What is your ideal way of buying or selling coins?

[gxseries]

Suppose you are given the opportunity to redesign how coins are being bought and sold, how would you go about doing it?

 

Personally I think selling over the internet will not change but the structure of how you locate them or sell them is a total pain.

 

At best, many sites just go by continent and by country and that's it. I propose that we make a huge database where people can go by locating by country, date and the coins. For example 1990 US quarter mintmark P. (making this up completely). If it's for sale, you can just buy it. Suppose if none are for sale, you can put in an offer and a seller can look and see if he's got one for sale. Of course, some other interested buyers can put a higher price and the seller can just sell it to the higher buyer. Instead of the normal bidding process where there's a end time, this advertisement is more structured, sellers stand to gain more and buyers can just leave their advertisement and wait for an answer. When an transaction has occured, price is recorded and this becomes a database of historical price.

 

What do you reckon?

[thedeadpoint]

This isn't answering your question but it's commenting on your proposition. Heritage has "want lists". I think you can put the price that you're willing to pay for your "want list" coin/note. If someone else has that coin, they can see the going bid for it and do the transaction with whoever made the bid.

[mmarotta]

There is a collecting website, Colnect http://colnect.com/en/ that is organized as a Wiki. The goal is to make it easy to find coins (and other collectibles) for buy, sell, and trade.

 

After I read your original post, I got to thinking and I agree that knowing about the existence of objects is a fundamental problem. One reason that I like searching the dealer's junkboxes is you never know what you will discover. Not so much that you will find a rare item you know about, but that you will find an interesting example of something you did not know about.

 

I have banknotes celebrating literature (broadly), national poets like Sandor Petőfi of Hungary are easy enough and I even added the Bulgarian and Icelandic notes with the printing presses. Are there any coins celebrating literature like that? How would I know, except to search with an engine for all possible phrases, which is painfully broad in its results.

 

But, just to say, I did google "coin celebrates author" and found out that the First Spouse coin for Thomas Jefferson "on the reverse, an image of his monument, overlaid with his famed epitaph: "Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia." " http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/newsRelease.php?id=2643 So, that might work well with a collection dedicated to universities. Are there any other such coins? What about medals? I know that the actual body of academic medals is huge, but finding them individually is difficult.

[just carl]

I've never sold a coin but sure have purchased a lot of them. USED to buy some from coin stores but not since I started going to coin shows. Just can't beat the cost of coins at a coin show. Plus you see what your buying, no postage, no lost in mail, no insurances and mostly not the wrong thing sent. I've never seen a coin for less on anywhere on the internet compared to a coin show.