Stamp Dealers

Stamp dealers are point persons whom you can ask questions about stamps including the price of a certain stamp and even the valuation of your collection. However, the price varies when it comes to commemorative stamps and several can be very expensive especially the rare ones.

Dealers of stamps generally have a large line of used and un-used stamps for sale to stamp collectors. Most of them have a system of sending stamps to customers on approval basis. If and when a customer acquires stamps on approval basis from a dealer, he has the option of either returning or retaining the entire lot or the part of the lot that is of interest to him and returns the rest back to the dealer. Payments are made only for stamps that the customer has desired to retain with him.

Dealers requisitely will have to specialize in some part of the hobby because the scope of stamp collecting is very big. Most of the time, a dealer will be stocking the stamps of his country. Likewise, the collector might keep some stock of stamps of neighboring countries. He might as well specialize in stocking stamps of specific topics such as stamps having the images of national flags, animals, birds, etc.

To motivate collectors in buying stamps of their country, dealers stock up stamps of their country in year packets. Each packet contains all the stamps issued by that country in that year. For a serious collector who wishes to have a set of stamps of his country is the easiest method. Obviously, there are limits to this. Stamps from earlier years that are not easy to obtain will either not be available in a packet or perhaps quite expensive.

Year sets are mostly available in both mint unused condition and in used postmarked condition. The packet containing used stamps will most often be priced less than the unused mint stamp packets though some of the larger premium dealers would price both packets with no difference or with a fractional difference.

Used stamps that pertain to earlier years and those that are difficult to come by are priced higher compared to the mint stamps or in some cases, priced more than the mint stamps.

Stamp packets are the easiest and cheapest means for someone to start this hobby in stamps. Dealers usually pack used stamps into packets of 50, 100, and 200 each or more. In turn, these are categorized into countries and topics while most stamp dealers cater to clients in their locale or town. The larger dealers necessarily have to extend their sales reach outside their region. Some of the larger dealers come out with a printed catalogue of stamps of their stock and these will the be mailed free of cost to customers or would be customers on a regular basis.