Tuesday, November 17, 2009

2006 Plateblock set, at half face value?

Today, I was the winner (and only bidder) on a set of 2006 Israel plate blocks. The face value of these was listed at 140NIS (~$37). The starting price was $19, roughly half of face value. Since I started collecting plate blocks in mid 2007, I am missing most of the early parts of this decade (older plate blocks were filled in by buying a collection that went through 1996). I am mostly baffled over how I was able to buy stamps that are still valid for postal use for half of there face value.

One possible explanation is that the seller made an obvious mistake in the listing that caused it to miss my normal search. My normal search is to got o stamps.ebay.com and look for all stamps with Israel in the title. That brings up about 2000 listings, 100-200 new ones a day. This item was not present in that search. In an attempt to cram as much info into the title as possible, the seller removed the space between Israel and 2006 in the title. E-bay's search engine fails to recognize Israel2006 as matching the string Israel. I am not sure why, but I am glad I did some deeper searches to find this item.

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