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Welcome to my stamp website. Every month, I offer a couple hundred auctions of worldwide stamps for collectors on eBay. I mostly break up large estate lots and dealer close-outs into bite-sized chunks. My lots are mainly collections from one or several countries, as well as better singles, sets and covers listed individually. Sometimes I list entire albums, or accumulations of used supplies. Most of my lots start at just $1. I like to let my bidders decide what each item is worth. Sometimes that means big bargains for you. Sometimes it means happy surprises for me :-). Check out my current auctions here.
Listing glitches. Thanks to everyone who has tipped me off about glitches in my auction listings, especially missing images or information. I've been composing my auctions in eBay's Mister Lister software, which has the annoying feature of not letting me preview how the listing will look, only raw HTML code. So inevitably, something gets scrambled that I'll never know about til some helpful eBayer lets me know.
A little rant on insurance. In most cases, I don't think postal insurance is a good bargain. I've sent thousands of packages of stamps and received hundreds of cash payments by ordinary first class mail. Items have occasionally been lost in the mail -- but its very rare -- surely less than 1%. Think of it this way: If you insure 100 $10 items @ $1.10 each, you've spent $110 on insurance. The post office would have to lose 11 of your hundred for you to come out ahead. I think that's a bad bet. Nevertheless -- I'll ship your stamps insured if you pay the extra cost, and understand that it may be a day or three til I can get to the post office to send an insured letter. It's probably a good idea to insure very large shipments, or fragile items, especially if they're going overseas. And if you choose not to insure, please understand that I cannot be responsible for the one-in-a-thousand shipment that is eaten by the postal gremlins.
Speaking of software, Mister Lister is full of annoyances -- but I've tried several commercial auction management software packages, and they're all even worse. If you've used listing software that you're happy with, I'd love to hear about it. Has anyone ever seen a website that compares and reviews auction software? BTW, some of the best auction tools I've seen, for both sellers and bidders, are available for free at vrane.com.
Coming attractions. Over time, I'm planning to add more to this website. But for now, I'm happy to have gotten this far and actually have this page online. Your comments and questions are always welcome. Thanks for visiting. See you on eBay.
Eric
Eric Lerner
eBay Stamp Auctions
504 South Plain Street
Ithaca, NY 14850
(607) 273-1154
American Philatelic Society member #130348
eBay user ID: ericlerner
Page updated May 3, 2001