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I’m tasked with selling about 300 hundred silver coins for my parent’s estate.
Any helpful hints? These aren’t mint coins…all are circulated….some more than others.
What’s the best way to list? Small lots or individually? What’s the best way to ship? Any scams to watch for?
I’ve been selling on ebay for 18 years, but never sold this sort of thing.
The GeorgiaHillbilly
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It sounds like selling any collection.
The more expensive items can be sold by themselves. You may want to get the real expensive ones graded.
The lesser valuable can be grouped with other like items.
Some may only be worth the melt value.
Be prepared to do a lot of research.
Good Luck.
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The tips I have are:
-check to make sure you don’t have any valuable coins – if you don, obviously sell them individually or if they are very valuable, get them graded
-once you know the coins are not that valuable, research the silver content of them – this is usually by year. Bundle the coins of the same silver content, and use that content in your title.
-weigh each bundle in oz, and in grams if selling internationally.
-listing would be the year range of the coins, silver content, weight, and total coins (3 nickels, 2 quarters, etc)Basically, you are selling silver…not the coins themselves.
I would be wary of international buyers…I sold 40 silver quarters once to a buyer from Brazil and it was a hassle.
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All good advice above. I’ve never been a coin collector and know nothing about it but I’ve been selling off an estate horde for a while myself, bit by bit. I can usually get quite a bit above melt for older ungraded circulated silver dollars and such and I think they are worth selling individually. For example common Morgan Dollars in decent shape are selling right now in the $20s and melt is only $12.
It helps to have a little familiarity with grading to help assess value as you go through and check dates and mints for rarities. When selling individually I take good photos of front, back, edges, and angles (to show relief) and point out things that I know are important to collectors such as marks, and sometimes give an “amateur opinion” of the general grade. I also include a photo of the coin on a digital pocket scale. I have a book called Making the Grade by Beth Deisher that is extremely helpful. It has color illustrations and graphics on grading the top 25 most widely collected US coins.
The web site http://www.silverrecyclers.com is convenient to use to get current silver price because it gives you current gross melt value for specific US coins by the each or for multiples.
When the gold and silver market was really hot in the depression a while back I put coins up on 3 day auctions and always did well. Now I prefer to put them up BIN with free shipping and do not accept returns (though of course a buyer can always claim INAD). Many dealers are still using auctions and seem to do well.
For shipping an individual coin I put the coin in a tiny zip lock envelope, sandwich it between two pieces of heavy cardboard taped together with an indentation made in the center to hold the coin, and ship First Class Package in a 6×9 padded envelope.
All this has worked well for me as a coin amateur and I’ve never had any issues.
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