Are Photos Enough?

EBay has a policy that allows sellers to list stamps for sale without posting a textual description of the stamps that are being sold. This is apparently a rephrasing of the dictum that “a picture is worth a thousand words” to “a picture is better than words”. This might work for showing pictures of your new grandchild, but it really doesn’t work for philately. When a seller is offering a collection or a group of stamps, it is possible that a scan or a series of scans might do justice in giving buyers a fair idea what is in the lot that is being offered. This is because for larger lots and collections quality doesn’t play as critical a role as it does in the value of individual stamps. Usually with collections of thousands of stamps the quality of the whole reverts to the average with some perfect stamps and some defective stamps, but the average quality of any two collections is much more alike than the quality of any two individual stamps. But allowing individual stamps to be sold without textual descriptions or warranties is allowing your buyers to be bilked. Many experts believe they can tell most of the salient quality details about a stamp from a scan. Certainly you can tell if it’s genuine. But most collectors couldn’t tell if a stamp was repaired or regummmed from a scan and selling a stamp without text is selling it “as is” which is selling it without a warranty of any type. But the problem isn’t that mainstream collectors would be fooled. People who know about repairs and quality issues will view stamps sold without text for what they are-a pig in a poke. It is the very people who most need protection-novices and price buyers-who will be bilked into believing they are buying quality that they are not. If a seller doesn’t have the skill to describe his wares and the ethics and capital to guarantee his description, he should not be selling stamps. Certainly EBay should require at least that of the people who sell on its site.