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 a fair transaction actually looks like
People ask what a good buyer looks like, expecting a name. The honest answer is a set of behaviors, and they are the same whether the buyer is a mail-in refiner, a coin shop or a pawnbroker.
A fair buyer tells you the weight they worked from and the purity they assumed, because those are the two inputs to every offer and hiding them means hiding the offer itself. A fair buyer states a spot reference and, if the quote is a lock rather than an estimate, an honest window for it. A fair buyer makes declining free, prompt and insured, because a quote you cannot walk away from without a penalty is not a quote, it is a trap. And a fair buyer does not revise the number downward once your metal is in the building without a documented, photographed reason you can see for yourself.
None of that depends on the buyer being kind. It depends on the process being transparent enough that kindness is beside the point. A transparent process protects you from a buyer who is having a bad month as reliably as from one who is dishonest, and that is the whole idea.
Why a former buyer is the right person to explain this
There is an obvious objection to a scrap buyer writing a guide for scrap sellers, and it deserves a straight answer. For eighteen years my interests and the seller's interests were opposed in the ordinary way: I wanted to buy well and they wanted to sell well, and the price sat somewhere in between. That is simply what a market is, and it is not sinister.
What changed is that the business is closed. There is no envelope, no offer, no metal moving in my direction from anything written here. The knowledge that used to be an advantage over the person on the other side of the transaction is now just knowledge, and the only thing left to do with it is hand it over. A guide written by an active buyer always has a thumb on the scale, however careful the wording. A guide written by someone who has left the trade can afford to tell you when the right move is to sell to a competitor, to hold, or to walk into a coin shop instead of mailing anything anywhere.
That is the one advantage this site has over the glossier resources in the field, and it is worth being plain about it. Most advice about selling silver is published by people who would like to buy your silver. This is not.
How to use what is here
The three core pages are meant to be read in order: what you have, then what it is worth, then who to sell it to. If you only have five minutes, read the valuation page, because the ability to turn any offer into a percentage of melt is the single most useful thing on this site. The methodology page explains exactly how buyers are assessed and where commission fits, so you can hold every recommendation here to a written standard.