty site. Members should expect a greater degree of accuracy and forthrightness from sellers. Sellers who consistently puff up their descriptions and overgrade their offerings should be sanctioned. This would help both buyers and honest sellers. IMO oversight would go a long way in setting Hipstamp apart from other on-line selling venues.
This is exactly why / what I meant when starting this discussion. Seems the `powers that be` are actually allowing this to happen right now. There are a few sellers here that either know nothing about stamps or, in my own personal view, are only here to attempt to rip-off unsuspecting buyers by claiming items are Rare, Very Rare, etc. OK, we have cancels that we class as Rare, etc. and if you view them in context of say 99% of Duplex cancels are in the £1 to £4 price bracket, when you have one at say £100, then yes, we class that as Rare. However, when you have sellers clearly stating that stamps which have a value of say 20p / 30c / etc. are RARE in capitals, then those listings should be deleted before any unsuspecting buyer sees them.
I wholeheartedly agree that the eBay "Top Rated" program is useless even though we are on it! We are there in, shall I say, `name only`, as we don`t receive any benefit from it, as we refuse to give Free Postage. To us, Free Postage is a non-starter. We tried it a few years ago and it made no difference whatsoever in overall sales. Therefore, we stopped giving it.
As for comments regarding membership of say APS, etc. thats OK if you are based in the USA. We were once members of the APS under another name but ceased membership in 2002 because we gained no benefit from being a non - US member. Ideally, if the powers that be are thinking of something along those lines, what about the `obvious`, say a "Rogues Gallery". That would be more beneficial, as it would root out the sellers who are not being upfront with their items.
These are my / our personal views and no doubt, there are pro`s and con`s with anything along the lines of keeping this site `honest` to everyone. However, if nothing is done quickly, this site will gain a reputation that it allows anyone and everyone to list whatever they like at ridiculous prices, just like dear old eBay!
I did do a search for that stamp,went into his store typed rare in and searched his store and low and behold 77 items came back with the word rare in the title. Strange thing is that the seller in question actually has 39,917 items in his store.
Now if you are having a problem with what he put into his item descriptions I can understand how misunderstandings can come up them. This is what his descriptions actually say after the stamp description.
Hundreds of high quality GB items for instant purchase always available in my shop.
Including the unusual, the superb and the very rare
(I did edit out the other site name)
Now with him having a store description like that after the stamp description does not seem like the best idea. It will lead to misunderstandings because as sure the sun rises in the East and sets in the West,people will misread that and assume that he is talking about the stamp and NOT other items in his store.
I will agree with you that putting his store description into the stamp description is not good but to say it's outright fraud is a huge stretch. If you are going to make the claims that you do back them up with actual facts and not hyperbole.
"Bye Bye Hipstamp?????" Don't let the door hit you in the.......well, you know.
"As I have written, I like to think of something as being rare when you have the money or chequebook in hand and cannot find it to buy.
In other words, if something is easy to find, then by definition, it is not rare. You may fluke something here and there - and that might make something elusive or even scarce, however, rare is one of the most over used words in philately, and I am sure many other fields.
A 5/- Bridge is not rare. I once knew a dealer that had approximately 500 in stock at the one time - counting postally used, CTO, mint and mint unhinged - and it included several complete sheets. That might seem impossible, however, I can guarantee it is true. I saw the dealer buy many of them and even bought some at auction for him from time to time when he couldn't make it. If you are chasing a perfectly centred MUH stamp that is perfection in every respect, then that is certainly hard to come buy and indeed scarce.
When I was young, I used to think that a 1930 penny was rare. Then I once had a stand at the Opera House stamp and coin show and was next to a well known dealer. In one display case he had no less than 13 from memory on display in varying grades. At the time the average price was around $10,000 each. I asked him how many he actually had in stock and it was about 20! We are talking about a coin that generally sells now for between $20,000 and $25,000 in average condition. I went on to ask him how many he thought had survived and about 2,000 was the answer. My next question was how many would change hands each year in Australia and the answer was about 100. So if you had $2,500,000 to spend, over the course of a year I could potentially find you about 100 of these. In my view that cannot be considered rare. Yes, it is much 'scarcer' than the very common dates which are available in huge quantities, but it cannot be considered rare. The price is held up because it is so popular.
When I write about the rare watermark inverted varieties or missing colours or imperforate errors, I generally refer to the rarities as when there are 10 or less known. Now that is rare. Sometimes there might be an item where 50 or so are known, however, they are 'very tightly' held, and one comes onto the market only every now and then. In the context of what is available to new buyers on the market, that is rare.
Simon Dunkerley"
https://www.hipstamp.com/listing/1949-us-air-mail-scott-c45-block-of-4-reverse-tape-damagemintog/10441454
https://www.hipstamp.com/listing/us304-blue/14204836
If the catalog number is correct, it catalogs for $2.25 in the 2017 Scott. Asking price: £150.00
Nothing rare about any of it.
Even the Hobo on the train. Try to find another one though.
Paul
I see no reason why the wording cannot be automatically stripped from titles and descriptions and for the offending sellers to be sent a warning email.
We can also all help weed out unscrupulous sellers by using the REPORT ABUSE button located on the SELLER tab for each sale item.
And who is going to determine that a listing is in error? I've seen enough bad certificates over the last 35 years to know that things are not always as they seem. It is a slippery slope. In the early days of Ebay there was a group of people who exposed many of the fakes, forgeries and doctored stamps - it apparently rankled the feathers of the guilty dealers and must have cut into Ebay's profit a bit too much. I believe that there is a similar forum these days outside of Ebay.
Just my two cents