As some know, I’ve been more or less active in stamp trading / exchanging for nearly two decades. Below are some of my personal experiences and opinions about the fine art of stamp trading.

Trading stamp by packets

Let’s begin with the traditional stamp trading. With this I mean “sent me 100 stamps and I’ll sent you 100 of mine” kind of trades, which are often referred as packet trades.

Personally I’m not very enthusiastic if somebody suggests a stamp trade like this. I have had some good experiences as well as some really bad ones. You never know what to expect – which is both good and bad. With packet trades trades approx. ¼ up to ½ of offered stamps have been what I really need, the rest (meaning 50-75% of stamps) have been either junk bin material (damaged etc) or something I already have or don’t want.

The good side of this trade type is easiness. You just pack 100 (or more) stamps and sent them away to your swap partner, and in return you get (hopefully) 100 different stamps.

Trading stamps by wantlists

Another very popular stamp trade type are wantlists. In practice this means posting (more or less long) numerical lists of stamps wanted to trade partners. The benefit of this kind of trading is that one usually gets precisely the items wanted (at some point).

Wantlists are IMO fine IF one has all the extra stamps sorted out by catalogue number and country wise. But for a worldwide stamp collector like me – with mile high wantlists (and equally large duplicates box) – this kind of swap is usually simply a not attractive.

One of the major headaches with wantlists are different catalogue numbers. Scott, Michel, SG etc. each has unique numbering system – the numbers game works only if both parties use the same stamp catalogue. And with worldwide stamps, that is very rarely the case.

Trading stamps by images

My personal favorite is image based stamp trading. In this both swap parties scan the images of stamps they have, then the images are exchanged (using email, photosharing website etc) and both share information on what items they’d like to have. In addition there’s usually a loose rule of “1:1 of the same kind” (meaning a commemorative equals a commemorative, defin equals a defin etc.) with the exception of better items that need to be judged stampwise.

I admit, it does have much more work than sending 100-250 random stamps by snailmail. Organizing everything just for a single trade easily takes a whole working day; but in return you usually end up having 200-300 new stamps.

Closing words

Every trading system has it’s downsides and strengths, and in the end personal preferences matter. What’s your take on stamp trading? Do you prefer some method over another, and why?

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