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Ebay's Worst Offerings

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32 minutes ago, Michael-Roo said:

 

An apt comment Peter, she is marlyBOB after all…. Even using the same photos.

Pete (PWA) talked with a representative of ebay last time so, although it ended on £1600, clearly no sale was made. Thanks to him they are aware of this thread too.

I am not certain if Ebay deserves any credit. The reason for the no sale might have something to do with all the bids looking suspiciously like shills.

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You're probably right. If she's listing each time they're offering a £1 maximum fee then I suppose she'll continue to fish hoping, eventually, some poor sap will bite.

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Why don't ebay just ban her IP address and get the fraud squad on her?

 

 

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25 minutes ago, Peter said:

Why don't ebay just ban her IP address and get the fraud squad on her?

 

 

Absolutely Peter, her and all the others.

I remember how, 10-15 years ago, I would spend and enjoyable hour or two hunting for coins on ebay several times each week.. It was fun, and there were always one or two proper rarities to be found which a seller may not have been aware of when listing. Now, there's so much repro being sold as genuine, washers being described as 'high grade', worthless 1971 pennies on at hundreds or thousands, that I can't even be bothered to look anymore.

 

Edited by Michael-Roo
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4 minutes ago, Michael-Roo said:

Absolutely Peter, her and all the others.

I remember how, 10-15 years ago, I would spend and enjoyable hour or two hunting for coins on ebay several times each week.. It was fun, and there were always one or two proper rarities to be found which a seller may not have been aware of when listing. Now, there's so much repro being sold as genuine, washers being described as 'high grade', worthless 1971 pennies on at hundreds or thousands, that I can't even be bothered to look anymore.

Declan Magee created a customised filter to exclude all the dross from searches, which presumably could be adapted for anyone's own use?

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I picked up a thread on the Moore model pennies from 2006. Apparently you can get a good one on eBay for a few pounds.

Not true in 2019, it's junk.

Searches for things like 1937 proof penny also yield junk. 

Appreciate they might come up, just don't really see the point in eBay anymore - if the "easy" stuff isn't really there then the alternatives are ...? I figure a good reason to be getting to the fairs 

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On 5/31/2019 at 7:01 PM, Peckris 2 said:

Declan Magee created a customised filter to exclude all the dross from searches, which presumably could be adapted for anyone's own use?

That sounds interesting and useful.

 

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On 2 June 2019 at 9:49 PM, 1949threepence said:

That sounds interesting and useful.

 

I did store it somewhere - if I can find it (might be a long job!) I'll post it.

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16 minutes ago, Peckris 2 said:

I did store it somewhere - if I can find it (might be a long job!) I'll post it.

Thanks Chris - if you do get the time, that'd be great. If you're anything like me though, it'll turn up when you're looking for something else - and you'll think "how the hell did it get there?"

Edited by 1949threepence
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Ended last night at £1,500 and with 25 bids.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/123785755191?ul_noapp=true

There were the usual bidders involved, plus a new one, the winner, who has a previous bidding activity record of zero.

Back on this morning as a £2,300 BIN.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1847-WW-SOLID-SILVER-PLAIN-EDGE-VICTORIA-GOTHIC-CROWN-MY-GRADE-E-F-plus/123791473035?hash=item1cd28bf98b:g:Jw4AAOSw9A5criZ1

Edited by Michael-Roo

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10 hours ago, 1949threepence said:

Thanks Chris - if you do get the time, that'd be great. If you're anything like me though, it'll turn up when you're looking for something else - and you'll think "how the hell did it get there?"

It was actually easy in the end - I just did a Spotlight search for 'Declan' and there it was! Proves that good naming brings its own rewards. Unfortunately, after eBay changed its search software, it became rather more complicated, but FWIW, here is Declan's technique:

 

Perhaps I should share one of my trade secrets.  Don’t tell anyone.  This is a filtering mechanism that I have developed over many years, and tonight, it reduced the list of what was presented to me from nearly a quarter of a million results to 66,000.  That means that 75% of the list is removed before I even see it, and if you sort your query by Ending Soonest, it means that I really can have a quick look through eBay to see if there is anything finishing tonight that takes my fancy.

 

Make a cup of tea at this point if you’re still with me – I am going to go into some detail.  All the examples I’ll use are my own personal preferences but I do understand that what I consider to be tat, others may consider to be treasure, so do forgive my ruthlessness.

 

I start by listing everything in the British Coins category, sorted by Ending Soonest.  Tonight it was around 225,000 items.

 

I use a three-stage process to reduce this number to something a little more manageable.

 

  • Stage 1:  eliminate things I don’t want to see, like 50ps and 20ps.
  •  
  • Stage 2: eliminate sellers whose tat I don’t want to see
  •  
  • Stage 3: set a maximum price so I don’t see things I can’t afford. 
  •  

 

 

Stage 1: Eliminate terms used in an items description, in my instance, this could be things like “50p, 20p, pound, proof, gold”.  You do this in the top search bar in eBay, using the syntax:

 

-(xxx,yyy,zzz)

 

I don’t want to see decimal coins, so a lot of my exclusions are dates.  You cannot use wildcards.  You used to be able to, but that’s a different story…

 

Soon, after playing with this a little bit, you’ll run up against a character limit.  eBay think that it is 100 characters, but I have found a workaround to extend that limit to 300 characters by enclosing three separate 100 character strings in three separate bracket pairs:

 

-(100 characters here) -(100 more here) -(and another 100 here)

 

Go one character over and it goes a little bit haywire, but you can always go back a page in your browser to recover it.  300 characters will keep you going for a while, but eventually, you’ll run up against that limit too, so you’ll want to use your 300 in the most effective way.  Some terms exclude thousands of items, and some only exclude a few.  “50p” excludes 35,000 records, while “brooch” only knocks out 127, so I rank the search term exclusions by how many records they exclude, and only use up my 300 on those that are worth using.  As we are limited by character, a small term, like “50p” (3 characters), is a lot more economical than a long term, like “enamelled” (10 characters).

 

This is where it can get complicated, and I leave it up to you, and the level of your own Asperger’s how far you want to go with this.  It gets complicated because items have more than one word in their descriptions, and you may already have eliminated an item with an exclusion already used.  Take gold sovereigns, for instance.  A search using “gold” brings up 6,500 results, so we can knock out 6,500 items by including “gold” in our exclusion string.  A search using “sovereign” brings up 4,000 results, but we cannot exclude a further 4,000 by using “sovereign” because most sovereign listings will also use the word “gold”.  In fact, only 650 listings used “sovereign”, but didn’t use “gold”, so by including “sovereign” when we’ve already used “gold” we only reduce the list by 650.  “Sovereign” is 10 characters, so at 6.5 items/character, “sovereign” is a very inefficient exclusion term.

 

Once you are happy with your query, save it.  I tend to save it in a text file, because eBay’s query management is not very intuitive.   The last time I did this exercise, in January, it was all about getting rid of Beatrix Potter, now it’s all about eliminating pound coins from the list, so I refresh my query three or four times a year, as trends change. 

 

 

 

My 300 characters removes more than half of the items in the British Coins category, about 100,000 listings.  That’s more than 300 per character, but it has taken many years to get it refined to that level of efficiency!

 

 

 

Stage 2:  Seller exclusion.

 

Anyone who spends any time watching eBay will already know the sellers that they tend to skip through, and there is a facility to remove those sellers from your query, in addition to the exclusions settled on in Stage 1.  Scroll down the left-hand side of the listings page, and you’ll see “More Refinements”.  A tab in that section is marked Seller, and in that tab, there is an exclusion box.  Select “Only show items from”, then “Specific sellers”, then choose “Exclude” from the drop-down.  The text box to the right is intended to contain a comma-separated list of sellers to exclude.

 

However, there is a bit of sloppy eBay programming in this form that needs a little workaround.  You cannot add seller names to this list one at a time without breaking the query before long – it adds spurious commas and spaces all over the place and the database just can’t handle that, so I keep my “eBay blacklist” in a trusty text file, using the syntax:

 

 

 

Seller1,seller2,seller3

 

 

 

No spaces, a single comma between names, and no carriage returns.  There’s 100 odd sellers on my list, but I’ve been building it for a while.  To update the seller list, update it in the text file first, then copy and paste the entire list into that little text box in eBay, in one hit.  Editing the contents of eBay's text box directly never ends well…

 

My seller list removes a further 40,000 items.

 

 

 

Finally, Stage 3, removing items that are too expensive.  This bit is easy, there’s a little box on the left-hand side that for once, is quite self-explanatory.  I change this every time I run the query, depending on my budget that day, and it usually reduces the list by a further 20,000 items or so.

 

 

 

If you made it to the end, congratulations, and I hope that’s helpful!

 
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Sheer, unadulterated magic. Thank you Declan and many thanks to Peck for finding it.

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There are some strange crowns out there after a bit of a lull - a distinctly fake-looking 1844 that someone wants £3,000 for, another 1844 (from a different seller) graded B Unc which is little better than Fine, and a 1703 at the bargain price of... £70,200.   

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Though they will accept offers on the Vigo crown🤔, AND one gets the Glendining sale catalogue to boot. 

Atlas milking it again

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3 hours ago, pokal02 said:

There are some strange crowns out there after a bit of a lull - a distinctly fake-looking 1844 that someone wants £3,000 for, another 1844 (from a different seller) graded B Unc which is little better than Fine, and a 1703 at the bargain price of... £70,200.   

Yes, that £3000 coin is a modern Chinese replica, I’ve emailed the vendor as he doesn’t seem to be a habitual fake seller.

Jerry

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On 6/3/2019 at 11:13 PM, secret santa said:

Just got in from the workshop shattered, so maybe that explains why my quick look at this lot looks OK......

Has something changed from 3 days ago?

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The original picture posted for this item was a pair of spectacles and not an 1854 penny !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Bit like that guy who lists coins, but keeps putting up pictures of a tree or a skirting board..........

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The Vigo crown's only £70,000 more than I paid for mine  (I will admit theirs is better!!) 

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On 6/4/2019 at 10:02 AM, Peckris 2 said:

It was actually easy in the end - I just did a Spotlight search for 'Declan' and there it was! Proves that good naming brings its own rewards. Unfortunately, after eBay changed its search software, it became rather more complicated, but FWIW, here is Declan's technique:

 

Perhaps I should share one of my trade secrets.  Don’t tell anyone.  This is a filtering mechanism that I have developed over many years, and tonight, it reduced the list of what was presented to me from nearly a quarter of a million results to 66,000.  That means that 75% of the list is removed before I even see it, and if you sort your query by Ending Soonest, it means that I really can have a quick look through eBay to see if there is anything finishing tonight that takes my fancy.

 

Make a cup of tea at this point if you’re still with me – I am going to go into some detail.  All the examples I’ll use are my own personal preferences but I do understand that what I consider to be tat, others may consider to be treasure, so do forgive my ruthlessness.

 

I start by listing everything in the British Coins category, sorted by Ending Soonest.  Tonight it was around 225,000 items.

 

I use a three-stage process to reduce this number to something a little more manageable.

 

  • Stage 1:  eliminate things I don’t want to see, like 50ps and 20ps.
  •  
  • Stage 2: eliminate sellers whose tat I don’t want to see
  •  
  • Stage 3: set a maximum price so I don’t see things I can’t afford. 
  •  

 

 

Stage 1: Eliminate terms used in an items description, in my instance, this could be things like “50p, 20p, pound, proof, gold”.  You do this in the top search bar in eBay, using the syntax:

 

-(xxx,yyy,zzz)

 

I don’t want to see decimal coins, so a lot of my exclusions are dates.  You cannot use wildcards.  You used to be able to, but that’s a different story…

 

Soon, after playing with this a little bit, you’ll run up against a character limit.  eBay think that it is 100 characters, but I have found a workaround to extend that limit to 300 characters by enclosing three separate 100 character strings in three separate bracket pairs:

 

-(100 characters here) -(100 more here) -(and another 100 here)

 

Go one character over and it goes a little bit haywire, but you can always go back a page in your browser to recover it.  300 characters will keep you going for a while, but eventually, you’ll run up against that limit too, so you’ll want to use your 300 in the most effective way.  Some terms exclude thousands of items, and some only exclude a few.  “50p” excludes 35,000 records, while “brooch” only knocks out 127, so I rank the search term exclusions by how many records they exclude, and only use up my 300 on those that are worth using.  As we are limited by character, a small term, like “50p” (3 characters), is a lot more economical than a long term, like “enamelled” (10 characters).

 

This is where it can get complicated, and I leave it up to you, and the level of your own Asperger’s how far you want to go with this.  It gets complicated because items have more than one word in their descriptions, and you may already have eliminated an item with an exclusion already used.  Take gold sovereigns, for instance.  A search using “gold” brings up 6,500 results, so we can knock out 6,500 items by including “gold” in our exclusion string.  A search using “sovereign” brings up 4,000 results, but we cannot exclude a further 4,000 by using “sovereign” because most sovereign listings will also use the word “gold”.  In fact, only 650 listings used “sovereign”, but didn’t use “gold”, so by including “sovereign” when we’ve already used “gold” we only reduce the list by 650.  “Sovereign” is 10 characters, so at 6.5 items/character, “sovereign” is a very inefficient exclusion term.

 

Once you are happy with your query, save it.  I tend to save it in a text file, because eBay’s query management is not very intuitive.   The last time I did this exercise, in January, it was all about getting rid of Beatrix Potter, now it’s all about eliminating pound coins from the list, so I refresh my query three or four times a year, as trends change. 

 

 

 

My 300 characters removes more than half of the items in the British Coins category, about 100,000 listings.  That’s more than 300 per character, but it has taken many years to get it refined to that level of efficiency!

 

 

 

Stage 2:  Seller exclusion.

 

Anyone who spends any time watching eBay will already know the sellers that they tend to skip through, and there is a facility to remove those sellers from your query, in addition to the exclusions settled on in Stage 1.  Scroll down the left-hand side of the listings page, and you’ll see “More Refinements”.  A tab in that section is marked Seller, and in that tab, there is an exclusion box.  Select “Only show items from”, then “Specific sellers”, then choose “Exclude” from the drop-down.  The text box to the right is intended to contain a comma-separated list of sellers to exclude.

 

However, there is a bit of sloppy eBay programming in this form that needs a little workaround.  You cannot add seller names to this list one at a time without breaking the query before long – it adds spurious commas and spaces all over the place and the database just can’t handle that, so I keep my “eBay blacklist” in a trusty text file, using the syntax:

 

 

 

Seller1,seller2,seller3

 

 

 

No spaces, a single comma between names, and no carriage returns.  There’s 100 odd sellers on my list, but I’ve been building it for a while.  To update the seller list, update it in the text file first, then copy and paste the entire list into that little text box in eBay, in one hit.  Editing the contents of eBay's text box directly never ends well…

 

My seller list removes a further 40,000 items.

 

 

 

Finally, Stage 3, removing items that are too expensive.  This bit is easy, there’s a little box on the left-hand side that for once, is quite self-explanatory.  I change this every time I run the query, depending on my budget that day, and it usually reduces the list by a further 20,000 items or so.

 

 

 

If you made it to the end, congratulations, and I hope that’s helpful!

 

Excellent, thanks. Only just noticed this as it didn't come up in my notifications.  

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...and now we have a 1935 proof crown graded PR64CAM by PCGS (confirmed by PCGS website that it's the same coin), but the grading is ludicrous - there's heavy wear on the obverse and I'm struggling to even say VF.  (No blame attached to the seller here - he/she started it at £1 and no doubt it will find its own level - it's £180 now). 

 

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Are you sure its wear and not just the toning? Ear and tash look ok but I'm on my phone not my PC.

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47 minutes ago, pokal02 said:

...and now we have a 1935 proof crown graded PR64CAM by PCGS (confirmed by PCGS website that it's the same coin), but the grading is ludicrous - there's heavy wear on the obverse and I'm struggling to even say VF.  (No blame attached to the seller here - he/she started it at £1 and no doubt it will find its own level - it's £180 now). 

 

Here it is https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/RARE-1935-PROOF-SILVER-CROWN-COIN-PCGS-PR64CAMEO/264357180231?hash=item3d8cea7347:g:iWsAAOSwumJc~qNU 

It is a strange looking coin, ?handled, difficult to grade from the photo. PGCS state that it is .925 silver, were the proofs made in sterling? The standard issue are .500.

Jerry

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The moustache looks OK but I still think the ear and hair look worn.  To be fair, it could be the photo or possibly the slab has become defective in some way (the toning looks a bit odd too). The proofs were indeed .925 silver.   

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