Hellow from Yahya

[shaheed]

Hellow,

My name is Yahya, I'm 38 years old, live in the county of Hertfordshire. I'm glad to have come across your forum as I hope I can use it correctly and in a useful way. I have launched my website around 3 months ago, I sell my own antique stamps collection in a bid to clear off all my debts that have been causing me some severe problems in my life. The main concept of the website is people can get any stamp for only £1 per stamp. My stamps span between 25 -over 100 years old and they are in great condition and each stamp could worth a lot more than the mere £1 by which it's being sold through my website. By offering this I'm giving stamps collectors and general investors the chance to acquire some valuable assets at a much lower price than it's true worth plus providing them with an opportunity to help me to overcome my own financial difficulties. It's affordable and easy for mostly everyone, and it can be beneficent for almost everyone even those who don't know anything about antique stamps. The website worked well as long as people know about it so I could reach few groups of audience through contacts and this generated the sale of around 1300 stamps to date. I don't have the resources to pay for advertisements and my finanical difficulties are still there haunting and my need for urgent cash is the main reason behind the sale of my website which is to secure some quick cash as soon as possible selling my the website and almost 20K stamps in stock. Shall you have any feedback then I assure you that I'll be more than grateful to hear it ...

regards,,

Yahya

[cash ninja]

Hi and welcome Yahya.

Sorry to hear about your finanical difficulties. I know what it can be like, I've been there myself. However, it sounds like you have something that I didn't when I found myself in finanical difficulties - you have an asset/assets that you could sell to get yourself out of debt - ie your stamps?

Correct me if I am wrong but you have a website, that is getting visitors and you have a huge amount of valuable stamps? Why are you selling them for only £1 each if they are worth so much more? If they really are so valuable, why not sell them for more, thereby allowing you to raise more money? Wouldn't you be able to still sell them for half price (as in half what they are actually worth) and generate sales? I

If your stamps (I'm afraid I don't know anything about stamps) really are so valuable then collectors would recognise that they are getting a bargain, you would still be able to sell them quickly and you would raise a lot more money wouldn't you?

Just my thoughts from a laymans point of view.

Tim

[bwelford]

Hi Yahya and welcome to the forum,


I very much go along with cash ninja's suggestion about charging the right price for what you are selling. Remember that price is a signal to people of the value. By suggesting a relatively low price for any stamp you sell, you are also signaling that perhaps there might be something not quite right about the stamps.


If you have time and the energy, I would suggest you add a blog to your website. That is my perennial advice to people who are trying to make their online properties more visible. You undoubtedly have a great deal of material that could fuel interesting posts. Just write about all those stamps and perhaps some interesting purchases that people may have made. I am sure it would work well for you.

[Kay]

Why are you selling them for only £1 each if they are worth so much more?

Tim, you took the words right out of my mouth.

Yahya, why sell them for £1 each? First, it raises the cash needed in dribs and drabs, and second, you might be breaking up a valuable collection. If you have collectors in your contact list or website audience, then why don't you offer the collection for sale? If that's likely to cause problems because the total value is too high for many purchasers, then can't you divide them up into sub-collections. I don't know anything about collecting stamps either, but perhaps you could group them in terms of country or dates or something?

Selling them at £1 each sounds like a really bad idea. If I were a stamp collector, I'd come along and buy up the good stuff at the bargain price of £1 and leave you sitting with all the ones which aren't worth that much.

Let's get back to basics here, and see if we've understood you properly. You own a valuable collection of stamps. You need to raise some cash quickly. You've set up a website to sell off your stock at way below its value in some cases. One really has to ask, "Why?"

Why don't you sell your asset to a collector? I'm guessing there must be forums for stamp enthusiasts. Could you not buy and sell stamps on there in the same way as people trade in many other things, such as domains? Could you invest a little bit more to hire a VA (virtual assistant) to track down potential buyers of your collection(s)? Or spend time yourself doing that?

Here are some questions. Feel free not to answer them if you don't want to.

- Are you knowledgeable about stamps? I mean, presumably you know what's valuable and what's not.

- Does the collection have any particular theme? From a country or region? Only those with pictures of birds on them? Some other theme(s)?

- You say you can't afford advertising. Fair enough, but there are ways to get the word out about your website/offer without having to buy adverts. You say you live in the UK - why not get yourself on local radio to talk about your collection? Why not run an exhibition at your local library (assuming there are any libraries left where you live)? There's loads of things you could do to help you sell this collection other than a website which sounds as though it doesn't get enough of the right kind of traffic.

Are there no magazines about stamp collecting? There are magazines about everything else under the sun. If you can't afford to pay for an advert in one of them, then write an article for them as long as you're allowed to mention your collection is for sale in the article.

I just don't 'get' why you seem to be frittering away a valuable asset by selling it off piecemeal at £1 a shot. What's the logic for doing this?

[JimWaller]

Welcome Yahya,

As you can probably tell from the suggestions above, there are a lot of very knowledgeable members here who are happy to share their knowledge. There are a number of low or no cost ways to draw attention to your website. You might be able to garner some interest from a press release for example.

You might also be able to do something with fiverr.com by saying something like "I will send you 4 or 5 antique stamps of my choosing for a fiverr" or " I will feature your message in a short video with an antique stamp and send you the stamp for a fiverr." (These are just examples, you would want to do something that fits your skills and abilities.) Try to use your creativity and come up with new and interesting ways to sell them.

I don't know how you acquired your stamps, but you might also be able to come up with some type of information product on how to duplicate your process, where to look, who to buy from, things like that. Good luck, I wish you much success!

Jim

[shaheed]

Hi everyone,

Many thanks for your truly valuable inputs and constructive suggestion & comment and I'm honestly very grateful for you all, for clarity I'll put down my reply in the following points:

• Stamps collections can be really tricky, you may have different opinion and valuations for them, but when it comes to selling them you need to really look, search and put a lot of efforts and resources in search for buyers or collectors who are interested in buying the stamps.
• Stamps can be valuable but find no one near to buy it and this can be for various reasons. My stamps are from different parts of the world mainly from the Latin America, and they span between 25 - over 100 years of age, and they have many themes.
• So, clarifying that is important to explain why my idea is in the way it's.
• My financial difficulties have been really hard and cruel to me and my family. I need to raise about £10000 to fully clear my difficult situation.
• I came up with an idea of selling my loose stamps for £1 each, and there are different prices for groups as shown on the website. The main reason for that is that I wanted to share my pain with others and allowing them to help me by any amount possible and the stamps will be the return for such help. Like , you help me with £1 I give you one antique stamp that I hope it give you better return.
• My need for the cash is really urgent and I focused on word of mouth techniques to spread the word hence I sold around 1300 stamps to date.
• I intended that the website share with the visitors my story and hoped that they can participate in helping me even if they have nothing to do with antique stamps collections, and I wanted to encourage that help for everyone by making affordable to everyone.
• It's my personal satisfaction that coming out of my current difficult situation is worth a lot more than what money can buy and for that reason if selling my entire stamps achieve this objective then I'll surely feel that I have sold them for the right price and not under valued them.
• I have started a blog with the start of the project.
• Creativity is very important factor of the campaign and if you visit the website you will notice that there is some creative efforts in trying to market for the project main purpose in many ways.
• Also, I have just finished writing a simple Flash Game that will come into action very soon to help add more creative touches to the campaign.
• The main message is : This website is not just about antique stamps that are sold for a bargain price, it's about knowing how to be able to help and get rewarded. I'm trying hard to utilize all what's available to me to let people know about it. My ultimate goal is to get out of my difficulties as soon as possible and achieving this is the real and ultimate value for the whole project.

More inputs are most welcome and many thanks once again for all your mouthful replies.

Best regards,,

Yahya

<added>

I received a kind permission from the moderator of this forum to post my website link to enable the readers of this thread to have a closer look at my website. So the link is: www.mystampsstand.co.uk , thanks very much for all your valuable inputs and contributions.

Best regards,,

Yahya

[Clinton]

Yahya, this seems like a bit of a scattergun approach, the type that takes a lot of time, but does not generate proportionate results. Have you considered a more targeted way of getting your message across to people interested in stamps? What about dealers, would they not pay that kind of money to buy the whole collection? And have you considered a lottery where you sell tickets and award the whole collection to the winner (as some people are doing with houses nowadays)?

Welcome to our forums.

[Kay]

And have you considered a lottery where you sell tickets and award the whole collection to the winner (as some people are doing with houses nowadays)?

Sorry to contradict you, Clinton, but although in theory a lottery is a great idea, it's also a legal minefield. It would probably cost a small fortune in legal fees to run a lottery that complied with the law in the UK.

(We did take a punt on trying to win a house which was sold by lottery. And then we followed the owner's blog about all the legal difficulties they went through to keep it legal.)

IMO what Shaheed needs to do is to sell to a collector or dealer. To do that, he needs to go where the collectors are. They're not going to come knocking on his door (or visiting his not well-known website). He must go to them.

So, where do stamp collectors hang out?

Are there any trade shows or expos coming up?

Are there any collectors and/or dealers actively seeking to buy collections?

Shaheed, for now I think you should also forget trying to help people on the Internet. The vast majority will just take what they can. You can be a philanthropist later, when you can afford to be. Even then, it'll probably be mostly a thankless task. Just concentrate on raising the cash you need.

I have a forum with people all over the world and they have a lot of various different interests. I'll post on there to ask if anyone is interested in stamp collections. If I catch anything in my net, I'll direct them here.

[crabfoot]

Delcampe is where the stamp collectors hang out, but I'm pretty sure Shaheed would know that. There's also this forum, one of Peter Davis's enterprises.

The trouble with collections is that it is often easy to sell the rarities and gems, leaving behind a substantial body of lesser items which have value but are much less in demand. This way some of the harder to move stamps will go.

What you don't want, when you have to split a collection, are the items that remind you of the wonderful pieces you once had. Usually, you bundle the better items with lesser items to sell "package lots" which will sell as a package.

I have a collection of miniatures to sell for an alcoholic friend of my wife - when she was tempted to open them, she decided it was time to let them go. I've actually been quietly collecting miniatures at boot sales etc so I can do a better job of "bundling" the lots.

[Davidj]

Sorry to contradict you, Clinton, but although in theory a lottery is a great idea, it's also a legal minefield. It would probably cost a small fortune in legal fees to run a lottery that complied with the law in the UK.

Isn't there some law here (UK) that you can't actually run a lottery (other then the National Lottery, who are obviously exempt), but you can run a game of skill? I thought that's why you get those things on TV with stuff like "What is the capital of France? a) Paris b) Shanghai c) New York. You'd have to be pretty daft to get it wrong, but it complies with the law. I've got a vague memory of some people having to do something like that on one of those house lotteries.