Anyone buy/sell coins as a side gig?

[Gone Fishing]

I knew a guy when I was growing up that had a small coin shop.  He basically bought somewhere around 50-70% of wholesale from people looking to liquidate, then turned around and resold almost immediately on the wholesale market, only keeping enough to stock his shop.  He said the majority of his income came from the buying/selling wholesale side, and only a small percentage from the retail side.  Sounded like a pretty good gig, he was robbed several times though...

Has anyone reduced this down to an internet business?  Doesn't seem like it would be too hard to do. How do you make it work?

[2Birds1Stone]

Its a tough gig, there are lots of fakes out these days thanks to our friends in Asia.

Lots of laws regarding buying coins from the public and having to hold them in case they are stolen.

That being said, it can be lucrative if you have a good understanding of numismatics, can spot fakes, and have somewhere safe to run the business out of.

[jmusic]

Lots of laws regarding buying coins from the public and having to hold them in case they are stolen.

That's kinda funny.  Do I have to hold dollars that I receive from someone because he may have stolen them?

[Syonyk]

I've sold some rare-ish silver rounds on eBay for a tidy profit, but I was purchasing them with mined bitcoin, so... probably not scaleable. :)

[anon-e-mouse]

Yeah, I know it's Fox News so take it for what it is but there's a lot of fakes on damn near anything with value.
http://www.myfoxny.com/story/19578206/fake-gold-bars-turn-up-in-manhattan

Like anything, become an expert at it before diving in too deep.

[Pooperman]

I've got a couple of pounds of silver coin proofs (like a 50 state quarters set). I'm more into collecting mutual fund shares now, but coins were fun as a kid.

[Grateful Stache]

Not sure about the retail side, but you have to pay capital gains on private sales of coins; they are considered a "collectable."

[Frankies Girl]

I have a pretty decent collection, but haven't looked into selling just yet (interested, just back-burnered until I get other things figured out). Lots of U.S. pre-1970 to 1800s silver. I still like looking at the old coins and such just because they're so pretty and will keep a core number of coins for my small collection, but I have a ton of duplicates, and mostly am holding them just for the slightly-more-liquid-than-general-property aspects.

[Bobberth]

I didn't do coins, but I made about $25k in profits from buying and selling the 3 3/4" GI Joes from the 80s-90s on ebay and my own website over several years.  I would buy large collections for a couple hundred $$ each and sell everything off individually.  It helped that I caught a huge rise in popularity as those of us that played with these as a kid were getting to their disposable income period of life and buying their old toys back.  I think the popularity has died down some now but I've lost interest in following it.  I still probably have a good $3k-$5k of Joes left that I need to sell but the time to do it is more valuable to me right now than the cash.

I know people will buy sets of baseball cards and then sell each one off individually and make some good money.  If you have the expertise and the time, it's a great thing to do especially if it's your hobby.  When I was selling Joes, I would buy, keep what I wanted for my collection, then sell the rest off.  I was up $5k-$10k doing that and when I sold off a good chunk of my own collection, I was able to buy a car with my profits.  No reason this can't be done with coins.  Although the market for coins is much larger than GI Joes so finding good collections to buy will be harder than it was for me.

[J Boogie]

I spent a few years working for a ebay powerseller coin dealer.

It was a small suburban office space, very cramped and full of safes which various employees knew various combos of.  Pretty secure building and safes are not easy to move but he was always cautious of getting robbed.

I helped him source an extruder of plastic cases and foam inserts (you can't just put a bunch of coins in a cardboard box!) to display/package them.

One thing he told me is that a good coin dealer is always fully extended or looking to fully extend and then sell off.

I guess that's probably because without transactions there's no money to be made, and then you're just a dusty old coin collector.

He also had phony little historical sets with stickered cigar boxes, mason jars, pennies from every year along with a significant event.  I think he did a lot of this stuff to keep employees busy, he had about 10 of us at one point.  He also got into gemstones, buying huge bucketfulls of raw ones from brazil and stuff.

If you love coins and have lots of liquidity go for it, just get ready to rub elbows with some weirdos.