Auction sale for philatelic material began to be the predominant way that philatelic material was sold in the 1870s. Pioneered (as so many other things were) by the first great American stamps dealer J. Walter Scott, the reasons for auction sales seemed at the time related to issues of lack of liquidity among stamp dealers and to the difficulty of pricing various grades of quality in an essentially non fungible product that is fine postage stamps. That is what the stamp dealers thought was the reason that they were selling their better stamps at Public Auction. History has proven that the real reason was something else.
eBay started as a purely auction format. As that selling platform has evolved, there are today far more stamps for sale in sellers eBay stores than there are in their auctions. Our Buy it Now sales, which are an on line store based format where collectors can purchase stamps directly and not bid on them through auction, has just recently surpassed our auctions as the larger part of our business. It seems that the real reason that auctions were the predominant sales medium for stamps in the pre-internet era was because of lack of visibility. Auction sale meant that a large number of better stamps and collections were going to be sold at a certain time, so well heeled collectors and dealers went to view and were there to buy. Absent this group of viewers, the number of buyers who could look at a dealer