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.
What makes a correction usable
The corrections that change a page are the ones with numbers in them. "Your page about mail-in buyers is wrong" tells me something is off but not what. "I sent 42 troy ounces of sterling to a buyer your page rates well, was quoted 88 percent of melt, and was paid 71 percent after a deduction they called refining loss" tells me exactly what to check, and that page changes the same week.
So if you are writing about a sale, the useful details are: what you sold and roughly what it weighed, what you were quoted before you sent it, what you were actually paid, and what reason was given for any gap. If a buyer changed their offer after receiving the parcel, that is the single most valuable thing anyone can report, because it is the behavior a seller cannot detect in advance and the one this site exists to warn about.
Photographs of hallmarks are welcome if you are asking about identification. They cannot establish value, but they can often settle whether something is sterling, plate, or foreign silver of a different standard, and that distinction is usually the question underneath the question.
Questions I get most, answered here so you do not have to ask
Is my silver worth anything? If it is sterling or coin silver, yes, and the amount is arithmetic rather than opinion. Weigh it, multiply by the purity, multiply by spot. The valuation page walks through it with real numbers. If it is plate, the honest answer is usually no, and that page explains why plate is not a scam so much as a misunderstanding.
Who should I sell to? That depends on how much you have, how quickly you need the money, and how much sorting you are willing to do yourself. The buyers page sets out what each kind of buyer typically pays and why the gap between them is as wide as it is.
Should I clean it first? No. Cleaning removes patina that a collector may value, can scratch a surface permanently, and never once increased what a scrap buyer paid. It is the most common piece of well-meant advice that costs people money.
Can you recommend a specific buyer near me? Not reliably, and I will not pretend otherwise. Local markets vary enormously and a shop that was excellent three years ago may have changed hands. What the site can give you is the set of questions that separate a good buyer from a bad one anywhere, which travels better than a name.
If you are dealing with an estate
Estate silver is the situation where the most value gets lost, and usually not through dishonesty. It gets lost because a whole household is being cleared under time pressure, silver is heavy and dull and nobody wants to deal with it, and the easiest path is to let it go with everything else. If that is where you are, the one thing worth doing before anything leaves the house is separating what is marked sterling from what is not, and photographing the marks on anything unusual. That is an hour, and it routinely changes the outcome by a multiple rather than a percentage.
Nothing here is legal or tax advice about an estate, and inherited property can carry consequences that depend entirely on where you and the deceased were resident. That is a question for someone licensed and local, not for a website.
Send a message
What happens to a message after you send it
It arrives in one inbox and is read by one person. There is no ticketing system, no triage queue, and nobody else with access. Messages are not added to a mailing list, not passed to any buyer, and not used for anything except answering you and improving a page.
Corrections with specifics get read first, because they change the site. General questions get answered when there is time to answer them properly, which is usually within a few days and occasionally longer. If a question has already been answered well on a page, the reply will often be a link to that page and a sentence about the part that applies to you, which is not a brush-off so much as the fastest route to the answer.
If you would like a message deleted after it is answered, say so and it will be. If you would rather your account of a sale informed the site without your name attached, that is the default and no message is ever published with identifying details.
What this site is not able to do, and why saying so up front is kinder
A contact page that implies more help than exists wastes the time of the person writing. So, plainly: no valuations from photographs, because value comes from weight and purity and a photograph shows neither. No authentication of anything that might be collectible rather than scrap, because that needs the object in someone's hands. No investment guidance about whether silver is a good place for money, and no tax guidance about what you owe after a sale, both of which depend on your circumstances and your jurisdiction and both of which need someone licensed and local to you.
And, most often asked: no purchases. The buying business is closed. There is no address to send anything to, and any message offering to sell metal gets a polite version of this paragraph rather than an offer.
Reporting a buyer
If a buyer behaved badly, particularly one this site rates well, that is the report that matters most. The useful shape of it is what was quoted, what was paid, what reason was given for any difference, and roughly when it happened. Dates matter because practices change: a firm that was fair three years ago may not be now, and a stale recommendation on this site does more harm than a missing one.
Reports are checked before anything is changed, and a single account is treated as a signal rather than a verdict. Where a pattern emerges across several reports, the page changes and the reason is stated. The methodology page sets out what gets a buyer removed outright.
Suggesting something the site should cover
The gaps worth filling are usually the ones a seller hit and could not resolve. If you went looking for something here and it was not covered, or was covered too thinly to act on, that is worth two lines in a message. Subjects that arrived that way have included weighted knife handles, what refiners actually do with a parcel, and how to sort an inherited box before getting quotes, all of which turned into full guides because somebody said the site was missing them.
Requests for a specific buyer to be reviewed are read but rarely acted on directly, because a review based on one report is not a review. What does help is several accounts of the same firm, which is why reports get logged even when nothing changes immediately.
Before you write, two pages that answer most messages
Roughly half of what arrives is answered by the valuation arithmetic, because the underlying question is almost always what is this worth, and that is a sum rather than an opinion. Weight, purity, spot price. Once you have run it, a more specific question usually replaces the general one.
Most of the rest is answered by the buyers page, which covers what each kind of buyer pays, what to ask before shipping, and which practices should make you walk away. If your question is who should I sell to, that page is a fuller answer than a reply could be.
None of that is meant to discourage a message. It is meant to save you waiting several days for a link.