Search for where to sell old stamps and you will notice something about the results: almost every page is written by someone who wants to buy them. Dealers rank their own “sell to us” pages, buying services publish guides that end at their contact form, and nobody spells out what you would actually keep after fees in each channel. This page has no buying desk. Here is the neutral version.
The best place to sell old stamps depends on what they are worth. Sell a genuinely valuable collection, typically strong pre-1930 material, through a specialist auction house; sell mid-value stamps yourself on eBay to keep the most money; and sell common accumulations to a dealer for a fast, modest cash offer. Identify what you have before showing it to any buyer.
Before anything: know what you are selling
Every selling channel prices your collection better informed than you are, unless you fix that first. So the first step is not choosing a buyer; it is identification. Photograph the albums, identify the stamps, and shortlist the items that might carry real value. Our inherited collection guide walks through that free triage, and what is my stamp worth covers the checks for any single stamp.
Two honest baselines to carry into every negotiation. First, most old stamps are common, and common stamps sell for very little; the arithmetic is in why most stamps aren’t worth much. Second, catalogue prices are ceilings. The American Philatelic Society’s estate guide tells sellers plainly that catalogue value is almost never what a collection fetches, and Warwick & Warwick’s appraisal guide notes that even dealers discount heavily from the prices they display. Real value, where it exists, concentrates in scarcer material, which in practice usually means pre-1930 issues in sound condition, covers, and better mint stamps.
The three real channels
Selling to a dealer: fastest, lowest return
A dealer looks through the collection, makes one offer, and pays immediately. That convenience is real, and so is its price: the offer must leave room for the dealer’s margin, the risk of holding stock, and the labour of breaking the collection down. For common accumulations this is often the only realistic channel, because no auction house wants them and listing them singly is not worth your evenings.
Getting a fair dealer price is mostly about preparation: know what your best items are before the visit, get more than one offer for anything substantial, and prefer members of a recognised body with a code of ethics (in the United States the APS, ASDA or NSDA, per the APS’s own estate guidance; the PTS in Britain), which gives you recourse.
Consigning to an auction house: best prices for genuinely good material, slowly
For collections with real strength, specialist philatelic auctions find the buyers who pay the most, because the room is full of people who know exactly what a good lot is worth. The trade-offs are fees and time. You will typically pay the house a seller’s commission, buyers pay a premium on top of the hammer price which shapes their bidding, and the cycle from consignment to catalogue to sale to settlement is commonly measured in months. Ask any house for its rate card and terms in writing before consigning, and ask what they would decline to sell; a good auctioneer will tell you frankly which parts of the collection belong in a different channel.
The threshold question is whether your material justifies the machinery. Auction houses exist for the collection with scarce classics, fine covers, or specialist strength, not for albums of common used stamps.
Selling yourself on eBay: best net for mid-value stamps, paid in your time
For individual stamps and small lots worth real but not spectacular money, selling directly captures the margin every middleman would otherwise take. eBay’s published fee schedule puts final value fees for most categories in the low teens percentagewise, plus a small per-order fee, which is far less than the spread between a dealer’s buy and sell prices. The catch is that you do the dealer’s work: photographing accurately, describing honestly (condition faults included, or returns will find you), pricing against sold listings, and shipping securely.
The self-sell channel rewards exactly one thing: knowing what you have. A correctly identified stamp with sharp photos and its catalogue number in the title reaches collectors searching for it. An “old stamp, rare?” listing reaches bargain hunters.
Which channel for which collection?
| Your situation | Best channel | What to expect |
|---|---|---|
| Common accumulation, no standout items | Dealer, sold as one lot | A fast, modest offer; a fraction of catalogue value |
| A few identified stamps of real value | eBay for those; dealer for the rest | The most net money, paid in your evenings |
| Strong pre-1930 collection, covers, rarities | Specialist auction consignment | Strongest prices, minus commission, after months |
| Formal valuation needed first (estate, insurance) | Paid appraisal, then choose a channel | A written figure worth the fee |
Red flags, whoever you sell to
- Unsolicited buyers. Anyone who approaches you after a bereavement notice or a casual mention online should be treated with extreme caution.
- Buying by weight. “We buy stamps by the pound” is a legitimate trade in packet material, and the wrong first stop for an unexamined collection.
- The appraiser who also wants to buy. A genuine conflict of interest; the APS advises keeping valuation and purchase separate.
- Same-day pressure. Stamps have waited decades in the album. Any offer that expires tonight is priced for your urgency, not your material.
- Letting the collection be examined before you have. Never hand over albums for “sorting” by a buyer until you have photographed and shortlisted them yourself.
The order of operations
Identify first, choose the channel second, negotiate third. An hour of photographing and identification, which Stampo compresses into pointing your camera at each stamp, tells you which of the three tables above you are actually sitting at. Sellers get burned in this hobby for one reason above all: the buyer knew which stamps mattered, and the seller did not.