Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
Would it be really to hard having a search facility that I can input my needed catalogue numbers and country and have a return of the sellers with the most items from my list in order.
Guess I am expecting to much as usual, beats me how anyone selling stamps there is actually making sales when cost of postage for a single stamp is 10 or more times the stamp price.
Ok moan of the day is over, will post a list of wants on Stamporama later.
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Hey Vic.
Since you are a leading contributor to The Holocaust Stamps Project, I will sell you any stamps you need at highly inflated prices so that the postage costs are less significant going forward.
Hope that will cheer you up my friend!
David.
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David, I really appreciate your input and as a reward I'm going to send you another box of stamps to count, probably next week, now that the Christmas rush has settled a little.
I don't mind paying a higher price, and most were common stamps at in excess of minimum catalogue price, just a pain to find them from maybe one or two sellers.
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I hear you! I’m trying to fill various gaps in multiple albums - eg just 2 more need to complete Bohemia & Moravia. Also not much above Min CV but the postage is killer. Found one on eBay $1.25 bid with $5.95 postage. And of course when we have to also convert to US$ it is agonizing!
David
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" And of course when we have to also convert to US$ it is agonizing!"
Jings!....Crivvens!....Help Ma Boab!
My heart bleeds for you
In the last week the exchange rate for me has gone up 4 cents!
In the past few weeks it has gone up 8 cents. Which means those in the USA are 8 cents better off!!
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If Vic and I had your lucrative investment portfolio, and juicy UK pension, we wouldn't complain Ian.
Plus, access to the barrels of good single malt Scotch you presumably also have hidden in your basement. 
But we're just poor wee colonials here...
David.
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First time I came across HipStamps in December 2019, I was able to actually purchase quite a few stamps. Higher prices than what we are used to at Stamporama, but still I was able to find a few sellers with reasonable shipping costs and stamp prices.
After that Christmas shopping in 2019, I wasn't able to buy anything else.
Leads me to think HipStamps is degrading over time.
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Hipstamp does need a better search capability.
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"But we're just poor wee colonials here..."
Yup!
Glad you remember it!
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As does Hipstamp. Just put in country and number in the search box at the top of most pages. You don't need to type "Scott"; the system assumes that.
Then with the returned results, just click to filter for the condition and any other criteria.
You can also sort any store's listings by country and catalog number. I really appreciate that over eBay.
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If you find a stamp you want on these other sites can you go to that seller only and do a search of just their stuff so you don’t have to manually scroll through?
Can’t figure out how to do that on eBay.
It would certainly help to pick up more stamps and combine shipping costs.
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I think that's possible for both Hipstamp & eBay.
For Hipstamp, on any individual stamp listing, I think there'll be some other stamps listed below that say "more from {store name}", where the store name is hot-linked.
Failing that, you can click on the tap for "seller" on that individual listing, and that'll give you info about how long the seller has been on there, their feedback rating, and the link to their store. (You can also click on the "shipping" tab and it'll tell you which country the seller is located in, and if you put in a quantity (I always use "1", it'll give you the shipping details, including whether or not there are any "additional item" charges. The seller usually has a shipping statement which will also appear there.)
For eBay, from an individual listing, seller info is on the far right of the page, and there are 2 hot links, one that says "visit store", and the other that says "see other items". I think the "visit store" link gives you only the fixed-price listings for a seller that has a store, while the "see other items" link will give you everything on offer (fixed price and auction) for that seller, whether they have a store or not.
I appreciate that, especially with eBay, this could look different, depending on what kind of device you're on, and, with eBay, what country you're in.
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Thanks for all the comments. I have tried inputting a specific catalogue number and yes it works but I cannot put in a list of numbers and get a return of all the sellers in order of volume from the list.
I have found that I can look at a sellers other items but they then do not come up in number order, so I still have to scroll through or click on loads of filters.
As far as I recall the sellers ID is not shown on the scan page and their location does not show up either.
"Can’t figure out how to do that on eBay"
Dave , just click on "see sellers other items".
"If Vic and I had your lucrative investment portfolio, and juicy UK pension"
Dave, I have the UK pension but being in Canada it will never change from the sum it was when first paid (quite a few years ago now) but if I move 100 miles south and live in the States it will automatically increase each year.
What helps is that I still have a UK bank account where a couple of pensions get paid into, so I can choose when to bring the funds over. It also helps to pay my UK Mastercard bills
for European purchases, avoiding the PayPal fees.
Can't do anything about the whisky though!!!!!!
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Ok, I'll see if I can try and unpack this a little bit.
"{...} I cannot put in a list of numbers and get a return of all the sellers in order of volume from the list."
I just tried this myself, and you can do a search of either contiguous or non-contiguous numbers. I knew about the contiguous, but didn't know about the non-contiguous.
I don't know that you can mix countries, but I did a top-level search with the term "Japan 32, 411, 1087" and it gave me 62 listings.
On the right-hand side of the screen, there's a "sort by" pull-down tab (it's in gray, so that's not great -- easy to overlook), then you can select the order by country and catalog number, price from low to high, price from high to low, newest listed, etc.
Let me also mention that there are a couple of little buttons to the left of the "sort by" button that lets you present the results as a list or as a grid.
For this search I cited, it gave me a few discards, where a seller had put their internal reference number at the start of the title, and it was unfortunately picked up as a catalog number. But almost everything came out correctly sorted. It'll also pull up a listing of a set of stamps, where the number you queried is part of the set.
"{...} in order of volume from the list"
I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. Sorted by the sellers who have the most listings for your query? I'm not sure that is possible.
"I have found that I can look at a sellers other items but they then do not come up in number order, so I still have to scroll through or click on loads of filters."
As I mentioned, there is a "sort by" pull-down tab, but, being in gray, I think it's easy to overlook.
"As far as I recall the sellers ID is not shown on the scan page and their location does not show up either."
That's true about the sellers' ID not showing up. I know that sellers have asked for that as an enhancement, but it hasn't happened yet and I'm not sure it's going to.
However, you can just hover your cursor over any listing and the seller's name pops up in a couple of seconds. Not great, but it's something.
About the seller's location, it's supposed to only give you listings if you're in a country that the seller ships to. But, say, in your case, there's also a field on the left-hand side of the screen that says "Seller Item/Location". You could select 'Canada', and you should see only sellers with listings who are located in Canada.
On a slightly different angle, there is also the capability to create a wantlist for the stamps you're looking for. I personally haven't used it, but I know other folks do.
I hope that's a bit helpful.
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It would have been a lot easier if I had bothered to look for this first - lol:
https://help.hipecommerce.com/support/solutions/articles/14000112220-searching-on-hipstamp
and
https://help.hipecommerce.com/support/solutions/articles/14000111299-how-do-i-browse-and-search-within-a-specific-store-
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Hi Dave, when I said by volume from list I meant the greatest number from one seller out of my list. So that whoever has the largest number of stamps I want are listed first and down to the seller with the least.
I have used the drop down filters but would appreciate being able to do that before the search.
I will see how I get on with inputting a list of numbers and see what happens.
Thanks for the help.
Edit, ok tried the list input, but not any better. Found I had to put the word "used" in the search bar otherwise there is not an option to filter the search thuswise afterwards.
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"Found I had to put the word "used" in the search bar otherwise there is not an option to filter the search thuswise afterwards."
There is an option, but I wish it were more apparent.
In your search results, on the left-hand side, you should see "Categories", with probably a region (like "Asia", just as a for instance), and possibly something else (in my search, it says "Topicals").
You'll see right below that it says "Select a category for more filters". So you need to click on one of those. (Again, in my case, that'd be "Asia".)
Once you do that, it'll produce more detailed results on that left-hand side. Under "condition", it should show you, perhaps 'mint (NH)', 'unused', and 'used'.
There are other filters below that, but they may or not apply to your search results.
Give that a try and see if it gets you closer to items you're actually looking for. (Looking for a 'fingers crossed' emoji here - lol!)
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Thanks Dave, here is a screen shot of the search.
Not exactly encouraging, but at least it works.
Makes me appreciate the approvals system here on Stamporama, which I always go to first.
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Thanks for posting that screenshot, Vic.
I'll try to play with that tomorrow and see if there are more of those items out there.
To be honest, I'm surprised that there are so few, just given my experience in searching on there. I'll take a look.
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Hipstamp is the perfect example of "crap in = crap out". There's no regulation about the data you should include when listing, which makes searching difficult.
- Scott numbers mean nothing to sellers outside North America, so you may need to check the SG numbers for the stamps on your want list
- searching by year is often more productive, as many sellers can't be bothered providing any catalogue number at all
- many sellers will list as "old stamp, good condition" and think that's adequate. You'll probably never see that listing in any search
Luckily, I enjoy browsing!!
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Victor,
I will be getting these definitives as part of a French lot. If anything you see fills a gap, let me know.
In addition, if you have the StampWorld catalog numbers, I may look through what I already have which is mostly in glassine envelopes by year. I don't have Scott unfortunately.
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Vic --
Last night I had a chance to work on this a little bit. At first, it occurred to me that the small number of listings was because you're in Canada, and I know there are a number of US-based sellers who no longer ship outside of the US. But in switching the "ships to" field to US, it only increased the number of used listings from 2 to 3.
I then ran a search on each individual stamp or set, and got back individually the same listings as you got with the long search string. So that's not it either.
It turns out that there are simply very few used listings for those particular stamps on there. If you were looking for mint never hinged, there are 46 listings that ship to Canada (which I know is of little consolation if that's not what you're looking for).
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Dave, thank you for trying, glad it is not just me. Used seems to be a problem with the modern French stamps, masses of mint all over the web but very scarce used.
I was also looking for the musical instrument and Zodiac series but same story. They must be out there somewhere but well hidden, sort of makes a mockery of the catalogue value.
Que será, será as they say over the channel.
They will turn up eventually I hope.
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Happy to try to help, Vic! Hopefully you'll be able to take Jules up on his offer, too.
For anything like that that doesn't come up for sale very often, that's probably a good use of the wantlist capability. (Again, I haven't personally used it yet, but that's because I'm not an active, focused buyer at the moment. (If I buy, it's often collections these days. And I've got a backlog of those to work on -- I should be good for 2 or 3 pandemics - lol!))
Here is the explanation of how it works:
https://www.hipstamp.com/my/
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Re Sheepshanks' 2nd post above this one, I did the same search and came up with 53 results.
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Using the # symbol helps, although it's meant to reduce the number of results, filtering out listings where your search number shows up as a year, a private inventory number, or similar spurious result. Also you can search over a range of uo to 50 catalogue number numbers, e.g. France #1501-1550, again using the #, so the system knows to look only at the "Catalogue Number" field.
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Ted, thanks for that but many if your results are mint rather than used as I wanted.
However thanks to some of our members I now have number of the ones I wanted (rather buy them here anyway), hopefully the others will ultimately be found.
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Ahh, sorry, I overlooked that. Yeah, when I click on the "Used" filter, the results are reduced to 3.
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"I was also looking for the musical instrument and Zodiac series"
These series are pre-cancelled. In the French catalog, they merit their own listing designation. Not in Scott.
In all these sorts, there is no capability to search just for the full range ie say #100 to 110, and not any number between 100 and 110, when you put in #100-110.
rrr...
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Approvals
Just been going through listings on Hipstamp and gave up as it means having to click through too many screens to find a seller, who has one item that I want does not have any others.
Would it be really to hard having a search facility that I can input my needed catalogue numbers and country and have a return of the sellers with the most items from my list in order.
Guess I am expecting to much as usual, beats me how anyone selling stamps there is actually making sales when cost of postage for a single stamp is 10 or more times the stamp price.
Ok moan of the day is over, will post a list of wants on Stamporama later.
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02:00:46pm
re: Rant
Hey Vic.
Since you are a leading contributor to The Holocaust Stamps Project, I will sell you any stamps you need at highly inflated prices so that the postage costs are less significant going forward.
Hope that will cheer you up my friend!
David.
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Approvals
re: Rant
David, I really appreciate your input and as a reward I'm going to send you another box of stamps to count, probably next week, now that the Christmas rush has settled a little.
I don't mind paying a higher price, and most were common stamps at in excess of minimum catalogue price, just a pain to find them from maybe one or two sellers.
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04:43:00pm
re: Rant
I hear you! I’m trying to fill various gaps in multiple albums - eg just 2 more need to complete Bohemia & Moravia. Also not much above Min CV but the postage is killer. Found one on eBay $1.25 bid with $5.95 postage. And of course when we have to also convert to US$ it is agonizing!
David
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06:39:41pm
Auctions - Approvals
re: Rant
" And of course when we have to also convert to US$ it is agonizing!"
Jings!....Crivvens!....Help Ma Boab!
My heart bleeds for you
In the last week the exchange rate for me has gone up 4 cents!
In the past few weeks it has gone up 8 cents. Which means those in the USA are 8 cents better off!!
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11:25:38pm
re: Rant
If Vic and I had your lucrative investment portfolio, and juicy UK pension, we wouldn't complain Ian.
Plus, access to the barrels of good single malt Scotch you presumably also have hidden in your basement.
But we're just poor wee colonials here...
David.
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re: Rant
First time I came across HipStamps in December 2019, I was able to actually purchase quite a few stamps. Higher prices than what we are used to at Stamporama, but still I was able to find a few sellers with reasonable shipping costs and stamp prices.
After that Christmas shopping in 2019, I wasn't able to buy anything else.
Leads me to think HipStamps is degrading over time.
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re: Rant
Hipstamp does need a better search capability.
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06:04:24am
Auctions - Approvals
re: Rant
"But we're just poor wee colonials here..."
Yup!
Glad you remember it!
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re: Rant
As does Hipstamp. Just put in country and number in the search box at the top of most pages. You don't need to type "Scott"; the system assumes that.
Then with the returned results, just click to filter for the condition and any other criteria.
You can also sort any store's listings by country and catalog number. I really appreciate that over eBay.
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04:22:05pm
re: Rant
If you find a stamp you want on these other sites can you go to that seller only and do a search of just their stuff so you don’t have to manually scroll through?
Can’t figure out how to do that on eBay.
It would certainly help to pick up more stamps and combine shipping costs.
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re: Rant
I think that's possible for both Hipstamp & eBay.
For Hipstamp, on any individual stamp listing, I think there'll be some other stamps listed below that say "more from {store name}", where the store name is hot-linked.
Failing that, you can click on the tap for "seller" on that individual listing, and that'll give you info about how long the seller has been on there, their feedback rating, and the link to their store. (You can also click on the "shipping" tab and it'll tell you which country the seller is located in, and if you put in a quantity (I always use "1", it'll give you the shipping details, including whether or not there are any "additional item" charges. The seller usually has a shipping statement which will also appear there.)
For eBay, from an individual listing, seller info is on the far right of the page, and there are 2 hot links, one that says "visit store", and the other that says "see other items". I think the "visit store" link gives you only the fixed-price listings for a seller that has a store, while the "see other items" link will give you everything on offer (fixed price and auction) for that seller, whether they have a store or not.
I appreciate that, especially with eBay, this could look different, depending on what kind of device you're on, and, with eBay, what country you're in.
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Approvals
re: Rant
Thanks for all the comments. I have tried inputting a specific catalogue number and yes it works but I cannot put in a list of numbers and get a return of all the sellers in order of volume from the list.
I have found that I can look at a sellers other items but they then do not come up in number order, so I still have to scroll through or click on loads of filters.
As far as I recall the sellers ID is not shown on the scan page and their location does not show up either.
"Can’t figure out how to do that on eBay"
Dave , just click on "see sellers other items".
"If Vic and I had your lucrative investment portfolio, and juicy UK pension"
Dave, I have the UK pension but being in Canada it will never change from the sum it was when first paid (quite a few years ago now) but if I move 100 miles south and live in the States it will automatically increase each year.
What helps is that I still have a UK bank account where a couple of pensions get paid into, so I can choose when to bring the funds over. It also helps to pay my UK Mastercard bills
for European purchases, avoiding the PayPal fees.
Can't do anything about the whisky though!!!!!!
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re: Rant
Ok, I'll see if I can try and unpack this a little bit.
"{...} I cannot put in a list of numbers and get a return of all the sellers in order of volume from the list."
I just tried this myself, and you can do a search of either contiguous or non-contiguous numbers. I knew about the contiguous, but didn't know about the non-contiguous.
I don't know that you can mix countries, but I did a top-level search with the term "Japan 32, 411, 1087" and it gave me 62 listings.
On the right-hand side of the screen, there's a "sort by" pull-down tab (it's in gray, so that's not great -- easy to overlook), then you can select the order by country and catalog number, price from low to high, price from high to low, newest listed, etc.
Let me also mention that there are a couple of little buttons to the left of the "sort by" button that lets you present the results as a list or as a grid.
For this search I cited, it gave me a few discards, where a seller had put their internal reference number at the start of the title, and it was unfortunately picked up as a catalog number. But almost everything came out correctly sorted. It'll also pull up a listing of a set of stamps, where the number you queried is part of the set.
"{...} in order of volume from the list"
I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. Sorted by the sellers who have the most listings for your query? I'm not sure that is possible.
"I have found that I can look at a sellers other items but they then do not come up in number order, so I still have to scroll through or click on loads of filters."
As I mentioned, there is a "sort by" pull-down tab, but, being in gray, I think it's easy to overlook.
"As far as I recall the sellers ID is not shown on the scan page and their location does not show up either."
That's true about the sellers' ID not showing up. I know that sellers have asked for that as an enhancement, but it hasn't happened yet and I'm not sure it's going to.
However, you can just hover your cursor over any listing and the seller's name pops up in a couple of seconds. Not great, but it's something.
About the seller's location, it's supposed to only give you listings if you're in a country that the seller ships to. But, say, in your case, there's also a field on the left-hand side of the screen that says "Seller Item/Location". You could select 'Canada', and you should see only sellers with listings who are located in Canada.
On a slightly different angle, there is also the capability to create a wantlist for the stamps you're looking for. I personally haven't used it, but I know other folks do.
I hope that's a bit helpful.
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re: Rant
It would have been a lot easier if I had bothered to look for this first - lol:
https://help.hipecommerce.com/support/solutions/articles/14000112220-searching-on-hipstamp
and
https://help.hipecommerce.com/support/solutions/articles/14000111299-how-do-i-browse-and-search-within-a-specific-store-
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Approvals
re: Rant
Hi Dave, when I said by volume from list I meant the greatest number from one seller out of my list. So that whoever has the largest number of stamps I want are listed first and down to the seller with the least.
I have used the drop down filters but would appreciate being able to do that before the search.
I will see how I get on with inputting a list of numbers and see what happens.
Thanks for the help.
Edit, ok tried the list input, but not any better. Found I had to put the word "used" in the search bar otherwise there is not an option to filter the search thuswise afterwards.
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re: Rant
"Found I had to put the word "used" in the search bar otherwise there is not an option to filter the search thuswise afterwards."
There is an option, but I wish it were more apparent.
In your search results, on the left-hand side, you should see "Categories", with probably a region (like "Asia", just as a for instance), and possibly something else (in my search, it says "Topicals").
You'll see right below that it says "Select a category for more filters". So you need to click on one of those. (Again, in my case, that'd be "Asia".)
Once you do that, it'll produce more detailed results on that left-hand side. Under "condition", it should show you, perhaps 'mint (NH)', 'unused', and 'used'.
There are other filters below that, but they may or not apply to your search results.
Give that a try and see if it gets you closer to items you're actually looking for. (Looking for a 'fingers crossed' emoji here - lol!)
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re: Rant
Thanks Dave, here is a screen shot of the search.
Not exactly encouraging, but at least it works.
Makes me appreciate the approvals system here on Stamporama, which I always go to first.
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re: Rant
Thanks for posting that screenshot, Vic.
I'll try to play with that tomorrow and see if there are more of those items out there.
To be honest, I'm surprised that there are so few, just given my experience in searching on there. I'll take a look.
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re: Rant
Hipstamp is the perfect example of "crap in = crap out". There's no regulation about the data you should include when listing, which makes searching difficult.
- Scott numbers mean nothing to sellers outside North America, so you may need to check the SG numbers for the stamps on your want list
- searching by year is often more productive, as many sellers can't be bothered providing any catalogue number at all
- many sellers will list as "old stamp, good condition" and think that's adequate. You'll probably never see that listing in any search
Luckily, I enjoy browsing!!
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re: Rant
Victor,
I will be getting these definitives as part of a French lot. If anything you see fills a gap, let me know.
In addition, if you have the StampWorld catalog numbers, I may look through what I already have which is mostly in glassine envelopes by year. I don't have Scott unfortunately.
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re: Rant
Vic --
Last night I had a chance to work on this a little bit. At first, it occurred to me that the small number of listings was because you're in Canada, and I know there are a number of US-based sellers who no longer ship outside of the US. But in switching the "ships to" field to US, it only increased the number of used listings from 2 to 3.
I then ran a search on each individual stamp or set, and got back individually the same listings as you got with the long search string. So that's not it either.
It turns out that there are simply very few used listings for those particular stamps on there. If you were looking for mint never hinged, there are 46 listings that ship to Canada (which I know is of little consolation if that's not what you're looking for).
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re: Rant
Dave, thank you for trying, glad it is not just me. Used seems to be a problem with the modern French stamps, masses of mint all over the web but very scarce used.
I was also looking for the musical instrument and Zodiac series but same story. They must be out there somewhere but well hidden, sort of makes a mockery of the catalogue value.
Que será, será as they say over the channel.
They will turn up eventually I hope.
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re: Rant
Happy to try to help, Vic! Hopefully you'll be able to take Jules up on his offer, too.
For anything like that that doesn't come up for sale very often, that's probably a good use of the wantlist capability. (Again, I haven't personally used it yet, but that's because I'm not an active, focused buyer at the moment. (If I buy, it's often collections these days. And I've got a backlog of those to work on -- I should be good for 2 or 3 pandemics - lol!))
Here is the explanation of how it works:
https://www.hipstamp.com/my/
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re: Rant
Re Sheepshanks' 2nd post above this one, I did the same search and came up with 53 results.
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re: Rant
Using the # symbol helps, although it's meant to reduce the number of results, filtering out listings where your search number shows up as a year, a private inventory number, or similar spurious result. Also you can search over a range of uo to 50 catalogue number numbers, e.g. France #1501-1550, again using the #, so the system knows to look only at the "Catalogue Number" field.
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re: Rant
Ted, thanks for that but many if your results are mint rather than used as I wanted.
However thanks to some of our members I now have number of the ones I wanted (rather buy them here anyway), hopefully the others will ultimately be found.
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re: Rant
Ahh, sorry, I overlooked that. Yeah, when I click on the "Used" filter, the results are reduced to 3.
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re: Rant
"I was also looking for the musical instrument and Zodiac series"
These series are pre-cancelled. In the French catalog, they merit their own listing designation. Not in Scott.
In all these sorts, there is no capability to search just for the full range ie say #100 to 110, and not any number between 100 and 110, when you put in #100-110.
rrr...
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