Rob

They have to be low to get competitive bidding. As long as the price to be paid offers the chance of someone to make a few quid, you will have multiple interested parties. Set them too high and your bidder will be the person who is actively seeking an example and is willing to pay book price.The alternative to low estimates is to set them at retail and hope. You see it time and time again at Baldwins where the estimate is about retail price, the coin opens at 20% below (which equates to low estimate once the juice is added) and there is usually one bidder only. The same could be said for the St.James's sale. The estimates in this case being OTT in a quite a few instances (highlighted elsewhere on this forum), but it only requires one person to bid and commission has been made. If the vendor puts a high reserve on it, unless there are no sellers' fees, he will have to pay a fee for the unsolds, so money is still made.

Came second on the only thing I was interested in

What you don't have you can't miss. Anyway, wanting to make an offer is not the same as putting your money where your mouth is

Best bet is to put it into auction. Rule of thumb is that cut halves go for about 10% of the value for a full coin

It is like every business. Costs have to be covered in one way or another. Either it goes on postage, or it is included in an elevated starting/reserve price. There is no free lunch.

They also say that you are not allowed to include expenses as part of the costs. When they stop charging fees and Royal Mail give a free delivery service, I would be quite happy not to include these overheads too.

It isn't aimed at you per se. It's just a recurring theme that has raised itself on this and other forums ever since it began. People everywhere seem to get quite exercised about not as described items, but these are par for the course on eBay. Obviously eBay is the place to go for most casual sellers and the quality of offerings is in line with the numismatic competences of the various vendors. Listings range from the clearly tongue in cheek £1m starting prices to a penny and see where it goes, but from past experience I've seen numerous examples of shill bidding, received not as described items, not all of whom would take things back and these from people who did know better. As a seller, had a number of returns where the item was around the market price and as described. Nothing wrong with the item, just not a bargain. Similarly I have seen numerous examples such as with that seller where the picture indicates something it isn't. A seller of coins with a feedback of nearly 25000 will know that a 1946 dot penny is going to be worth more than a couple of quid. They will also know that a worn ordinary 1946 penny isn't worth diddly and won't sell. The phrase 'If it seems too good to be true, it probably is' usually applies. it wouldn't take more than a minute to write that the item you see is not the one you will receive. Both sides to my mind are people being greedy. However, the point that David raised about many people not knowing what they are selling is correct and you do have to make allowances for these. Sure I don't like eBay very much, but I'm not averse to buying from there and in fact have done so in the past year and many times in the past. I only stopped using it once it became too much like the wild west and in practical terms, overloaded with tat, 10 years or so ago it typically had 2-3000 listings in the British coins section. Now it is over 100000, and numerically no richer in terms of quality. The inability to convey the truth in feedback also didn't help.

Not quite

I understand that side of the argument. The point I am trying to get across is that the opprobium heaped on sellers for not fully describing the item or posting a different picture to the item being sold is not counterbalanced by a similar feeling of guilt for paying less than the going rate when purchasing. It is like being given change for a tenner when you have only handed over a fiver. It's just two different versions of greed. I simply don't understand the indignation expressed of receiving a similar but different piece of crap, neither of which are costing or are worth more than pence or a few pounds at most. Every week I receive a few enquiries asking if I want to buy a few collections of 'granny's coins' that were stuck away in a jar on the mantlepiece. Usually these are bronze pennies and halfpennies. I'm lucky if 1 in 20 sellers have even a vague idea of the value, as that requires knowledge of the contents which they clearly don't have. Ebay is no different and is frequented by the same sellers. And I might add is frequented by a considerable number of unknowledgable types who ask prices in line with their own inflated concepts of values.

The only thing I take from this is that people accept or are at least very forgiving of eBay items with faults that every dealer or TPG would be castigated for selling or misdescribing. Stop persisting with eBay and accept it for the den of thieves that it is. Pay proper money for something rather than expecting everything to be a bargain for few pence and then complain that your Petition Crown turned out to be a Churchill. It is only greed (on both sides of the transaction) that makes people persist with eBay

Harold II (he of the arrow in the eye) hence the reference to 950 years of French rule and the vote to leave their private club. Wilton mint, the moneyer is Aelfwold and it's about 20mm diameter. The portrait is slightly double struck, but I can live with that as there is minimal wear. Sorry, couldn't resist adding it to the penny acquisition thread. Hope springs eternal that a few of you might cast your eyes a bit further back than 1860.

Picked up today to celebrate the end of French rule 950 years after it began.

There might be some mileage in this as the auction lots are likely to be done on a conveyor belt, suggesting the lights will be run contiuously and will get hotter, whereas a single coin for slabbing, or even a small consignment, will not result in the lamp(s) reaching as high a temperature as in the former case. i.e. the single shot picture will be cooler.

Ah, but we have black puddings from Bury market - best there is.

thanks all

Does anyone know how to convert a nef file to a jpg file, or alternatively how to persuade paint to work with a nef file? I'm pretty certain the question has been answered before, but search doesn't find it. Thanks.

I got one of the offspring to do this for me. Now I can happily hold myself responsible for my own mistakes, as opposed to thinking I have written something which on examination is complete and utter b****cks.

Private Eye recently highlighted what must be the ultimate two letter word misprunt from the Grauniad website - 'Are you going to vote to leave the UE(sic) or not?' Thinking about it, they might have also written my mobile's predictive text software. Every time I tried to write 'no' it corrected it to 'on' - this despite the fact that a significant proportion of texts are questions, many of which require a simple yes or no answer. Somewhat fewer can be answered with on or off.

You can get the featured cleaning sign for 11.99 + vat from Viking. http://www.viking-direct.co.uk/catalog/search.do?Ntt=cleaning+sign&N= That would be a far better fashion accessory to wear stood outside the car wash.

You're lucky. I've got 110 gaps in my Saxon/Mercian list

The Grauniad always manages to express itself badly. Obviously branching out from its home turf of a near monopoly on spelling mistakes. Apparently the preferred newspaper of the teaching professions........................... God help us.

The series is called rip-off Britain. It doesn't really leave much scope for reallocation of blame, which manifestly should be the case for those who spend tens of thousands on 'investments' from the LMO and similar without doing due diligence. They certainly wouldn't buy a car without taking it for a test-drive. To my mind it is simply sellers pandering to the market. People want to be greedy and see unrealistic returns ahead of them, and so the market will oblige. Caveat emptor should outweigh all other arguments, but a programme title demanding that people are being ripped-off can't afford to say the audience is to blame - so there's no danger of an objective discussion

I'm afraid we need a bit more than 10 minutes notice, so missed it. There is going to be a rip-off Britain program on 'investment' coins some time soon, but don't know when. I declined to take part on the ground that the programme title precluded objectivity. I don't have access to the BBC's schedule.

Obviously the more mistakes the rarer the error, but it shouldn't surprise people that they get through as there is not sufficient flan missing to bugger up the striking process, after all, the attached got though and that is missing considerably more of the circumference.

The key is going to be whether the radius of the missing bits matches the coin. There is no reason to assume that only one clip could occur. To have a different radius to the 10p requires you to have a flan clipped in two places and also of the wrong diameter, i.e. a blank in the wrong bucket and with two unusual errors. Do you win the lottery on a regular basis?