{"id":4257,"date":"2021-05-17T22:55:07","date_gmt":"2021-05-18T02:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/?p=4257"},"modified":"2021-05-22T21:11:31","modified_gmt":"2021-05-23T01:11:31","slug":"selling-silver-on-ebay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/2021\/05\/selling-silver-on-ebay\/","title":{"rendered":"Selling Silver on eBay"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year when gold and silver prices jumped, I wound up selling almost all of my gold<\/a> and a big chunk of my silver. But the buyback prices for some silver coins was not that great and I thought I could make more by selling them on eBay. Prices have fluctuated some since then, but are still pretty high. But the premiums dealers charge on silver have really, really gone up. It used to be you could get US silver coins for $3-5 over the spot price of silver and now it is more like $16 or $17 per ounce (the spot price is around $28 right now, so that is more than a 50% markup!).<\/p>\n

The coins I wanted to sell are 5 ounce silver America the Beautiful quarters. They look just like quarters but are the size of drink coasters. I came in late, so didn’t get the early ones, then I paid anywhere from $90-$115 for each and got most of the states before the prices went crazy last year and I stopped buying. Now dealers are charging about $226 for a new one from the mint (the mint doesn’t sell these directly, just dealers), and still can’t keep them in stock, but the buyback price is only $153. That’s for $140 worth of silver. So the premium the dealer pays you is only $2 per ounce, while the premium they sell for is $17 per ounce. This is why it is hard to make money on silver. It would be better if you could do a private party sale and meet someone in the middle, but I don’t know any silver collectors and wouldn’t try Reddit or Craigslist for something like this (maybe a silver forum where buyers and sellers get ratings based on past transactions). I have put off selling on eBay because it is just a pain to take pictures, post listings, etc. Then you have to deal with people who may complain that the coins aren’t pristine or something and file a claim or want to return the coin. Also eBay isn’t cheap. Their current deal is they let you list items for free (if you do it their way), but you pay 12.5% of the sale price to them. That covers listing fees as well as finance fees from PayPal or credit cards.
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Items sell best if you provide free shipping, but of course it comes out of the price. I could buy padded envelopes and packaging, but USPS has a flat rate small box for $8.45, including the box. So I will just charge that. It isn’t that much more than shipping an envelope and the box will definitely help prevent damage. So the payer will just have to pay that. Supposedly eBay can get better shipping prices on some things than individuals, so that might be something to think about later. When I first tried to do a listing and entered 8 ounces as the package weight, they said shipping would be about $4.50, which may reflect their special rates since I couldn’t see that rate at USPS. eBay and USPS have online tools that let you create labels and pay for postage from home.<\/p>\n

Also items sell better if you do a true auction and have a starting price of $1.00, then let people get interested in the unrealistically low price and bid it up. That always makes me nervous, especially with silver. I remember people on silver forums bragging that they were able to get silver below spot price on eBay by combing through listings. So I am setting a minimum price of $160, which will give me $140 after fees, so $13 less than what I could get throwing all of my coins in one box and selling it back to the dealer for two lousy dollars over spot (but also still clearing a profit on the coins compared to my purchase price). To net the $153 that dealers would pay for one of these coins (though I pay postage in that deal) it needs to sell for $175 on eBay, so I am hoping for more than that. One of the silver dealers provides values of coins online and they are saying these previous year ATB coins are worth $230-260, which I guess is what they would sell them for (including packaging and free shipping), but looking at eBay past sales, the prices are more like $170-210. Some people have the coins graded and those tend to go for more. Plus there is a collector edition of the silver coins with a satin finish that come in a nice US Mint box, whereas the ones I bought were sold in bulk (they still came in a clear plastic capsule that the dealers add) and some have small imperfections or scratches. Plus since some of the coins are 10 years old, despite my best efforts, I noticed a little tarnish around the edges of a couple of them.<\/p>\n

So after researching prices and fees, I dug out some coins to take pictures. I realized I need to clean the plastic capsules to get rid of fingerprints and dirt and it is hard taking good pictures of silver so you can see the details, but not the reflection of the photographer. Then you need to crop and resize the pictures and keep all of the pictures straight because the heads sides all look exactly the same. I tried taking a picture of them sitting on a sheet of white paper outside but my camera focus is so sensitive that unless I was directly over the coin, part was in focus and part was not. I wound up taking pictures in the kitchen with the coin on the back of Jeb’s diploma cover from Notre Dame. <\/p>\n

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Then you have to set up the listing and eBay has so many options that it is a lot to keep track of and hard to make all 5 listings essentially the same. I had to write a title and description, but with different years or parks for each coin, the type of shipping I want to do (eBay makes this more complicated than necessary), check that I don’t want to accept offers, and I don’t want a buy it now price, but I wanted to start the bidding at $160. Lastly I wanted to do a quick auction of 3 days instead of the standard 7 days, but they charge $1 for that, so I went to 5 days, which means the auction ends Saturday and I will mail everything on Monday, so it might as well have been 7 days, except I will have Saturday and Sunday to package.<\/p>\n

I saved all the listings as drafts first so I could check them one more time and then list them at essentially the same time. It probably took about 2 hours to place 5 listings, but could go a little faster next time. Within a couple of hours of posting I was relieved that I had a bid on one of the coins and that night all 5 of them had bids, I think by the same buyer (if he wins all of them, he can combine shipping and save a bunch [edit: he only won one]). So they will definitely sell, but without a second bid they are all at $160 right now. I think it is good that they have one bid because others will think they must be okay if someone is interested. <\/p>\n

I still have a bunch of coins so if this doesn’t work out, it isn’t terrible, and I can do something else for the rest. Even if the sales go through at about the price I am hoping for, silver is generally a terrible investment. I started buying coins 7 years ago and stock market prices have about doubled in that time. Meanwhile silver is up about 50% and I may clear 40% on these sales [edit: actually got about 44%]. Plus coins are way harder to store, keep from tarnishing, and then sell compared to mutual funds. They are fun to look at and it was fun getting packages in the mail, but I think I’m over that now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last year when gold and silver prices jumped, I wound up selling almost all of my gold and a big chunk of my silver. But the buyback prices for some silver coins was not that great and I thought I could make more by selling them on eBay. Prices have fluctuated some since then, but … Continue reading “Selling Silver on eBay”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4257"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4266,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4257\/revisions\/4266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}