eBay vs. Coin Shows: Where to Get the Best Price for Mint Error Coins — Lessons From a Lost 2000 Lincoln Cent Broadstruck Out of Collar

Where you sell a coin shapes what you actually pocket. Not sometimes — nearly always. In my years running an online coin dealership, I’ve watched near-identical pieces realize wildly different sums depending entirely on the venue. I’ve also watched sellers lose money, patience, and occasionally their tempers over things that have nothing to do with the coin itself. Shipping, mostly. Recently, one lost package holding a humble $60 mint error set off a discussion that says just about everything you need to know about choosing your selling venue wisely.

A Case Study: The $60 Broadstruck Cent That Went Missing

The story begins innocently enough. A collector on a fixed income — he mentioned he’s on Social Security, and that $60 is genuinely meaningful to him — won a lovely little rarity at a weekly online auction: a Mint Error 2000 Lincoln Cent Broadstruck Out of Collar, graded PCGS MS-63 RD. Even at MS-63, the original red luster jumps off the surfaces. Small coin, big story.

New to error coins? Here’s what happened at the Mint. A broadstrike occurs when a planchet is struck without the retaining collar in place. Instead of being confined to the standard 19.05mm diameter, the planchet spreads outward under striking pressure, producing a stretched, flattened design with no formed rim. On a 2000 zinc cent — that’s the 97.5% zinc, 2.5% copper composition used since 1982 — the effect is dramatic and instantly recognizable. No rim. Blown-out devices. Once you’ve handled one, you’ll spot another across a crowded bourse floor.

The problem? Two weeks after payment, the USPS tracking still read:

USPS Awaiting Item — Shipping Label Created — IRVINE, CA 92614

In plain English, that status means the shipping label was printed, but the Postal Service never physically scanned the package into its system. The buyer emailed the auction house twice. Called once. Heard nothing. Frustrated, he posted his experience publicly — and what happened next taught me more about modern numismatic commerce than a dozen seminars ever could.

Why This Story Matters to Every Seller

You might file this under customer service anecdote. It isn’t. It’s a window into the fundamental differences between venues: how quickly disputes get resolved, how reputation actually functions, what recourse buyers and sellers truly have, and where the real costs hide. Whether you’re listing a key-date Mercury Dime, a rare variety, or a complete type set headed for a bourse floor, these dynamics determine your net profit far more than the hammer price does.

Understanding the True Cost of eBay: Fees That Quietly Eat Your Margin

I’ve listed thousands of coins on eBay over my career, and I’ll tell you the platform’s biggest hidden cost isn’t any single fee. It’s the compounding stack of them. Before you celebrate a strong sale price, run the actual math:

• Final value fees: Typically north of 13% all-in for most coin listings once the marketplace fee and payment processing combine. On a $500 coin, that’s $65 gone before you print a label.
• Promoted Listing ad rates: Want visibility in today’s crowded search results? Expect to voluntarily tack on another 2–4% (or more) to your fee load.
• Returns exposure: Depending on your return policy, a buyer can send a coin back for almost any reason — and you eat shipping both directions.
• Labor costs: Photography, attribution research, answering “what’s your best price?” messages at midnight, packing. This is unpaid work unless you price it in.
• Store subscriptions: Serious sellers often pay monthly fees for better insertion rates — fixed overhead whether or not anything sells.

None of this makes eBay a bad venue. Far from it. The audience is global, the traffic is unmatched, and material with crossover collectibility — especially coins with original surfaces approaching true mint condition — can achieve spectacular prices. But I always tell new sellers the same thing: a 13–17% total fee load means your “great price” is really a mediocre net. Compare that to a dedicated auction platform where the economics are built differently, and the gap becomes obvious fast.

The Auction House Alternative: GreatCollections and the Fee Revolution

Our case-study coin was purchased through GreatCollections, the Irvine, California-based weekly auction platform collectors have embraced precisely because it flipped the traditional auction model on its head. Buyers pay no premium at all. Sellers pay a flat consignment commission — roughly 10%, with a small minimum. Stack that against the 20–25% buyer’s premiums at the big-name legacy houses, and suddenly a $60 error coin doesn’t carry a $75 effective price tag.

In my experience, that fee structure creates something invaluable: liquidity in the mid-range market. Certified material between roughly $50 and $1,000 — exactly the zone where that PCGS MS-63 RD broadstruck cent lives — moves efficiently week after week. Sellers know their true cost upfront. Buyers bid with confidence. And the Sunday auction cadence means capital turns fast.

The Downside of Auction Consignment

Honesty requires me to note the trade-offs. Consignment means waiting for your item’s scheduled sale. It means accepting whatever the room decides your coin is worth that day. And — as our case study painfully demonstrates — it means trusting the mail system to finish the job. A coin show puts cash in your hand in ninety seconds. An auction puts it there ten-plus business days after the hammer falls. If everything goes right. Which brings us to the heart of the story.

When Packages Vanish: The “USPS Awaiting Item” Nightmare

Here’s a technical reality most collectors learn the hard way: “USPS Awaiting Item” almost always means the package was never scanned at acceptance. Sometimes it means a label was printed and the box sat on a shelf. But often — and this is critical — it means the sender dropped the package in bulk with dozens of others, and the postal facility simply never scanned it. Your coin can be riding trucks across the country completely invisible to tracking until it suddenly appears, delivered, on your doorstep.

One experienced dealer in the discussion described this exact scenario, and his response has become personal gospel for me:

“Both of the lost packages I’ve had to eat over the years were due to USPS never scanning the item at the initial sending location. Now I stand in line so I can watch the person behind the counter scan my shipments. They’ll encourage me to use the unattended drop-off bin, and I always politely decline. Burn me once…”

I do the same thing. Every single shipment leaving my office gets handed to a human being who scans it while I watch. Yes, it costs me fifteen minutes in line. But an unscanned package is an uninsured package in practice — many insurance claims fail precisely because there’s no origin scan proving the carrier ever took custody.

What Should You Do When a Shipment Goes Silent?

After hundreds of transactions, here’s the protocol I follow without exception:

1. Wait a reasonable window. Two weeks feels eternal when it’s your money — especially on a fixed budget — but seasoned collectors correctly noted that packages surface from “USPS limbo” constantly, sometimes two months later.
2. Contact the seller in writing, ideally replying to your original invoice email so there’s a paper trail.
3. Never open a credit card chargeback first. This deserves its own section below.
4. Know the house policy. Most reputable dealers and auction houses operate on a 30-day lost-package threshold, after which a signed declaration triggers a refund.
5. If the coin arrives late, honor the reversal. More on that beautiful moment shortly.

Online Reputation: The Currency You Cannot Re-Mint

When the frustrated buyer asked whether he should dispute the charge with his bank, the community’s response was swift and unanimous: don’t. One veteran collector with roughly fifty purchases from the same platform put it plainly — a chargeback might make you whole today, but it would poison the relationship permanently and could flag your accounts across multiple marketplaces.

This is a lesson I wish every new seller understood before their first listing. Online reputation in numismatics operates like a grading service for people. Your feedback score, your dispute history, your responsiveness — buyers and fellow dealers check all of it. I’ve seen sellers with gorgeous inventory fail purely because their feedback profile showed a pattern of slow communication. Conversely, I’ve watched dealers command premium prices because collectors trusted them implicitly, pedigree and provenance intact.

And here’s where the story redeems itself beautifully. After two weeks of silence, the owner of the auction company himself — reachable even while attending a major show in Pittsburgh — stepped in personally, apologized, confirmed that every shipment is fully insured, and invited direct contact via email. Within days, the situation was moving toward resolution. That, friends, is what online reputation looks like when it’s built right: ownership that answers, even mid-show, for a $60 package.

The Twist Ending Every Collector Should Hear

Another collector shared an almost identical saga. His package stalled in Seattle for a month. He signed the lost-package form, received a prompt refund — and then the original package arrived intact days later. His response? He immediately contacted the auction house and arranged to repay the refund. Both parties came out clean. Trust survived. That transaction cost everyone nothing except patience, and it’s exactly this culture of mutual good faith that separates professional numismatic venues from the wilder corners of e-commerce.

Coin Show Etiquette: The Unwritten Rules of the Bourse Floor

Now let’s cross over to the traditional side of the ledger. Coin shows remain the beating heart of this hobby. I attend them religiously — to buy inventory, yes, but also to feel the pulse of the market and examine coins whose patina no photograph can capture. If you’re accustomed to clicking “Buy It Now,” though, understand that the bourse floor operates under rules nobody prints anywhere.

• Don’t shop a dealer’s offer around the same show. If a dealer writes you a ticket on your coin, parading that offer past the next table for bargaining power is deeply bad form. Accept it, decline it, or come back tomorrow — but play it straight.
• Ask before touching. Never reach over the glass. Wait for the dealer to place the coin in your hand or invite you to handle it.
• Respect the current customer. Hovering and interrupting a live negotiation marks you as an amateur instantly.
• Expect wholesale, not retail. Dealers quoting buy prices are making offers they must profit from — often 80–95% of Grey Sheet bid for liquid material, considerably less for esoteric items like minor mint errors.
• Sunday afternoon is lowball hour. Dealers facing pack-up pressure will negotiate hard, but so should you — their opening offers
  

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