It's time to come together and get these crooks off eBay. This issue is effecting hundreds of innocent eBayers and many business sellers too - okay, for transparency, I have to state that I am a stamp dealer, meaning this issue also has a detrimental effect on my business. But it also kills confidence in the market and I, for one, can't compete with the criminals offering stamps for postage at a price I can't even buy in the trade or at auction.
Take a deep breath - this is long explanation!
But make no mistake, the market is flooded with Chinese counterfeits normally offered by sellers who actually sell kitchen and bathroom products or collectibles, when suddenly they stumbled upon £100,000 of stamps! Unfortunately buying them and using them in the postal service is a crime. It is possible the only problem you will experience is that Royal Mail charge your customer £5 to receive your packet (still embarrassing) but the consequences could be much worse, as Royal Mail really want to 'stamp' this out.
To explain the market, stamp dealers often buy in bulk at auction or from estates. They take out what they need for stock and other items of interest but are sometimes left with hundreds of first and second class stamps in booklets and the like. There aren't enough collectors to 'soak them all up', so for cash flow or to realise a profit on a box lot, it is necessary to offer valid stamps, under face value to help liquidity and in truth get and an overall profit - no one is going to buy stamps online for postage at full price (although that is going on sometimes on Amazon!).
Having been in the business for 50 years, I can tell you that an auction, if you're willing to buy large lots of modern GB you will be paying anything between 50% and 60% of the face value for them and sometimes more and that's before adding a buyer's premium of between 18-25%. You cannot buy the material at 35% of face unless occasionally, when the auction house hasn't done their job and no one else has bothered to view the lot. So when eBay sellers of shampoo and little craft animals, start aggressively selling postage on eBay, they are selling counterfeit stamps imported from China. And I'd be lying if I told you that the latest batch of fakes that have come in aren't pretty amazing but do you want to be sucked into criminal activity? If so, fill your boots!
It is not viable to sell stamps for postage on eBay at 35% or less. Even if, which they never do, get to pick up a small parcel of decimal stamp at 25% of face...here's the mathematics. If a £1 stamp costs 25p (which it doesn't and, if it did, I would buy up a million of them for £250,000) and you put 100 of them on eBay at £35...all these crooks are pay the highest promotion rates to be at the top of listings...so 13% plus normal fees, 12% + listing fees 12p and a transaction fee of 30p and they all offer free p&p, which I guess costs them nothing because they have the counterfeit stamps to use. Anyway 100 x £1 stamps has a face value of £100 - offered for £35. £35 less 13% (£4.55) + 12% £4.20 leaves £26.25 less 42p for listing and transaction leaves £25.83. Not much of a margin on tens of thousands of stamps. So they have to be coming in at 10p (absolutely impossible for anyone in the trade to do), unless, of course, they're robbing post offices in their spare time.
Royal Mail have been horribly slow in getting to grips with this and have now set up a fraud department, as it is costing them millions. When something looks to be good to be true.....it is! And it's not just the barcoded stamps, its commemoratives too - mainly 2022 self-adhesives, e.g. Wallace & Gromit, Cats, Fruit and Veg (2003) and Cats and Dogs (2002) booklets etc.
I would like to sell stamps for postage on eBay but unfortunately at this time it is impossible because the first three pages of listings in that category are 90% counterfeit and being offered at between 35-45% of face. eBay don't care although they have made a few of the sellers remove the words 'good for postage', as they're clearly not and that is another separate offence under trading standards.
If stamps are being offered for postage, you also need to avoid 'unfranked' material. These have already gone through the post once and cannot be re-used (again quite hard for Royal Mail to spot and it's their poor working standards that mean masses of letters arrive without a post mark or, if they can be bothered, have been struck through with a felt tip. An elderly couple selling unfranked stamps on eBay were sent to prison last year but not before they'd soaked off £600,000 worth of stamps, which they sold for just under £350,000.
So even if it's not me, it's always best to buy your discounted stamps for postage on eBay from a stamp dealer. You can sometimes pick them up at a great rate on eBay auctions. At fixed price, however, it is unlikely anyone in the trade can offer them for much less than 75% of face, that nets down to 59% after eBay's fees and that's what they would have cost at auction in the current market, although advertised buying prices from the big postage dealers are often nearer to 40%, rising to 65% for second class barcoded and they mainly supply other businesses direct rather than sell on eBay.
Thank you to anyone who has got down to the bottom of this description - you deserve a medal but these crooks are killing an already shrinking market.
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