Review: Gainesville Coins

[pmbug]

Website: http://www.gainesvillecoins.com/

Gainesville Coins offers an online shopping cart and clearly displays their separate prices for check/bank wire versus credit card.

Their prices are consistently challenging Provident Metals for best value in purchases not requiring large minimum purchases.

I have not used them personally but have seen some complaints about late shipping and some orders received that weren't exactly what was ordered (ie. ordered BU coins, got tarnished/circulated coins, ordered sealed box set, got unsealed individual items).

You can use coupon code NIAUS to save $5 on any order over $50.

Gainesville does not accept payment by check. It's either credit card or bank wire.

 

[DosZap]

Thanks for the heads up,sorry to hear the poor practices.Their pricing is about as good as it gets on Wires.(plus shpg)
And they sell Aussies for less than most dealers I have seen to date.(which have high prems and sell(back to dealers) for no more than Mapes,or Krugs.

 

[Island_Dweller]

I've made one order from Gainesville and was very happy. Best for me is that they are one of the few PM firms that ship internationally (I live in NZ). It took a while to get here, but most of that problem was from customs here; Gainesville shipped when they said they would (about 2 weeks). The markup on PMs here is shocking, so I was glad to find Gainesville.

Cheers

 

[pmbug]

Supposedly, the coupon code NIAUS has expired and barnone11967 is a new code offering the same $5 off discount.

 

[DoChenRollingBearing]

@ Island_Dweller

Perhaps there is a "physical arbitrage" you could take advantage of? By that I mean if you ever are in Los Angeles or other big US city, you could "back up the truck" buying gold and taking it back with you in person.

That assumes you have someone there in NZ to sell to.

If you take in/out of the USA over $10,000 in liquid assets (incs. gold coins), you must fill out the stupid US Customs form. You are free to bring in or out $1,000,000 or 500 oz of gold, but fill out the form. And whatever you have to in NZ as well.

 

[pmbug]

...
If you take in/out of the USA over $10,000 in liquid assets (incs. gold coins), you must fill out the stupid US Customs form. ...

Discussed here: http://www.pmbug.com/forum/f13/decl...nstrument-when-traveling-internationally-121/

 

[Island_Dweller]

@ Island_Dweller

Perhaps there is a "physical arbitrage" you could take advantage of? By that I mean if you ever are in Los Angeles or other big US city, you could "back up the truck" buying gold and taking it back with you in person.

That assumes you have someone there in NZ to sell to.

If you take in/out of the USA over $10,000 in liquid assets (incs. gold coins), you must fill out the stupid US Customs form. You are free to bring in or out $1,000,000 or 500 oz of gold, but fill out the form. And whatever you have to in NZ as well.

Hey DCRB. I just noticed your comment. Believe me, I've thought about this a lot. In fact, the coins I bought from Gainesville were for resale here in NZ. Unfortunately, there were a couple of problems.

1). Spot price went down between when I bought them and when I got them.

2). I had to move money from NZD to USD and, of course, I lost a little there and then in the few days it took my trade to settle, the USD/NZD went down a bit more. So the delay can hurt you (obviously it can help too).

3). The best place to sell them here is an online site like ebay called trademe. Here's there success fees:

Up to $200 7.5% of sale price (50c minimum)
$200 - $1500 $15.00 + 4.5% of sale price over $200
Over $1500 $73.50 + 1.9% of sale price over $1500 (max fee = $149)

So even though there is about a 20% premium over spot and I get get it from Gainesville for about 10% over spot, the other parts of the deal have to go your way as well.

Anyway, I bought a monster box of ASEs that I'm just holding on to right now. I paid $23,900 for them and I see that I can get them for $21,900 at this site: http://www.bulliondeals.co.nz/store.html#ecwid:category=986260&mode=product&product=4096063.

I just did some quicks sums and Gainesville will sell a monster box for $17,095. I think I paid $150 for shipping so that makes $17,245 the USD/NZD is 1.21435 however, I can only get about 1.22 for that amount of money from my currency exchange which comes out to $21,308.90. The guy above is selling them for $21,900 which is the best price as I've looked around a lot in NZ and some of these guys charge incredible premiums. Most are probably $1000 more at any given moment.

A quick check on trademe and I see that most ASEs are selling between $45 and $53. I paid $47.80 for each coin, so with the trademe success fee I'd lose money (At $53, it would cost me $4, plus any extras like photos, etc). I guess I'll just hold on to them for a bit.

There is another auction site that's free called sella.co.nz, but they haven't caught on yet. I look forward to that site gaining clientele.

I have a story to add about customs that I'll add to the thread that PMBug mentioned sometime soon.

Cheers, -Ron

 

[Island_Dweller]

WOW! I just found this article from a poster JW in FL on ZH.

http://blog.jtcoins.com/tag/nationalgoldexchange

The article is about the bankruptcy and fraud problems of National Gold Exchange (NGE); however, here's where Gainesville Coins is mentioned in the article:

Consultants for and officials from Sovereign Bank testified that NGE used some of the collateral pledged to the bank for $35 million in loans to obtain loans from other entities and co-mingled assets with Gainesville Coins, which operates in the same office and is affiliated with Mark Yaffe and Alan Yaffe, owners of NGE.

In addition, the Yaffe family is involved in the ownership of Independent Coin Grading, a company that assigns values to coins and is located at the rear of NGE’s premises, according to testimony.

Elizabeth Sousa, a member of Sovereign’s precious metals unit, said bank officials conducting a spot check on July 10 at NGE were “stunned” at the disarray at the business and were alarmed that the company could not produce a perpetual inventory of coins.

In addition, it was difficult to separate Gainesville Coins’ assets from those of NGE or to locate about $2.7 million in coins that were reported to be at consignment sales, she testified. Instead, it appeared that NGE employees were holding some coins the company listed as consignment sales, Sousa testified.
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Also, Here's the original post as there were more articles, but I couldn't get them to work. Can anyone else?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/chris...rgan-get-physical-gold-silver#comment-2363669

Finally, I'm on Gainesville coins email list and recently the sent out an email saying that they would hold gold for people in their vault for a fee. Here's a link to that:

http://www.gainesvillecoins.com/secure-storage.aspx

All kinda scary if you ask me........

 

[KMS]

If they are lying then I am glad they are getting exposed now instead of farther down. Who knows how many more people they could have defrauded if the practices are allowed to continue.

Physical. Only. (Bitchez).

 

[white&yellow999]

look at mark yaffe's house...

http://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/mark-yaffes-house/

 

[rblong2us]

wouldnt want to be paying the property taxes on that lot

unless of course hes paid up front with metal ......

 

[Arkad]

I like to buy when people are selling... right now seems like a good time to buy so I just ordered 2 tubes (2012) Silver Eagles from Gainsville today.
Total cost with shipping was $1331.43 ($33.28ea x 40).
Estimated shipping date is 5/18/12
This is the first time I have ordered from them, so we will see how it goes.

As of today, the same product with shipping/handling from APMEX would cost me $1408.03 and Bullion Direct was $1389.38 with S/H.

 

[escobar]

ordered some rounds from them, came about 7-10 days later don't remember exactly. everything was fine.

 

[ancona]

Gainseville is OK, I have a little bit of a problem with their swhipping "delays" though. Sometimes they ship pretty quick, sometimes you wait 6 weeks.......it's a crap shoot. When I buy from Apmex, I buy enough that they back off some of the charges. The rest of the fees I build in to my DCA as the cost of owning silver, but I get my bang bang right away. I have never waited more than eight days for silver from Apmex.

 

[mike]

I wouldn't put too much faith in a company that uses cloaking. I recently discovered they were cloaking the prices they served to my web crawler, which made them appear to have the cheapest prices in my price-comparison tables.

You can read about it in detail here.

 

[pmbug]

You know, the PM community - the peeps who are active in discussions on the internet - is a fairly small group. When a dealer does things right, word spreads quickly. It doesn't take much to earn respect in this community. That's what makes it so frustrating when we hear reports of 'fly by night' practices (like selling inventory that isn't actually in stock) and dishonest marketing (like cloaking prices for mike's site). :doodoo:

 

[ancona]

Folks, I've been following this thread, because I have been bitten by a two dollar difference between a website [which I'll not name] and actual paid price. I was furious. Then, after calling them up, talking to their web-guru dude, and listening to the explanation, I was still frustrated, but understood why there was a difference. Back during the crash I went on-line to order some silver. I saw an advertisement for a well known firm on a financial site offering a discount price for purchases ove4r 20 oz. I went right to the online order instruction page, rather than confirm the price at the appropriate PM section on the site. I placed my order then went to the bank to do a wire. Nine days later i got my order and it was two ounces short.

As it turned out, the website showing the discount did not properly install the "widget" or whatever, so it did not refresh nearly often enough. apparently it was set to refresh every two days rather than every two hours. The long and short is that now, i go directly to the page showing the product on the dealers site, then call to confirm and lock in my order. After that, and only after that, I go and do a wire.

While there are certainly a lot of douche-bags out there, I was quick to pass judgement without looking all the way back up the food chain to see if there was a disconnect somewhere, and I almost embarrassed myself pretty good in the process.

Most of the prominent dealers want to have happy customers, and they will usually bend over backward to make things right if they turn left during the process.

 

[CoinExplorer]

Mike, I'm customer ombudsman for Gainesville Coins, and I want to let you know that I'm forwarding your concerns upstairs. Since you mentioned a 3% discrepancy, it may be that your crawler is grabbing the bankwire price instead of the credit price, which is 3% higher.

If you could check that for me while I run this by our IT department, I'd be greatly appreciative!

 

[11C1P]

Maybe run by them to stop doing "cloaking"?

 

[mike]

Mike, I'm customer ombudsman for Gainesville Coins, and I want to let you know that I'm forwarding your concerns upstairs. Since you mentioned a 3% discrepancy, it may be that your crawler is grabbing the bankwire price instead of the credit price, which is 3% higher.

If you could check that for me while I run this by our IT department, I'd be greatly appreciative!

I would be more than happy to look into any plausible explanation you have. But if you read how I performed the test and look the results, you see two different pages were being served to two different servers. All of the prices were discounted, bank wire and credit card.

Note also that I performed the test on the weekend, when prices weren't moving, to avoid any small discrepancies caused but network lag.

 

[CoinExplorer]

Hi Mike, we've checked some other price comparison sites, and there are no discrepancies between the prices they report and our actual prices. Here is an example we pulled up today.

 

[CoinExplorer]

That attachment is kind of puny. Here's a linked image:

 

[steve0791]

Gainesville Coins was the first online retailer I purchased coins in Jan 2012. I was excited about buying my silver and gold coins for the first time. However, I have bad experiences with them.

When I received the order, there were a missing gold panda coin. I contacted them and asked them to either give back my money or sent me another coin. They refused, and to this date, they deny they made a mistake. Calling them and emailing them back and forth to tell about my missing coin, and they still refused to do anything for the mistakes or cheating out of my coin. Whatever the case may be, its really bring a bad taste to my mouth from this company. Ever since then, I never buy or deal with Gainesville coins again.

To this date, I only buy my coins from Provident metal or APMEX. They have never cheated me of any coins I ordered from them. They have good customer services, and they executed any orders I made with precision. Yes, I would recommend anyone buying coins from them via Provident Metal or APMEX.

 

[Bru]

After that nasty bankruptcy stunt with NGE and in view of the many horror stories about GVC's inordinate shipping delays, damaged goods, refusal to accept returns, nasty so-called “customer service” (ha,ha) which can be easily found all over many internet PM forums… I can’t imagine why on earth anybody would order anything from GVC.

The possibility of saving a couple scroungy bucks doesn’t turn me on when the possible downside is losing a sizable amount of money or getting stuck with damaged coins by a company that won’t take them back.

But -- “To each his own.” Caveat emptor!

 

[CoinExplorer]

Steve, if you can PM me your name and order number, I'll have the CEO take a look at it personally. We videotape every order being assembled and the box being sealed, so we can check that the order was filled properly.

Bru, NGE and GC are separate companies. GC got caught up in the NGE situation, but that was straightened out. We have an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau.

 

[11C1P]

Found this post on another website on a thread discussing silver.

http://www.survivalistboards.com/showthread.php?t=233538&page=750

yes i am just a bit upset, i have only bought from them 1 time and it was a small order, placed an order for a MB of generic at $15.15 with credit card and waited. today rolls around and i get an email saying i got a refund and that my order is cancelled, i look at the refund and it is $500 short of what i was billed for. i get on the horn and the guy tells me that they tried contacting me several times for more verification and according to their policy they have the right to cancel and refund minus a 5% restocking fee.

he told me that when i place an order they go out and buy the product therefore their loss. i reread the CC policy and it does say that "they may need further verification" but i was never notified of this, how could they send me a cancellation email but not send me one for more verification.

i searched further and see this is common practice for these guys, burning people for the 5%

already filed with BBB and dispute the charge, glad i paid with CC, these guys are shysters

If that's true, that's some serious B.S. Anyone ever had this happen to them?