Has the time come for international philately to develop a single system for philatelic identification???

As I last blogged yesterday, I had the brilliant, if slightly mad and masochistic, idea of adopting the Wikipedia World Stamp Catalogue project and using it to become a reference for those collectors who, like me, are often frustrated by the use of many different systems of stamp identification in the philatelic marketplace. One of the great inconveniences that any collector who has involved themselves in the global philatelic marketplace is the reality that stamp identification systems, to this day, remain based upon "national" systems often first developed in the late nineteenth century.

Some of these systems have evolved to cover the entire world, such as Scott in North America, Stanley Gibbons in the UK, Michel in Germany and Yvert et Tellier in France. These four also produce specialized catalogues that go further into depth for their home nations and historic colonial realms) while other systems have been developed as specialized systems for one region of the world (Edifil for Spain, Sassone for the Italian area, JSDA for Japan, Yang and Ma for China, Facit for Sweden, etc etc.)

The amount of information and research in these catalogues is immense, and philately as an organized hobby today is highly dependent upon them as the way to create a common standard of stamp identification between dealers and collectors, and among collectors.

Unfortunately, my idea to use a Wikibook as a reference has hit the commercial reality of the claims to trademark and copyright that national catalogue system publishers maintain. Some of these publishers are very proactive in what they perceive as the defense of their intellectual property, and are more than willing to seek redress through the legal system to protect what they perceive as their vital commercial interests. Not being in the position to want to have to take on any publishing Goliaths, after consideration I've decided caution is the better part of valor and decided not to include catalogue identifications as part of the Wikibook.

In the twenty-first century however, the rise of a global philatelic marketplace and global philatelic community has shown the limitations of these "national" systems of identification. Anyone from North America who visits the Delcampe stamp marketplace website, for example, will find that the vast majority of listings of items are identified with catalogues other than Scott. Similarly, most dealers rely on one primary identification system for marketing their stock to potential consumers. Since many collectors often do not have copies of alternative "national" catalogues at hand when they are shopping, the result is often an avoidance of dealers who do not market their stock "with the same catalogue numbers." And for those who do have access to more than one catalogue system at hand, it can be more than a little inconvenient to stop and look up items in a second, or third or more, catalogue as you are surfing the global philatelic marketplace.

And among collectors, especially on international stamp forums such as SCF, very often discussions between collectors regarding specific items have to begin by stating what catalogue the initial poster is referring to in their post for purposes of identification to ensure that everyone involved knows which stamp is the focus. Invariably, at some point in longer conversations, someone will raise the question "What is the catalog number for that item in X, I don't use the Y catalogue."

Of course one solution to this would be to have a ready reference site that cross lists catalogue numbers between the major publishers (and relevant specialized literature). There are quite a few websites that do this for specific nations, maintained by collectors with a passion for the stamps and philatelic history of a specific postal authority. But there is no "one stop" place a collector can quick refer to for all nations, and when you are a worldwide collector that can be frustrating.

There is of course an alternative, the development of a single standard system of stamp identification that would, over time, come to be accepted by the philatelic community worldwide as the basis for stamp identification. In an age of an ever more interconnected global philatelic community and marketplace, the creation of such a single universal system, preferably one that is not considered the intellectual property of any one publisher, would I think greatly enhance the development of philatlely as a global hobby.

Which raises the question I posed as the topic of this thread. Should international philately develop a single system for philatelic identification. Here, I am thinking about two organizations with a vested interest in the promotion of philately on an international scale. First, the Federation International du Philately (FIP), which is most well known for its patronage of international stamp exhibitions such as the upcoming New York 2016 show at the end of May.

Second, and probably even more likely to see this as a worthy idea, the Universal Postal Union's World Association for the Development of Philately (WADP). The WADP has actually taken the first step in this development, creating an international identification system that it uses with new issues released by the various international postal authorities. It's database starts in 2002, and for those nations whose postal administrations are diligent in submitting new material, contains items right up to early 2016 for many nations.

What I find surprising is that the WADP has not considered creating a database that extends backwards from 2002 all the way back to the first stamp released by the United Kingdom in 1840. I am sure that there are many who probably regard the amount of work that would be needed to create and maintain such a database as perhaps a use of resources that could be better utilized for other projects. But as the hobby continues to become increasingly globally interconnected over the next several decades, I do think that international philatelic organizations, and the WADP in particular, might want to consider developing such a system in the future. While it would likely take several years for such a system to become accepted within the marketplace, the benefits to the hobby of such a system being developed could greatly enhance the growth of the hobby, both in terms of the hobby itself, and the retail industry behind the hobby.

The "democratization" of philatelic retail - the impact of the internet on the philatelic marketplace....(Repost)

This is a repost of a blog posting I originally made on the 1.0 version of this blog on 28 October 2015

Over at the Stamp Community Forum there has been a lively debate going on regarding the impact of ebay and other online marketplaces upon the business side of the hobby.  The discussion started with the question "Can dealers compete with ebay?" and has ranges across several related topics, as is the want of a forum thread that is already eight pages long.

My reply to the question was that the question was asking the wrong thing. It's not a question of dealers competing with ebay, but rather "Should dealers consider using ebay as a platform for their business"  Ebay itself is simply a tool, a digital marketplace where buyers and sellers can meet in cyberspace and exchange goods.

Which raises a separate question. Is there a difference in the terms dealer and seller? 

A question of semantics to be sure. I would say anyone who is offering to sell stamps, in any marketplace, is a dealer.  Others would seem to prefer to "rarify" the term dealer by restricting it only to those who make a professional living from their business. For those who only do a little business on the side, they would argue that -seller- is a better term.  And in the end, the "sellers" on ebay are making it much more difficult for many "dealers" to make a living.

This observation then leads to the actual heart of the issue at question - the decline in value of most stamps over the past decade.  And here it would be wise to not separate the two groups into "dealers" and "sellers" because they are all doing the same thing : offering stamps for sale to buyers.

If we think about how the business of philately operated say back in the 1980s (yes I am sure that is ancient history for some readers of this blog, who may not have even been alive then.  Me I was a teenager, working on my stamp collection while listening to Bon Jovi, Miami Sound Machine and Heart on the radio). You had your local stamp dealers if you lived in a large enough metropolitan area. You had dealers who advertised in publications such as Linn's Stamp News.  But unless you travelled a great deal around the country, it was often difficult to find stamp dealers who might have the material you are looking for.  You could write to those dealers who placed ads in the various philatelic publications, but in general the total number of people selling stamps in the 1980s was fairly small, and in general the demand for stamps equaled the supply available (or seemingly only available) through dealers.  In that retail environment, most stamps tended to rise in price slowly, and some that would become -hot- issues could rise very fast very quickly, as anyone who remembers the US stamp bubble of the late 1970s can attest.  Philatelic retail was, I would argue, controlled by an "oligarchy" of dealers, many of whom were quite chummy with each other and would rarely move to undersell their product verses a competing dealer.

Then came the internet, and all the rules of philatelic retail were changed. Philatelic retail became "democratized" and the benefit has been to the buyer at the expense of the dealer.

Today, the ability of the buyer to "comparison shop" between different dealers of stamps is so much, much greater than it was in the 1980s.  And, with the ease the internet provides to allow anyone to become a purveyor of stamps (compared to the days when most dealers had huge overhead in the cost of a shop, the cost of advertising, etc) it means the potential for a large number of retailers to join the marketplace now existed  The result is that today there is now a lot greater supply of stamps in the marketplace for purchase than there was in the 1980s.  What might have been 20 dealers in the USA offering stamp X for sale via local channels and, perhaps, an advertisement in a national publication, now has become 200 dealers of offering the same stamp, and the buyer can compare prices with just a few keyboard clicks.

The one problem with this of course is that demand for many stamps has not kept pace with the increase in availability of supply in the marketplace.  This is especially true for the "meat and potatoes" type of stamps - those stamps that were always worth more than being packet material back in the 1980s, but they were not so rare as to be nearly unobtainable unless you had deep pockets.  It turns out that these "meat and potato" stamps exist in sufficient quantity that if you have more sellers offering to sell the item than buyers to buy them, the value of the stamp is going to decrease in the marketplace.  This is especially the case for the stamps of Western Europe and North America where demand is weak due to the lack of new collectors of the stamps of the West and the vast quantities of most stamps printed at time of issue. Many stamps are now selling at a percent below face value in the marketplace because they are so common and demand is so weak for them. Countries that were -hot- in the 1980s like Germany have in particular been hit hard. A perusal of the Scott Catalogs and comparing prices clearly illustrates this - most of the "meat and potato" stamps have either remained stagnant or declined in catalog value over the past decade.

Meanwhile those stamps that always have been rare due to limited quantity in desired conditions continue to this day to increase in value because there will never be enough supply to meet demand. High quality pre-1930 USA issues, for example, continue to rise in value if they are in above average condition.  And of course one can not forget the impact of booms and bubbles in in philately. While the Chinese stamp market did decline a bit over the past couple years due to China's own internal economic weakness, the days when Chinese stamps of the pre-1990 era sold just above face value are never going to come back either, as it seems the supply of these issues is much less than the demand even when you factor out speculation.

Dealers who do not make use of sites such as ebay, Delcampe, Zillions of Stamps and others here I think really are making a grave business error. These platforms provide an audience of millions of potential collectors from around the world that the dealer would never have been able to reach had the structure of the retail trade remained the same as it was in the 1980s.  The cold hard reality is that the marketplace is now much, much bigger than it was, and as the amount of supply has grown faster than the demand for stamps from collectors, the laws of supply and demand work to the benefit of the buyer. And this will remain the case until a new equilibrium between supply and demand is reached.  It is a whole new retail ballgame in philately, and the days of the stationary retail brick-and-mortar stamp shop are probably numbered. A dealer with the cost of overhead such as owning a retail space is going to find it difficult to compete with a dealer selling items from the comfort of his or her home.