I spent eighteen years on the other side of this transaction
People mailed me their silver and I sent them a check. That is the whole basis of this site: not research, but eighteen years of opening boxes and seeing what was actually in them.
In short
- Eighteen years buying precious metals from the public.
- The business is closed. Nothing here buys your silver.
- Some links earn commission. All of them are labeled.
What the business was
I ran an online precious metals buying operation. Members of the public sent in silver and gold - inherited flatware, scrap jewelry, coins, the contents of a house being cleared - and I valued it, made an offer, and paid for what people chose to sell.
Over eighteen years that meant tens of thousands of parcels. Canteens that turned out to be electroplate. A shoebox of what the sender believed was junk that held a run of early coins worth many times the scrap. Enormous quantities of perfectly ordinary Victorian sterling. And a great many people who told me, in the covering note, what they had been offered somewhere else first.
That last category is why this site exists. The gap between the first offer someone received and what their metal was actually worth was frequently large, and the only thing standing between them and it was information they had no way to get.
Why I closed it
Two reasons, and neither of them was losing interest in the subject.
The first was volatility. When you quote a price on metal that will not physically reach you for a week, you are carrying market risk on every parcel in transit. In a calm year that is a manageable cost of doing business. In a volatile one it is a constant, grinding exposure, and managing it well is a full-time job that has nothing to do with silver.
The second was logistics. Handling other people's valuables through the post is a serious responsibility and an endless one. Insurance, disputes, lost parcels, the occasional package that arrived visibly opened. It is solvable, it is just relentless, and after eighteen years I had had enough of solving it.
What I had not had enough of was the subject. Writing about how to sell silver carries none of the risk and none of the parcels, which is why this is what I do with it now.
What this means for what you read here
I am not buying your silver
There is no envelope to send anything to. Nothing on this site is trying to acquire your metal, which removes the conflict that sits underneath most advice in this field.
I know what the spread is for
When I explain why an offer widens in a volatile week, that is not theory. I set those spreads, for those reasons, and I can tell you when a wide one is justified and when it is not.
I know the tricks because I competed with them
The expiring quote, the improved second offer, the unexplained downgrade once the metal has arrived. I lost lots to firms doing this and I know exactly how it works.
I still have an incentive, and I state it
Some links here pay commission. That is a real interest and pretending otherwise would be worse than disclosing it. What the commission is and how it shapes the rankings is set out on the methodology page.
What this site will not do
No predictions about the silver price. I have no idea where it is going and neither does anyone selling you a newsletter about it.
No fear marketing. The precious metals field is full of currency-collapse rhetoric aimed at people who are frightened, and none of it belongs on a page read by someone settling a parent's estate.
No invented urgency. If waiting is better for you, the page will say wait, even where waiting means no commission is earned this month.
No fabricated reviews or testimonials. If you find quoted praise on this site, a real person said it. Where there is nothing real to quote, there is nothing quoted.
No advice about whether silver is a good investment. That is a different question from what your grandmother's cutlery is worth, and it needs a licensed adviser rather than a former scrap buyer.
Corrections welcome
If something here is wrong, out of date, or does not match what you found when you went to sell, please say so through the contact page. Prices and practices change, and a guide nobody corrects becomes wrong quietly.
Things eighteen years taught me that surprised me
The heaviest box is rarely the most valuable one. People would send an enormous canteen of electroplate, insured for a fortune, and separately mention a small tin of coins they assumed was worthless. The tin was frequently worth ten times the canteen. Weight is a terrible proxy for value and almost everyone uses it anyway.
Most people undersell out of embarrassment rather than ignorance. They would accept a poor first offer because haggling felt rude, or because they did not want to seem mercenary about a dead relative's possessions. Getting three quotes is not mercenary. It is the minimum diligence anyone would apply to selling a car.
The worst offers were rarely the most dishonest firms. They were usually the ones with the highest overheads and the least volume, quoting what they genuinely needed to make the transaction worthwhile. Dishonesty in this trade looks different: it looks like an accurate quote that gets revised downwards once the metal is in the building.
Almost nobody separated their knives. Weighted handles are the single largest source of disappointment in mail-in valuations, and five minutes of sorting before packing would have prevented most of it.
The covering notes were the education. People wrote about who the silver had belonged to, what they had been told at a shop, what they were afraid of. Reading a few thousand of those teaches you what sellers actually need to know, which is a different list from what the industry chooses to publish.
Who this site is for
It is written for someone who has ended up with silver they did not buy and did not choose. An estate, a house clearance, a downsizing, a divorce. You are not a collector, you have no particular interest in precious metals, and you would like to convert this into money without being taken advantage of.
If that is you, start with what you have, then what it is worth, then who to sell it to. Those three pages in order will take you half an hour and will put you ahead of nearly everyone who walks into a shop cold.
If you are a collector or an investor, this site will be too basic for you, and that is deliberate. There are better resources for numismatics and for bullion strategy, and I am not trying to compete with them.
What eighteen years actually looked like
Most of it was unglamorous. Parcels arrived, were logged, weighed, tested and valued, an offer went out, and either a check followed or the parcel went back. The interesting part was never the metal. It was the covering notes.
People explain themselves when they sell inherited things. They wrote about clearing a parent's house, about a divorce, about a bill that had to be paid this month. They frequently mentioned what somebody local had already offered them, and that number was often so far below the metal value that it was difficult to read the note without wincing. Those notes are the reason this site exists, and they are why every page here assumes you are dealing with something you did not choose to own.
The other recurring theme was apology. People apologized for the condition of things, for not knowing what they had, for taking up time. Almost nobody arrived knowing the one fact that would have protected them, which is what their metal was worth before anyone made them an offer.
Why the closure matters to what you read here
Every guide about selling something is written by someone with a position. Usually that position is a buyer wanting inventory, or an affiliate wanting a click, and the advice bends toward it in ways that are hard to see from outside.
The business here is closed, which removes the largest of those pressures entirely. There is no envelope, no address, no lot being assembled. When a page here says that waiting for a calmer market is worth real money, no part of this site loses anything by your waiting. When a page says a local coin dealer may beat every mail-in buyer including the ones that pay commission, that recommendation costs this site money and it stays on the page anyway.
That is the whole argument for reading advice from a former competitor rather than a current one, and it is worth stating rather than implying.
What I still do not know
Eighteen years teaches you a trade, not everything about it. Grading collectible coins to professional standards is a specialism this site does not claim; where a coin might be genuinely rare, the honest answer is to see a specialist with the object in hand. Hallmarks outside Britain and the United States are covered here thinly, because that is how thinly I encountered them. And local markets change constantly, which is why this site describes categories of buyer confidently and individual shops barely at all.
Where the site is uncertain it says so. That is a more useful signal than confidence, and it is the reason corrections from readers are the most valuable thing that arrives in the inbox.