Get in touch
Corrections are the most valuable thing you can send. Prices and practices change, and a guide nobody corrects goes quietly wrong.
What I can help with
Corrections to anything on this site, particularly where a buyer behaved differently from how a page describes. Questions about identifying a piece where the guides have not settled it. Suggestions for subjects that are missing.
If you write about your own experience selling, please say what you sold, roughly what it weighed, what you were quoted and what you were actually paid. That is the detail that makes a correction usable.
What I cannot help with
I cannot value your silver from a photograph. Valuation needs weight, purity and today's spot price, and a photograph gives none of them. The valuation page shows the arithmetic, and doing it yourself takes about five minutes.
I am not buying. The business closed. There is nowhere to send anything, and any message offering to sell me metal will get a polite version of this paragraph.
I cannot give investment or tax advice. Whether silver is a good place for your money, and what you owe after selling, both need someone licensed and local to you.
I cannot authenticate a piece remotely. For anything that might be collectable rather than scrap, you want a specialist with the object in their hands, and the identification guide explains when that is worth doing.
Response times
This is one person, not a support desk. Most messages get a reply within a few days. Corrections that come with specifics get read first, because they improve the site for everyone who arrives after you.
Privacy
Messages are used to answer your question and nothing else. Your details are not sold, shared with buyers, or added to a marketing list without your asking. If you sign up for the newsletter that is a separate and deliberate choice, and unsubscribing takes one click.
How to write a message that gets a useful reply
Most questions that arrive could be answered in one exchange if the first message included a few details, and could not be answered at all without them. If you want a reply that helps, these are the things worth putting in.
Say what the piece is marked
Copy out any stamp exactly: STERLING, 925, 800, EPNS, a lion, a letter in a shield. The mark is the single most informative thing about an item, and "it has some little symbols" cannot be worked with. A clear photograph of the mark, if you have one, is better still.
Give a weight if you can
Even a rough weight in grams, from a kitchen scale, changes a vague question into a concrete one. If you are asking whether something is worth pursuing, weight and purity are what decide it.
Quote the numbers you were given
If you are writing about your own sale, say what you sold, roughly what it weighed, what you were quoted and what you were actually paid. That is the detail that turns a story into a correction other readers can benefit from.
Ask one clear question
A message that ends with a specific question gets a specific answer. A message that describes a situation and trails off is harder to help, because it is not clear what you actually want to know.
The questions that come in most often
Can you just tell me what my silver is worth?
Not from a message, because value is weight times purity times today's spot price, and I have none of those from a description. What I can do is point you at the exact arithmetic. Weigh the solid pieces in troy ounces, multiply by 0.925 for sterling, multiply by the current spot price, and you have your melt value in about five minutes. The valuation page walks through it with an example.
How do I tell sterling from plate before I write?
Look for a mark first: STERLING, 925 or a walking lion mean solid silver, while EPNS, EP or A1 mean plate. Then test. Silver is not magnetic, it is dense for its size, and an ice cube melts noticeably faster on silver than on plate because silver conducts heat so well. The identification guide covers each test in order.
Is it worth sending you a photo?
A photo of a hallmark can help me tell you what a mark means. A photo of a whole item cannot tell me what it weighs or what it is made of, so it cannot produce a value. Send the mark, not the mantelpiece.
I have coins. Where should they go?
To a coin dealer before anyone weighs them, especially silver dollars and anything dated before 1900. Coins are the category where the object most often beats the metal, and a scrap buyer has no duty to tell you so. The coins and bars page explains what to look for first.
Should I clean it up before selling or before photographing it?
No. For scrap it makes no difference, and for anything potentially collectable, cleaning removes patina and can soften hallmarks, which takes real money off the price. Never clean coins under any circumstances. Leave everything exactly as it is.
Will you recommend a specific buyer for my situation?
I can explain what each kind of buyer is good for and what a fair one does, which is what the buyers page and the methodology page are for. The one thing that genuinely protects you is getting three current quotes yourself, because the right buyer depends on what you have and where you are.
If you are selling soon, a five-minute checklist
Whether or not you write in, this is the short version of everything the guides cover, in the order that protects you. Running through it before you accept any offer is the difference between hoping you were treated fairly and knowing it.
Confirm what is solid silver
Separate anything marked STERLING, 925 or carrying a walking lion from anything marked EPNS, EP, A1 or plate. Set the plate aside; it has no melt value. Test anything unmarked before deciding either way.
Set knives and weighted pieces apart
Hollow silver knife handles and weighted candlesticks hold far less silver than their weight suggests. Weighing them as if they were solid is the most common way sellers over-estimate and then feel cheated.
Weigh the solid pieces properly
Use troy ounces, or weigh in grams and divide by 31.1. Never use the ounces on a kitchen food scale as if they were troy ounces; the two differ by about ten percent.
Calculate your own melt value
Weight in troy ounces times purity times today's spot price gives the melt value. That is your baseline, and every offer becomes a percentage of it.
Pull anything that might beat scrap
Coins, especially silver dollars and pre-1900 pieces, and anything signed, antique or part of a matched set, should be looked at by a specialist before it is weighed for metal. Melting is permanent.
Get three quotes and compare percentages
Convert each offer to a percentage of your melt value and compare like with like. On a large lot, get five. The spread is routinely wide enough to make the calls worth your while.
A short reference: what common marks mean
If you are writing to ask about a piece, it helps to know what its mark is already telling you. Here are the ones that turn up most often on things people inherit. Copy the mark into your message exactly as it appears, and mention where on the piece it sits.
| Mark | Means | Silver? |
|---|---|---|
| STERLING | Solid sterling, the standard on American and later British silver | Yes, 92.5% |
| 925 | The numeric form of sterling, 92.5 parts per thousand | Yes, 92.5% |
| 800, 835, 900, 950 | Continental European standards, silver at that purity per thousand | Yes, at the number |
| COIN or 900 | Older American coin-silver standard used before sterling | Yes, 90% |
| Walking lion (lion passant) | The British sterling guarantee mark | Yes, 92.5% |
| EPNS, EP, A1, plate | Electroplate: a thin silver layer over base metal | No melt value |
| Nickel silver, German silver | An alloy named for its color, containing no silver at all | No silver |
An unmarked piece is not automatically plate; a good deal of genuine silver, particularly small or very old items, was never marked. It simply means the piece has to be tested rather than read, and the identification guide covers how to do that at home before you commit to any conclusion.
What happens after you write
Your message goes to one inbox and is read by one person. There is no ticketing system, no chatbot triage, and no sales team that receives your details afterward. Corrections that arrive with specifics get read first, because they make the site more accurate for everyone who lands on it later, which is the whole point of inviting them.
Most messages get a reply within a few days. A few do not get a reply at all, and it is only fair to say which: offers to sell me metal, since the business is closed and there is nowhere to send anything; requests to value a piece from a photograph, which is not possible; and pitches from firms wanting to be listed, since being listed is not something that is bought here. Everything else is genuinely welcome.
Before you write, three pages answer most questions
If you are in a hurry, it is worth thirty seconds to check whether the answer is already written down. What you have covers telling sterling, plate and coin silver apart. What it is worth shows the melt calculation that turns any offer into a percentage. Where to sell compares the kinds of buyer and the questions that separate a fair offer from a bad one. Between them they settle the large majority of what arrives in the inbox, and they do it faster than waiting for a reply.
If they do not settle your question, that is exactly the kind of gap worth telling me about, because a question the guides fail to answer is usually a sign a guide needs another paragraph.