Foreign Coins, Ebay vs scrapyard: update

Howdy-

So a while back I sold off a couple pounds of junky (in the literal sense) foreign coins to my local scrapyard and was paid $1.50 per pound. I thought that was a pretty decent deal, but I got a lot of recommendations from here (and at the scrapyard) to sell them as coins on eBay. Well, I recently put up three different lots of foreign coins on eBay, and while the sample size is small and my little experiment doesn't really prove anything one way or another, I thought folks might be interested in the results.

What I did was put up three different lots at three different times: 1.5 pounds of world coins, 1 pound of New World coins, and 0.75 pounds of Old World coins (excluding Europe). There's one big difference between these eBay coins and the ones I brought to the scrapyard though- every coin was different within each of my three lots. That is, these weren't expensive coins, but a) they were not corroded junk, and b) they were selected for maximum variety/numismatic interest within each lot. So, what happened?

The 1.5 pound lot sold for $16.35 (to the second bidder- the highest bidder ducked out on me), netting me $5.58 per pound after fees and shipping. Not bad.



The 1 pound lot sold for $5.99, the opening price, netting me -$0.88 per pound after fees and shipping. The only thing that kept me from feeling like a complete chump was that I paid for the shipping with a wad of old stamps I had laying around. So, if you don't consider old stamps "money", I netted $4.92 per pound. Sort of.

The 0.75 pound lot didn't sell at all.

Conservatively, it took me two hours to carefully select out the coins and produce the three mixtures, to photograph and list them, to prepare them for shipment, and to drop them off at the PO (it was probably more like three, but who's counting). If you don't count the old stamps I used as postage, that means I made about $5 per hour off of 2.5 pounds of hand-picked coins. Now, compare that with the 30 minutes it took me to sort out 3 pounds of crappy coins that I sold for $4.50 at the scrapyard (that I was going to anyway)- that's almost twice the payout per hour for almost the same amount of metal.

For as much as I am a coin collector and want to promote the hobby, I'm wondering if I shouldn't sort *all* my common duplicates and dump them at the yard... Either that or start a coin collecting club at the local elementary school and just give 'em away to kids...

cheers,
tbg

that's how I sold my last lot of foreign coins.

I bought it for $3, and sold it for $10 for a school teacher for her students. did this when I was 14 or so