What really grinds my gears

[Restitutor]

When someone bids more than me on a coin I want. Like, what gives them the right to steal my coin?! 🥲😂

[Ryro]

1 minute ago, Restitutor said:

When someone bids more than me on a coin I want. Like, what gives them the right to steal my coin?! 🥲😂

I remember when some knucklehead on an old site actually made a post stating almost that exactly! They tried to justify the reasoning and everything of why they deserved the coin more than the person who outbid them. Man, that joint attracts weirdos.

[DonnaML]

1 hour ago, Ryro said:

I remember when some knucklehead on an old site actually made a post stating almost that exactly! They tried to justify the reasoning and everything of why they deserved the coin more than the person who outbid them. Man, that joint attracts weirdos.

You mean the Persian prince? He was really serious with those "how dare they?" rants, vowing retribution.

[GregH]

- Buyer fees in auctions - which have zero utility for the buyer. What am i paying for exactly with this fee? I put this fee in the same category as booking fees for the theatre. It's just a bullshit fee to inflate the price. It also makes it hard for me to estimate my total price - i already have to guess what currency exchange rate i'll be paying (it's never the actual exchange rate) or what postage option the seller arbitrarily selects.
- USPS: it's like a third world postage service. Australia was on the "we don't post there" list for several months, in the same category as other advanced first world countries like Libya and Yemen, due to "coronavirus" (which was never a huge problem here anyway) ... Yet every other postal service in the world managed to post here. When the embargo was lifted, my package went to Tokyo, then Sydney, then back to the US, then back to Japan, and finally arrived in Melbourne.
- Mr Highrating_Lowprice aka Ilya Zlobin, who continues to use fake discounts to sell coins, despite this being illegal and reported to eBay many times. And of course his "discount" prices are always inflated by an order of magnitude - his business model being to trick newbies into massively over-paying.
- Knowledgeable collectors who keep Ilya in business by using the "make offer" button
- The amount of low grade garbage i have to trawl through on eBay before i find a gem

There is more, but that will do for now.

(Now i'm sounding like the grumpy old man who tells the kids to get off his lawn!)

 

[Ryro]

5 minutes ago, DonnaML said:

You mean the Persian prince? He was really serious with those "how dare they?" rants, vowing retribution.

Haha! I was hoping someone would remember the utter absurdity of that loon! Good riddance for to bad rubbish.

[GregH]

Oh, and slabs, obviously! Where are these people who love slabs? There must be millions of them, yet i haven't met a single one.

[JayAg47]

7 hours ago, Finn235 said:

- Once had a buyer open a claim against me because he "didn't receive" a coin. I had no proof of course, so I refunded the $15. Then after getting the refund, he listed it for sale on his ebay store. Ebay wouldn't help.

You should've made an alt account, then bought the coin from him and made the same dispute! give him a taste of his own medicine. 

[DonnaML]

Speaking of using the pandemic as an excuse, a certain dealer in Germany that still refuses to ship to the USA -- but still sends me emails touting its latest offerings.

Some other dealers in Germany who charge exorbitant amounts for DHL Express shipping -- but then ship by regular DHL, which is simply the standard German postal service.  Which often takes weeks or more to arrive, like the package that recently took almost two months to get from Germany to New York City by way of China. 

[CPK]

Not having enough money to buy all the coins I want. 😜

[GregH]

11 minutes ago, CPK said:

Not having enough money to buy all the coins I want. 😜

I have the same issue. Although my “assigned” financial status is an average wage-earner, I identify as a multi-millionaire. So I’m hoping people will donate money to me to assist in my transition to my “true” self 😊

[FrizzyAntoine]

10 hours ago, GregH said:

- Buyer fees in auctions - which have zero utility for the buyer. What am i paying for exactly with this fee? I put this fee in the same category as booking fees for the theatre. It's just a bullshit fee to inflate the price. It also makes it hard for me to estimate my total price - i already have to guess what currency exchange rate i'll be paying (it's never the actual exchange rate) or what postage option the seller arbitrarily selects.

I agree with the rest of your post, but I feel like this gripe is a little unfair (tho I definitely still find it annoying as a buyer!). 

As a normal business like any other auction houses have to make something in order to stay afloat and continue offering their services. The margins are pretty low in the numismatic business compared to some other sectors, considering the consigner is the one who pockets the entire hammer price of the coin, minus a small fee (usually 10%, but depending on the size and quality of the consignment it might be as little as 0 or even -5%, where the auction pays for the privelage of selling that collector's coins!). That means their revenue comes mostly from buyers fees, and those are usually 20%, maybe 22-25%, which leaves them at most 30-35% margins to run their business. That means if a coin hammers at $1000, you pay $1200, the consignor gets $900, and the auction has $300 left over to spend on their operations - which include hosting a website, taking pictures, cataloguing coins, employing staff to respond to emails, ship coins, manage accounts, procure consignments, and all the other boring stuff, and still having something left over so that the proprietor can make a living for himself too.

Now, I can't speak for you, but personally if it weren't for the service offered by auction houses posting their sales online I would have no way to access or purchase coins outside my local area, which means I would have no coins, and therefore no collection at all. Only one of my coins has been purchased locally in Australia (out of roughly 200), and even that was in Sydney, which is an 11-hour drive away from me. Instead I can sit at home, bid on coins that might have belonged to a swedish collector, on an american firm's website, and have them sent to my house in australia hassle-free (minus the weeks of waiting on the mail to finally arrive!), while I would have otherwise had no way of even knowing the coin existed, let alone contacting the previous owner to arrange a sale. That's the whole point of the fees, otherwise auction houses would just be charities helping to connect wayward collectors around the world with one another.

In summary, buyers fees are definitely annoying, but I'm pretty happy to pay them and feel they serve a very reasonable purpose (unlike theatre booking fees, I'm with you on that one). I just factor them in before bidding and accept them as part of the cost of buying what are, at the end of the day, niche luxury items. 

[Roman Collector]

I don't have too many pet peeves when it comes to my collecting. I tried to make a list, such as ...

1. dealers taking too long to ship coins
2. customs taking a long time before giving clearance
3. dealers having to wait for export permits
4. the post office taking a long time

... and so on. But when you think about it, this all boils down to one thing:

TAKING TOO LONG

[Ancient Coin Hunter]

Like @Spaniard- fake sand patinas and also photoshopping coins to make green corrosion spots imperceptible.

[John Conduitt]

Some of these things are illegal and yet they persist. There’s definitely an attitude that the law doesn’t matter and won’t be applied. Which appears to be true. That is annoying if you don’t want to break laws.

[thejewk]

A few of mine:

Dealers who seem to be unable to answer a simple email about a coin simply.  I buy most of my coins from ebay, and usually get good responses to any queries.  Every time I've purchased from an actual dealer via places like Vcoins, I've either received answers verging on contempt, or I have been simply ignored.

Dealers who are unable to post items with a competent turnaround time, and who do not inform you in advance of your order in the myriad ways available to them that there will be a delay.  

Worst of all, coins entering the dealer graveyard.  There are lots of coins that were on the market when I started collecting a few years ago, advertised at ridiculous prices that will never be met.  They are still there, and will remain there.  Every time I search within my areas of interest I see the same listings over and over and over, and I will continue to see them for all time, because nobody in their right mind would ever pay £150 for a common LRB in relatively bad shape, 5 examples of which have sold in the last 3 months for a tenth of the price.

[idesofmarch01]

19 hours ago, GregH said:

- Buyer fees in auctions - which have zero utility for the buyer. What am i paying for exactly with this fee? I put this fee in the same category as booking fees for the theatre. It's just a bullshit fee to inflate the price. It also makes it hard for me to estimate my total price - i already have to guess what currency exchange rate i'll be paying (it's never the actual exchange rate) or what postage option the seller arbitrarily selects.

When I think about buyer's fees in auctions, I always compare them to possibly purchasing the same coin from a retail dealer.  The transparency of buying a coin in an auction almost always compares favorably to buying a similar coin from a dealer.  Here's more explanation.

Let's say you win a coin at a hammer price of $100.  With a 20% buyer's fee, you'll pay $120 for the coin (not including shipping and insurance, which is common to both types of transactions).  Assuming the seller paid a 10% seller's fee on this coin, the auction house has a 33% markup on this coin (a profit of $30 on their cost of $90).  On more expensive coins -- say, a hammer price of $10,000 -- the markup is even lower.  Most likely the seller of a $10K coin didn't pay any seller's fee so the auction house makes a markup of 20% -- the buyer's fee -- in this case.  This makes for a fairly transparent purchase.  Plus, my opinion is that a 20% - 33% markup would be more than reasonable if I were to buy a coin from a dealer's inventory. 

On the other hand, retail dealers are very unlikely to be selling a $120 coin for only a 33% markup.  More likely, it's a 50% - 100% markup, but there's almost no way of knowing what their actual markup is.  So the $120 auction hammer price may be a bargain for comparable coins that are held in dealers' inventories.  Personally, I have seen a number of high-priced coins hammer at auctions for, say, $50K ($60K including buyer's fee) only to be immediately listed on the dealer's website for $120K or more -- a markup of 100% or more.  Of course, with a little research you can discover this and negotiate with that dealer, but you're never going to get an auction coin for a price remotely close to how much you would have paid if you had won the coin at auction.

I agree that the psychological hurdle of a 20% buyer's fee can seem excessive if you regard the auction house as simply a pass-through of the coin from seller to buyer, but even in this case, I can make a fairly compelling argument (left as an exercise for the reader) that when you analyze the entire business model of an auction house, even 20% - 30% gross profit can be a very thin margin except for the half-dozen or so highest profile auctioneers (NAC, CNG, Heritage, et al.).

[Octavius]

 1. dealers who do not state a coin has been tooled.

2. dealers who use the word "enhanced" rather than "mutilated" or tooled.

[GregH]

3 hours ago, idesofmarch01 said:

When I think about buyer's fees in auctions, I always compare them to possibly purchasing the same coin from a retail dealer.  The transparency of buying a coin in an auction almost always compares favorably to buying a similar coin from a dealer.  Here's more explanation.

Let's say you win a coin at a hammer price of $100.  With a 20% buyer's fee, you'll pay $120 for the coin (not including shipping and insurance, which is common to both types of transactions).  Assuming the seller paid a 10% seller's fee on this coin, the auction house has a 33% markup on this coin (a profit of $30 on their cost of $90).  On more expensive coins -- say, a hammer price of $10,000 -- the markup is even lower.  Most likely the seller of a $10K coin didn't pay any seller's fee so the auction house makes a markup of 20% -- the buyer's fee -- in this case.  This makes for a fairly transparent purchase.  Plus, my opinion is that a 20% - 33% markup would be more than reasonable if I were to buy a coin from a dealer's inventory. 

On the other hand, retail dealers are very unlikely to be selling a $120 coin for only a 33% markup.  More likely, it's a 50% - 100% markup, but there's almost no way of knowing what their actual markup is.  So the $120 auction hammer price may be a bargain for comparable coins that are held in dealers' inventories.  Personally, I have seen a number of high-priced coins hammer at auctions for, say, $50K ($60K including buyer's fee) only to be immediately listed on the dealer's website for $120K or more -- a markup of 100% or more.  Of course, with a little research you can discover this and negotiate with that dealer, but you're never going to get an auction coin for a price remotely close to how much you would have paid if you had won the coin at auction.

I agree that the psychological hurdle of a 20% buyer's fee can seem excessive if you regard the auction house as simply a pass-through of the coin from seller to buyer, but even in this case, I can make a fairly compelling argument (left as an exercise for the reader) that when you analyze the entire business model of an auction house, even 20% - 30% gross profit can be a very thin margin except for the half-dozen or so highest profile auctioneers (NAC, CNG, Heritage, et al.).

You and @FrizzyAntoine make a very reasonable argument for necessary evil of auction fees.

However i think it is a false economy to compare the profit margins of auction houses vs dealers based purely on mark-ups. Correct me if i'm wrong: my understanding is that the dealer buys his inventory. Whereas the auction house pays nothing for their inventory; they receive it from the consignor (and take a fee when it sells). The dealer wears a lot more risk, so i can understand some of the astonishing mark-ups that we see. Granted, the auction house still needs to pay for wages, marketing, the cost of running the auction, and all the admin mentioned previously, so they need to charge fees to someone. An auction house really is the perfect business if you have a large enough audience - you never have to purchase stock.

My frustration really is having to estimate the final price i pay myself - taking into account the fees, exchange rates (which are much less favourable than the official rates), shipping etc. My personal estimate always falls short of what i actually end up paying. It would be nice if auction houses provided estimates of total price, with every bid i make online. When i go to the supermarket, the sticker price is the price i pay (in Australia taxes are included in sticker price). It's only in auctions for collectible goods, where this is not so, and the onus is on the buyer to do a mental calculation.

I won a CNG auction recently. It's not mentioned in terms and conditions, but they told me AFTER winning that my only postage option to Australia was FedEx at an extra US$70. Ridiculous.

To my fellow Australian @FrizzyAntoine's point - I agree that auction houses have vastly expanded the pool of coins i have to choose from. When I was a kid, all i had was the two coin shops in Adelaide where i grew up. And as long as i exercise self-control in an auction (ie don't drink a couple of vinos beforehand 😉 ), i can usually buy a target coin for less than retail (obviously staying clear of Heritage, where the bidders are apparently mad).




 

[GregH]

1 hour ago, Octavius said:

 1. dealers who do not state a coin has been tooled.

2. dealers who use the word "enhanced" rather than "mutilated" or tooled.

"Some details strengthened" is the new phrase for "tooled AF"

[idesofmarch01]

13 hours ago, GregH said:

However i think it is a false economy to compare the profit margins of auction houses vs dealers based purely on mark-ups. Correct me if i'm wrong: my understanding is that the dealer buys his inventory. Whereas the auction house pays nothing for their inventory; they receive it from the consignor (and take a fee when it sells). The dealer wears a lot more risk, so i can understand some of the astonishing mark-ups that we see. Granted, the auction house still needs to pay for wages, marketing, the cost of running the auction, and all the admin mentioned previously, so they need to charge fees to someone. An auction house really is the perfect business if you have a large enough audience - you never have to purchase stock.

This is the key difference between a dealer who maintains inventory and an auction house -- the cost of carrying inventory.  Sometimes this is funded by loans, sometimes by the dealer's cash reserves, and mostly by a combination of both.  This reduces the dealer's per-coin profit hence justifying a larger markup on each coin.  But otherwise, both the dealer and auctioneer have similar categories of costs and expenses (except maybe the high-quality auction catalogs) and I would think that the main advantage for the auction house is the reduction in risk of carrying inventory for too long, which explains their lower markup.  It's also my understanding that for high-quality collections, auction houses will provide both an advance and guarantee to the seller, which increases their risk measurably.

Note, though, that some auction houses such as CNG also maintain and sell a retail inventory so there's likely a reasonable profit to be made in this aspect of the business too.

[Sulla80]

17 hours ago, idesofmarch01 said:

Assuming the seller paid a 10% seller's fee on this coin....

Are there really a dealers that takes only 10% from the seller?  If you get both buyer and seller to pay you and make a profit on shipping you start to get a pretty nice margin.  Dealers have to do work: photographing, attributing, shipping and pay for auction venues (virtual and physical) - so they certainly deserve a fee whether auction house or dealer.  For the buyer it is important to know total price in the end of the day and not underestimate when bidding:

- Buyer's fees

- Shipping fees

- Currency exchange rates

- Sometimes the most shocking: international customs/export license fees

 

[idesofmarch01]

6 minutes ago, Sulla80 said:

- Buyer's fees

- Shipping fees

- Currency exchange rates

- Sometimes the most shocking: international customs/export license fees

Of these four fees, the last three apply equally to dealers and auctioneers, and can be reasonably well-calculated or estimated by contacting the dealer or auction house.

It seems fairly straightforward to calculate these additional costs whether buying from a dealer or bidding in an auction.  

[John Conduitt]

14 hours ago, GregH said:

My frustration really is having to estimate the final price i pay myself - taking into account the fees, exchange rates (which are much less favourable than the official rates), shipping etc.

Some auctions do have the option for different currencies. Some (like Noonans) show you the bid price both with and without fees during the live auction. Some show you the total you have won so far. So you just need to have shipping in your head, which will depend on how many coins you're going for. They could all do that. I usually get around this problem by creating a spreadsheet of the lots I want and the overall cost if/as I win them, but it's a bit frantic when all the coins I'm looking at come one after the other.

Roma have an annoying T&C where if your invoice comes to more than £2,500 including fees and shipping, you can't pay by credit card. So if you've won around £1,500 of coins and the lot you're bidding on approaches £500, your next bid could mean you need to pay it all in cash. But you can't be sure.

Edited July 3, 2022 by John Conduitt

[John Conduitt]

20 minutes ago, idesofmarch01 said:

This is the key difference between a dealer who maintains inventory and an auction house -- the cost of carrying inventory.  Sometimes this is funded by loans, sometimes by the dealer's cash reserves, and mostly by a combination of both.  

This is true, but isn't the problem with buying inventory that the dealer has to sell a coin over their cost price to stay in business, while the auction house doesn't really care whether the buyer makes a profit, just that they're prepared to sell it for a price someone will pay for it on the day. So auctions can sell more coins more quickly, and don't need the same % as a dealer.

[Limes]

Some additional annoyances: 

- "suprise costs" that appear on the invoice, besides shipping and buyers fees, such as 'handling costs', 'payment fees' etc. At least add these in your terms, thank you!
- limited descriptions, also in the official reference works. E.g. 'equestrian statue left' or 'temple' is quite lazy without mentioning more specifics. 
- folks who tell you what and how to collect. Please, get a life. 
- the fact that even basic Roman silver has become expensive. Thank you pandemic, I hate you.