How Do You Become A Stamp Dealer
Stamp Dealers seem to be mystic beings who know everything about all the stamps and somehow come to the profession by being handed down a collection or having the baton of the dealership handed down. But what if you want to become a stamp dealer without any family help? How do you get into the profession and what do you need to know to become a successful stamp dealer? Let’s take a look.
What Do I Need to Know About Stamps
Like every profession, there are sub-sections of people who specialise in a particular area. I have decided to focus on Australian stamps for example, but there are as many specialties as there are stamps. When becoming a Stamp Dealer there are certain levels you can focus on when you begin, and then if you choose to, you can specialise in particular stamps and trade in higher value stamps.
At the higher level, you can trade in stamp albums, filled with a myriad of stamps, or someone else’s collection, and sell those as is. You can break up collections and put them up for auction on sites like ebay or delcampe. If there is something valuable within a collection, the collectors will spot it and the auction will take off by itself, you don’t actually need to know too much about it to begin with. As you auction off lots, you will begin to spot trends and what is selling for higher values than others.
Once you begin at this level, you will come across most of the stamps of the world. From there, you can break them down into themes – which is a simple way to begin. For example, put them in groups of birds, transport, trains, countries, dead countries (countries that produced stamps but don’t exist anymore or have changed their name – Holland for example).
As you become familiar with stamps, you can begin to break those lots down even further to auction or sell individual stamps. How much do you need to know about individual stamps?
How Do I Learn To Specialise
Specialising can depend on a few things:-
- the value of the stamps
- the demand for the stamps
- the demand for the stamps
- the demand for the stamps
- the collectability of the stamps
- your own enjoyment of the stamp
- how variable the stamp is
- the availability of the stamp
- information available to learn about the stamp
Determining these elements depends on your time and passion for learning and what you actually want to achieve by becoming a stamp dealer. Do you want to build a reputation in a certain area, or do you want to just stay at high level selling?
There’s so much to stamps and the more you investigate it, the more you find and this is what deters many people from entering the world of stamps but which is also a huge opportunity to build a business and make a very good living. Will you become a millionaire? Absolutely it’s possible but you need to do the work. This is not a get rich quick area at all, but that does not mean you cannot make a five or six figure annual business. It’s up to you.
Where Can I Get Stock to Begin?
Getting stock is both easy and difficult at the same time and you will make many, many mistakes when you begin and that is OK – if you can afford to. It is also the way to learn and any purchasing mistakes I have made so far, I put down to the cost of entry into the business. What I have also found is even though something looks like a mistake, you can re-package it to make it sellable. For example, I bought some decimal (more modern) Australian stamps from the 70’s and 80’s. These don’t have any catalogue value in terms of reselling them individually. But, there are many uses for them. People use them for art projects or as additions to their themed collections (birds are huge). So I ended up packaging them into smaller lots of themes, colours, years etc and they sold – not for a huge amount – but over time with many small sales it got me my money back and more and I learned how to sell stamps in a completely different way. This is where the opportunity is. There are as many ways to sell and deal in stamps as there are stamps and very many opportunities to corner a market.
The thing is – to begin. Buy a stamp album in an auction and look through it. Some go very cheaply and some are more expensive – the market will tell you what is in the album. If an album or a group of albums has reached $100 or more – it has something valuable – or resellable – in it and you will be competing with another dealer for it. You should not get these at the start of learning. Where are these albums? Ebay is a great place for cheap albums and collections to start with. Join a local stamp club and go to their auctions. There you get to actually look at the albums before purchase and you can really see what, if any, value there is for reselling and dealing purposes.
Is The Stamp Community Hard to Get Into
In my experience, I have been welcomed at every club, society and website out there. Stamp collectors are very generous with their knowledge and could talk all day about their chosen field or point you in the direction of someone who knows about the area you wish to learn about. It is a rich tapestry of people from all over the world who are more than willing to share knowledge if you are interested.
The difficult thing is determining what it is you want to know. Once you know or have decided that, you will be greeted with a fire hose of information from all sources.
What I have found though, is that dealers themselves, play their cards pretty close to their chest. Why would that be? Because they are making a LOT of money and don’t want competition. I have completely the oppositve view. I feel there is enormous potential for more dealers to enter the market and revive the industry and carry the torch, capturing and sharing the information about stamps, before some of it is lost.
If you come up against a dealer in an auction – forget about it – unless you have very deep pockets. They know – for sure – what they will be able to make from a piece at auction and they have the cashflow to beat a collector any day of the week.
How Can You Start
First, find out if you like stamps – at all. You don’t have to love love them to be able to sell them, but an appreciation of what makes them special to your customers is highly recommended. It will also help you make more money in the long run.
If you find you like them, and you particularly like one over all or a section over all, then specialise in that interest. Learn everything you can. The more you know, the higher you can value a stamp. An example being, I love the King George V Australian stamps – all of them – but I’m trying to specialise in the 1d and 2d so I can plate them. Why? Because the stamp can be valued at either $5.00 or $100.00 if you can identify the flaws, or the plate position. This is what I mean when I say the more you know in stamps, as with anything really, the more you can potentially earn.
Decide if you want to be a specialist or a generalist – just like a doctor – and then go from there. Pick up some albums and start to resell them, repackage them or learn about them.
Like any career, it will take time to develop and learn the industry but I believe that the stamp collecting and philately industry, has huge potential for small operators to make large impacts and make real money. The only thing stopping you from pursuing it is your ability and motivation to do so.
If you want to learn some more about becoming a stamp dealer or a stamp reseller I have written a more indepth guide about how to start learning about and selling stamps. You can get it here.
