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Selling Gold and Silver

You can sell your jewelry on this site for free using the form below.

Please give a detailed description of the piece you are selling:
Choose a picture to upload (optional):



Minimum price you would accept for this item: $

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You will get the best results by giving a highly detailed description of the piece you are trying to sell and including photos. Be sure to check your spam folder for replies.To edit your entry just re-insert it and it will be amended automatically. To delete it see below. You can also try craigslist which is free. Selling gold as estate jewelry and direct to a buyer will give you the best price, and you should be able to get close to the current price of gold. We conducted a poll on the price that people would pay for a 14k gold chain which contained $1000 worth of gold. $981 was average price given by more than 500 respondents to the poll. As you can see from this survey on ways to buy gold, most people pay a substantial premium when buying small quantities of physical gold.

Secrets of selling your jewelry online

  • The more you tell the more you sell is an old advertising adage. The more detail you put in the more likely you are to find a buyer.
  • Be sure to have a photo. Have a WHITE background. Use a white board if necessary and be sure there is good light. Use a low angled light source. Shoot it in early morning or late evening if using natural light. Don’t just shoot it straight on.Take it from the side, tilt the camera a bit so that when you look at the photo straight it looks like it’s sitting on a slanted surface. Take about 5 images from all angles and choose the most artistic and beautiful.
  • Upload your photo here if you would like help in enhancing it.

Before selling your jewelry online it is worth asking whether you should sell it online at all. You will probably get the best price by selling it to someone you know. You could also give it away as a gift.

You need to be aware that selling gold by credit card or paypal carries a risk of fraudulent charge backs. You should contact the vendor by telephone and ask her a few basic questions as a minimum precaution. You should also be aware of a scam making use of paypal, where you receive a 'phishing' email that appears to come from paypal confirming receipt of payment, but which is actually a fake email. Always login to your paypal account and check that you have actually received payment before sending the jewelry. Another scam is where the buyer demands a refund from paypal on the grounds the goods are not as advertised and promises to return the jewelry, but then fails to deliver it.

If you cannot find a buyer your best bet is a gold refinery who will typically pay you around 95% of the value of the gold they extract from your jewelry although this may be less than the karat value in some countries. If you shop around you can find refineries who will give you 98% or more of the melt value for gold, although this will depend on the quantity. For silver, platinum or palladium you will be unlikely to get more than 90% of the melt value. Note that scrap gold is always measured by the pennyweight. The turnaround time is between 3 to 12 days. Be careful to check in advance for hidden costs such as refining fees, assay fees, treatment charges, brokering fees, inbound troy ounce weight fees and handling fees. You should also drill a few small holes into the jewelry before sending it so that you have samples to get independently assayed if need be. If you are unsure about the purity of the gold it may be worth buying an inexpensive testing kit and finding out how many karats it is before selling it.

Bear in mind that the price you paid for your jewelry is about 5 times more than what it cost the store you bought it from.

If the offers you are getting for your gold are insufficient you could refine the gold yourself using this starter kit or this more advanced one.

Selling Gold on Ebay

It is possible to sell gold on ebay. The problem with ebay is that their fees are so high. For some products this is not significant, but for jewelry, where the cost of the metal  makes up most of the price, it becomes an important factor. It used to be possible to lower the costs by reducing the price of the jewelry but having a high shipping fee. However ebay has now closed this loophole. With PayPal fees – which are a part of eBay – on top, it ends up that they take around 16 per cent of the price. In addition the maximum length of time an auction can run is 10 days which does not give you much time to find a buyer who will offer you a good price.

The total costs of selling a piece on 'feebay' and using paypal to pay for it, all of which must be born by the seller in some way, can be calculated using this calculator.

Other Auctions

Other types of auctions are even more expensive. Most auctioneers charge a 10 - 20% selling fee. They only get the fee if they manage to sell the item so they will usually price it sufficiently low to be sure of getting a bid. Auctioneers also charge a buying fee, so they can make up to 40% of the value sold in fees.

Jewelry Stores

A high street jewelry store will pay about 60% to 65% of the day’s gold price for scrap. In theory they should be willing to pay more than this as jeweler's gold ( ie 18k or 14k) is sold at a small premium, generally about 5%, over the melt value. However jewelry sales have collapsed in recent years and buying people's unwanted jewelry and selling it to a refinery is the only way many high street jewelers stay in business.

TV Gold Buyers

Not so long ago, Fox news put together a kind of undercover sting, where they brought in three of the same amounts of jewelry to three individual cash for gold businesses and waited for their payout and while all of the companies did in fact give them a payment for the broken gold, only 1 of those cash 4 gold companies actually submitted the current market value while the other cash for gold companies paid out one third of the real value. The other 2 companies that paid 30% of the real value were acting as middle men while the 3rd cash 4 gold business that paid the current market value did have their own precious metal refinery.

ABC News did a similar operation.

It is interesting to see what some ex-employees of cash4gold have to say about the company.

The fact is, gold brokers are nothing more than a go-between, between you and a precious metal refinery and as a result they will pay you approximately one third of the market price for your gold, silver or platinum and easily trade it back to a gold refiner themselves thereby keeping the larger share and you get a few measly dollars.

A study by the British magazine Which found that on average, TV gold buyers offered around 6 per cent of the retail price for gold, while high street retailers paid around 25 per cent.

Cash for gold
Company Gold retail price £115 Gold retail price £215 Gold retail price £399
CashMyGold £6.43 £9.64 £22.50
Postal Gold £7.97 £10.89 £25.04
Money4gold £8.17 £11.26 See a
Cash4Gold £10.31 £14.57 £31.48
Pawnbrokers (b) £26 £32 (c) £80
Jewelers £33 £46 £102

Table notes

a. Demanded £9.95 Postal Order (costing an additional £1 Royal Mail charge) to return item

b. Average of three quotes

c. No quote was provided by one merchant for the £215 item

Pawnbrokers

People are usually down and out when they have to stoop to use a pawn broker. The pawnbrokers see the blood and go for the throat. Many pawnbrokers give you no more than 30% of the value of your item. The rate of interest that they charge will depend on the state but it will be somewhere between 3-14% every month...so forget about ever getting your jewelry back.

Some pawnbrokers will give you between 60-85% depending on the quality of the item.

Gold Selling Parties

Gold parties are organised by multi-level marketing companies and are typically held in people’s homes. The hook used to lure you in is the promise of cash for your unwanted gold jewelry, coins, and other items. The buyer tests your gold and pays you cash on the spot (based on the gold’s purity and weight). The on-the-spot pressure skills that these scammers possess, can make even the best people second guess themselves.

Fashion

Fashion can play a role in how much you will get for your gold. Rose gold is currently the most-wanted metal of the season, so you can probably get a better price for it than other colors.

Broken Jewelry

Broken gold will have the same price as new gold: you will get the melt value of the metal in both cases.

Tax

Tax will depend on which country to our in. In the US capital gains on sales of gold are taxed at 28% as precious metals and jewelry are treated as collectables. For example, if you paid $100 for a gold chain and later sold it for $200, your capital gain is $100, and you will owe $28 in taxes When you sell to a dealer, the dealer is required to report any gold bar sale of 32.15 ounces or more. Maples, Krugerrands, and Mexican Gold Onzas are reportable by the dealer to the government if sold in quantities of 25 or more but gold and silver Eagles, Australian Kangaroos, and Austrian Philharmonics are not reportable in any quantity. Silver ‘scrap’ coins if over $1,000 face value and 1000 ounces in silver bars are reportable but 40% silver content coins are exempt. Gold jewelry sales are not reportable.

Most jewelers and bullion dealers keep their records for 2 years.

Selling Gold in Thailand

Gold shops will buy gold jewelry from you at the spot price of gold ie the price of the piece you bought less the design fee although some shops try to give you less. You generally get the best price by selling it to the shop you bought it from. If you exchange  you will be charged the design fee for the piece you bought. If you exchange it only a few days after you bought it, you will probably not be charged anything.

Selling the gold outside Thailand should be no problem. Selling it just as scrap, you will get back the spot price of gold at the very least.

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Tips

  • Gold dealers, like car dealers, pawn shop dealers, antique dealers etc. almost always have more knowledge of what they are buying or selling than their customer, and rarely is that knowledge shared fully.
  • Gold buyers often try to “low-ball” you on the price of the piece and see if you are ignorant enough to accept the offer. They take advantage of the fact that most sellers do not know what the scrap metal value is of their jewelry. Perform some simple tests on the piece to find out what the karatage is before deciding on a price.
  • Gold buyers are notorious for misreporting the weight of your gold. A typical technique is to determine the weight in pennyweights vs. grams, which is confusing to most people. They also report a lower level of purity than what the test results indicate. For example, you might offer an 18k (75% pure gold) ring and you will be told it is 14k (60% pure gold). If you sell jewelry or gold frequently, it may be in your best interest to use a scale to weigh the metal or buy a gold or diamond tester to see how it is marked.
  • Buyers may try to convince you the Karat stamping on the piece is wrong. This is very common when the piece bears a foreign stamp.
  • Be care not to let jewelry of different karats be weighed together: Some buyers weigh all gold together and pay only the price for the lowest-quality gold.
  • Think twice before agreeing to drop your valuables in a regular mailbox. There may be no record or proof it was mailed.
  • Be wary of advertising you have something worth lots of money inside your house.