rsfish1

Once again, not defending, standing up for anyone, or meant to be anything more then a comment- But it is refreshing to hear the same story from both sides, Paula and Jim. From the conversation I was privy to via a friend of mine, Jim's story matches almost word for word with her version. So personally I am encouraged that in the end, this will all work out. Life sucks sometimes! Now to find something new to gripe about...

Without going in to details of the conversation, after a friend of mine and had a phone conversation with Paula, I do feel a little better that the situation will resolve itself for everyone. Do I approve or defend how the whole situation has been handled, No. Do I pretend to understand how I might have handled the whole situation if I were in their shoes, No. At this point I have no recourse through Paypal for getting my money back. But I think there may be a glimmer of hope after the conversation. I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt even when everything I see is not good. Hopefully in the next couple weeks to a month we will all hear something.

Just my quick .02. Here's another reason you see some people place a lot of bids on .99 auctions. You can check and see what percentage of bids a person has with a particular seller. If it is an inordinately high percentage, they either love the seller or it could be a shill bidder. By placing a bunch of .99 bids on a multitude of other seller's coins, their percentage drops and looks like they are bidding on lots of sellers coins. That's why I see who they have won auctions from and look at their bid history. It helps to root out who is being sneaky and boosting their prices up.

So that's four of the six. Any idea what the other two are? I red a possibility? I'd love to trade one of my two for a red one. If there is a red one, that is... CF30 Well there is supposed to be a purple, but I have not seen it. The 6th color must be super secret.

I have a feeling mine is going to be one of the more boring explainatins. RS, my initials. Fish-Well I love anything to do with fish and water. I have been fishing since I could hold a pole. I have fished in 30 plus states, all the oceans and gulfs of the US. Bahamas an Canada. I have 3-75 gallon fish tanks in my house plus a 45 gallon. I have a 350 gallon pond in my front yard, a 110 gallon pond off my back deck and a 3800 gallon koi pond in the back of my yard. No I a not obsessed with fish at all! LOL Oh and as for the 1. Well believe it or not, someone on AOL had already taken the moniker of RFish, so I had the original thought of adding a 1 to it. Thanks for the cointest!

If anyone is interested in seeing the LE Mimbres that I got, go to this -> LE Mimbres I did not want to spoil the surprise for anyone if they don't want to see before they get them.

Tsun, I am sure you will be in here reading through later today. But did anyone else have it where it did not charge shipping fees? I definitely need to get that paid since it did not charge me any.

Wow. I was about to post a new topic about this. I sold a customer a geocoin I had bought new from the webstore. It is a Snow Ammo Can geocoin. He was having troubles getting the activation code because it said it had already been activated. So he sent them a picture of the tracking number and it shows it was activated November 28th of 2007. Hmmmm... Since I did not have this coin in hand until 2 months ago, how could it be activated last year. So is this a case of where the same tracking number was put on 2 different coins? Or could someone actually activate a coin by entering the wrong numbers and get the activation code for this coin? I should mention they are both ammo can geocoins but one is a snow and the other is an urban. I have contacted the geocacher that has activated the coin and sent him the picture with the tracking number on the coin to see if his matches this one. I am wide open to suggestions.

Hello Indianapolis and Westside Cachers! Earlier this year I held a CITO event at a westside park in Avon. They are wanting to host another caching event a week from Saturday, August 23rd, and are looking for some help from experienced cachers for doing the event. I know this is short notice and have their contact information if anyone is interested. Unfortunately I have a brother with terminal cancer and we are in our last days. I had to decline their request for help since my time is being spent with him and family. But I told them I would see about contacting some fellow cachers and see if anyone wanted to help them out. Please contact me through my profile for the park's contact information and event details. I may not make it back on here to get PMs. Sorry for the short notice but my head has been pretty cloudy all this going on with the family. Randy

Well as a seller on Ebay also, and a good friend sells on there also, we have noticed a trend lately. Since late April we have both seen an increase in lost packages or empty packages through USPS. I personally now have had 5 packages either completely lost or lost for 3 plus weeks and then show up. My friend has had a package show up damaged and empty. And that was a priority mailer envelope. I have changed my policy as a seller on Ebay to require insurance on any purchase totalling $20 or more. But I am also dropping my shipping charges to help ease the pain of requiring it. Essentially it comes down to a lose, lose situation for everyone. If I could see a pattern to where the packages were having problems at USPS I would see if I could avoid the "black holes" in the USPS system. Unfortunately it seems that they exist all over the US. Interesting though that all of my overseas packages seem to make it there just fine...

Wow....Definitely sounds like a mint problem to me! The more I hear from people and read on here, it sounds like the coin business has got too big for some of these vendors and they have bit off more then they think they can handle. Or they lose interest in the project and maybe are not as attentive as expectations from this side expects. Sorry to hear about your experience. What should be a fun and axciting project for you, and many others, sounds like it turns in to pure frustration. I really want to get a coin going that I have in mind. But I see for sure I need to really look in to all the angles before going forward and choose wisely.

It is amazing what can happen with geocoins sometimes. My first coin I released, RSFish1 Evil Micro , made it all of 13.8 miles and disappeared. I emailed the people that picked it up over a 2 month period and no replies even though they had been online. Always be polite and ask if there is anything you can do to help them move it on. Offer to send them a prepaid envelope to send it to you so you can move it. Life happens and sometimes people cannot get out any more to cache or health problems keep them in. Like many stories I have read, mine had a good ending. Almost 6 months later they found it in their caching bag and now it has over 1600 miles on it. There is always hope. Just be glad you have a log of who grabbed it. It's the coins that are grabbed and no one logs that they took it that seem to disappear forever.

I will jump in on this one. I am willing to wait 3, 4 or possibly more months with the one or more of the following caveats. A. I am told up front it is going to be X number of months before this coin is delivered. B. I am told of delays and it is a seller I feel I can trust to be telling me the truth. C. Unforseen medical/family problems happen to the seller and the coin is delayed. If it is communcated correctly and it is a coin I want, I will wait.

T"n"T-I have never heard anything bad about any of your delays and personally think you are one of the best at communicating any delays that happen. And it is sellers like you that I hope everyone knows that they can trust to do a presale through and if there are delays, they will be notified. Tsun-I am crossing my fingers that I never have to go through what you did. My goodness what a horrible experience. I knew it happened, but never had a clue of all the stupid hoops you had to jump through. And I checked flights to China to see if I could go and talk to them personally about the delays. I don't think it is worth the $1700-$3300 for the airfare. But thanks for the suggestion! I think several of us after sharing experiences here are getting the same idea of which vendors to watch out for. And the 44 day rule is starting to sound very tempting. But I would NEVER use it if I was kept up to date on any delays and how long those delays were expected to take. I also find it very interesting that none of the sellers who have been mentioned here have stepped forward with more information or dates. I did receive my Claddagh geocoins yesterday and they look great. Thanks for all the sellers who have stepped forward with their stories. I really appreciate it.

Tsun with your reputation and designs you could charge double and we would all still buy the coins. But on to your question, I think limiting them to one and charging half again more like some do is fine. You deserve to make a profit on them just as much as any body else. Keep the RE's at a reasonable cost and make some "fun" money on the LEs.

I appreciate the coin vendors that have stopped by and posted their experiences. I REALLY do want to know what you guys run in to when dealing with the mints. Making a change after seeing samples or adding a finish is something I had not thought of. I am not against pre-sales per se'. I have always been a person that communicates a lot, too much some people say. LOL And I am also a very curious person. I try to learn a little about everything. I know it's still early in this thread, but I still have not heard anything that explains what is TRULY happening at the mints at this time that explains the latest delays. I hope my gut feeling is wrong that the "delays at the mint" are just excuses and not the real reasons.

Now there is an interesting picture. Cabana Boys wearing cowboy hats and boots serving you NUTELLA covered grapes. Back on subject...I too was hoping to keep names of vendors out of this discussion and just hoping that we could hear from some of them on their own about what they are running in to. And to hopefully improve some of the communications from them. I agree with several things that Castleman and Tsun have said above and I am starting to learn which vendors are reliable and which ones seem to have a lot of excuses. But since I have heard the same excuse about 6 times in 3 months, it gets me to wondering what's going on if anything on the mint side. All of this will also help for when I go to get my first coin done. For those vendors that are having good luck with their minters, I know who I will be asking advise of to have as hassle free time as possible.

Well I have never went specifically for a geocoin. But my boss and I have went twice for a FTF on a new cache published in our area. And one did have 2 coins I had never logged so I did grab them and move them on their way. Oh and yes he probably will read this since he is sitting 20 feet away and looking at the forums too. Let's see if he notices or if he is too busy playing with his Rubix Cube?!? LOL

I doubt I would be offended by anyone defending the coin makers. But Atlanta Gal has mentioned a couple of the same ones I have been wondering about. It gets frustrating wondering what is going on and it would be nice to know why things are happening the way they are. And as I have read in many other posts, communication is the key to having a good business relationship as well as personal relationships. I am just hoping some coiners will take this as a constructive criticism and step up with a little better communication and let us know what frustrations they are running in to so I can understand a little better as to what they are going through. But when a website states for 2 months that coin ABC should be in on June 14th for shipping and here it is a month later, they have had my money for over 2 months, and there are still no updates, I would like to know what is going on.

I think this is the first topic I have ever started on here. It's more of a question for the people having coins made and a little bit of a venting session. There are several coins I have pre-ordered over 2 months ago that I still have not received. Of course with them being pre-sales, the money is out of our pocket all that time. And it's not just one company that these coins have been purchased from. All I keep hearing is troubles at the mint, delays at the mint, so on and so forth. I guess my question is what's going on? Are there new mints that people are trying and they are not living up to the standards? Are some of the old mints having quality control issues? Are there really mint issues or is this just an excuse being used? I know I have received coins from 2 different places that had serious issues and I had to send them back for refund/replacement. So I have seen some of the quality issues. But there just seem to be so many delays these days. Now for the venting part. To the people we buy coins from, please keep us informed about delays. Some companies are very good about this. Others I wait patiently on and then email because you never seem to get any updates. And still others you go out to their websites and they have a message saying "these are delayed and should be in shortly". But that same message is up for weeks at a time and their is no date stamp when they put the message up. It would be nice to get more status updates. I would rather hear "there are no new updates or ETA" then to hear silence.

PM sent.

Well not all of this is from today, and there are still a couple of trades coming in. But this is from the last 2 weeks. Work and life has been very busy and I haven't thanked everyone for the trades. I have to put this in to a link since the place I use for uploads does not want to load the images directly on to here. New Coins Thanks to everyone for the great trades and to Roddy for the 2 coins from his contest. I love nerds and I love geocoins that glow. Now I have one that does both! Thanks everyone!

Wow. I need a break from work. it's taking way too much time away from my forums time! LOL Lucky #29. Thanks Rod! Another coin for the collection!

Specifications-Approximately 1.75" Across, 5MM thickness, Antique Gold. I believe this finish may be reminted plus one more.

I know a Koi breeder in Ohio. I know they have visitors now and then to their koi ponds. But they will check you for forks, knives and wasabi before you can enter!