eBay issues
Sadly, eBay, having initially been a useful stamp market-place, goes from worse to worse. The main problem is the automatic relisting of unsold lots; there doesn't seem to be any way of filtering them out (if you know of a way, please tell us!), so you end up searching through large numbers of lots you've looked at and rejected already to find the occasional newly-listed lot that might be of interest.
The other increasing problem is sellers listing lots at starting prices that are way above any realistic value. Here's a gem, listed today (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/373766914738?): a page of rather pedestrian late Victorian and EVII used lower values from the Cape, Natal and Transvaal with a starting price of £595!
Any suggestions?
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I guess that's why it is called FakeBay by some collectors... 🙂 🙂
As a dealer, I keep getting bombarded by people wanting to sell me collections that they have "inherited". Invariably, the email will say something about the "very valuable" stamps they have because the've seen what they are worth on EBay and other places. When you burst their bubble, they accuse you of being a crooked dealer and move on to the next dealer. When my fellow dealers also burst their bubble, you never hear from them again.
Regards
Dennis
Nonetheless, some nice things still crop up on eBay at reasonable prices - here are two recent finds:
a 1910 cover from DELMORE (a not-very-common Transvaal postal agency), which I bought recently for Eur 3.00,
and a 1902 registered cover from Johannesburg, sent on 2 JUN 02 to Pietermaritzburg, which had clearly been postmarked 2 MAY 03 in error, and then corrected with 2 JUN 02 postmarks; 1 June 1902 was a Sunday, and the clerk presumably changed the day on Monday morning but not the month, and then realised his error. This I bought recently for £20 - errors of this kind fascinate me, and aren't common.
The problem is how to sort decreasing amounts of wheat from increasing amounts of chaff ....
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Great to see this post. Thanks.
Regarding Bas' question about how to sort new wheat from old internet chaff. Sorry, I do not know. It is a problem I have as well, revisiting material that I have obviously looked at before. My wife - who buys more on eBay than me! - tells me that while she has eBay search for items that she wants, it will continue to send her the same items again and again if they remain unsold and the seller relists the items. She says that gets a lot of advice from eBay about "10 New Items" almost all of which she has seen before. She says the feature you want would be really useful if it existed. Perhaps it does and we have not looked hard enough? eBay, are you listening, Big Brother?
I have for some time been preparing a 'How to Detect Fake Cape Triangles through their Forged Postmarks", largely because I grew tired of spotting obvious "space filler" Cape triangles for sale on eBay and elsewhere at very stupid prices. (I guess the hope here is if you put a high price on something, someone will be dumb enough to believe it genuine.) Right now, my current project is Saturday 30th October's South African Collectors' Society meeting in Letchworth. I will return to the 'How to Detect Fake Cape Triangles ..." project at some stage and post it. The basic premise is simple - there were only 13 handstamps found cancelling Cape triangles - all others are fakes.