[ale] [OT] Need everyone's help

[Jeff Hubbs]

I'll tell you what I know, based on my own experiences including selling 
items on behalf of my mother's estate through 2016 and 2017.

Any coin or sports memorabilia dealer is going to do his or her level 
best to give you only a token amount of money for everything. It's not a 
matter of them being trustworthy vs. not; it's just business - including 
a healthy amount of information asymmetry. Consider that if you bring 
them 300 coins, going through each one to both identify it and grade it 
is no small task. Coins that are packaged and graded through one of the 
major grading companies like the American Numismatic Association 
Certification Service have a value-add baked into them, but it is 
generally not going to be worth that or even paying to have a local 
expert grade them when you're talking about e.g. 50-cent pieces that 
might sell for $0.75.

In other words, coins are a massive time sink and unless you have some 
pieces that are in exceptionally good condition for their age, they just 
aren't worth much. Having said this, I have some recommendations for 
eBaying:

  * If there are some individual coins that seem like they may be worth
    at least a few bucks but you don't know grade, don't bother trying
    to grade it yourself; just take really good photos of obverse and
    reverse. I got good results by putting them on the flatbed glass of
    a decent scanner (and that process is pretty fast, too - especially
    for getting images of a lot of coins at once). But some years back,
    before you could get better than 300dpi on a scanner, i set up a rig
    where I'd place a coin on a gray cardboard circle atop a lightbox
    and set a truncated cone of aluminum foil on top of that so I could
    shoot a picture with a DSLR through the hole atop the cone; this
    made for nice even lighting all the way around the coin.
  * If the coins in the plastic tub are mostly undifferentiated and
    well-worn, group together the all-copper and all-silver ones by
    denomination and by composition (you'll have to look that up) and
    sell each group as a set. Unless there are some real outliers as far
    as rarity goes, the clad coins are all pretty much worth face if
    they've been circulated at all.
  * EBay and PayPal together take quite a chunk out of any sale. I
    worked up a spreadsheet in Calc that runs the numbers with all the
    fees and allows for different shipping payments by buyer and seller
    (ideally they are the same) and the cost of packaging so I can tell
    how much I've cleared or, more importantly, use Goal Seek to know
    what opening bid I need in order to clear a given amount or break
    even. It's very easy to wind up upside-down on an eBay sale if you
    start an auction too low and that's what it sells for. And clearly,
    if you've gathered together 100 silver quarters to sell as a lot you
    want to make sure you clear no less than $25 on the sale.

For the sports memorabilia, some of the above holds with the addition 
that you can often search existing or past sales to get an idea what to 
ask for. If there are existing sales, your mission is to set your 
opening bid so as to undercut everyone else without risking going 
upside-down.


On 8/13/18 8:57 AM, Jerald Sheets via Ale wrote:
> My Dad passed away recently, and I’ve got a plastic tub FULL of coins.  I’ve also got some sports memorabilia here.
>
> I need to unload it all.
>
> Problem Statement: Every time I’ve ever even so much as entered a coin shop, I walked away feeling as though I needed a shower after. Either the place was filthy, or the people were specious, or I felt like I was dealing with Rick from “Pawn Stars”.
>
> Do any of you have a relationship with a coin shop and/or a sports memorabilia shop that is trustworthy and honest that you would recommend?  I don’t want to keep all this mess, but at the same time, I don’t want to get taken advantage of.  My dad and grandmother spent almost 40 years collecting all this, and I’d like to have their efforts mean something by not “giving away the farm” to some disreputable clod(ess).
>
> Any help would be most appreciated!
>
>
> Jerald
>
>
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