1. USA Coin Book
2. Updates, Upgrades and News

USA Coin Book: Major Updates, Upgrades and News

February 13, 2024

2024 Update: New Categories - Updated mintage/price figures

All new 2024 coin categories have been added and the mintage figures for coins are now up to to date through 2024 based on the most recently updated US Mint sales figures provided February 4, 2024. As always, we will not list any of current year mintages until next year, although you can monitor them using the encyclopedia link above for current mintage/sales figures released each week by the US Mint. Lots of new example photos are also available, and the price guide is also updated. We will continue adding new photos and update the encyclopedia throughout the year as they become available.

We have also completed a number of background updates on the server and may be adding an additional server later in the year due to the increasing traffic volume.

March 10, 2023

2023 Update: New Categories - Updated mintage/price figures

We've just completed the vast majority of the major updates, including the new categories for all known 2023 coin releases. We've added a new major Bullion category: American Palladium Eagles and added the new Palladium metal prices and melt values to the main Coin Melt Values page.

All of the mintage figures are up to date through 2023 based on the most recently updated US Mint sales figures provided February 26, 2023. As always, we will not list any of current 2023 mintages until next year, although you can monitor them using the encyclopedia link above for current mintage/sales figures released each week by the US Mint. Lots of new example photos are also available, and the price guide is also updated.

We've completed a number of other background updates, including migrating the site to a completely new server architecture over the last few months. We will likely be adding advanced search capabilities in the next few weeks or so. We'll also keep an eye out for more coin info, images and other important information to add to the site throughout the year.

October 5, 2022

Ongoing DDoS Attack

Our humble coin collecting website is currently being hit by a massive DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. Yesterday, we were sent a message by the attacker to pay a $3000 bitcoin ransom to stop the attacks (which we will not pay). We were able to knock out the attack ourselves for a short time yesterday. However, they returned today with a far more massive DDoS attack of a different kind. We now have the server protected by Cloudflare and USA Coin Book appears to be working normally again. Cloudflare has done an excellent job of mitigating the attack, so there will "most likely" be no more DDoS disruptions from here on out. Users may have to complete "I am not a robot" captcha challenges for a short time, and then we can disable these attack mode settings after the attacker leaves for good.

The full size of the attack is still being investigated. The attack is still ongoing at a very strong pace, even as the site continues to operate normally. From the data that we see, the attacker is sending over 20 million hits through hundreds of thousands of IP addresses to the site every hour (or 5,500+ simultaneous page hits each and every second). The vast majority of botnet servers appear to be based out of China and the surrounding Asian countries, as well as from Russia and Eastern Europe. However, the attacker could be based anywhere and using those foreign servers to mask their true region of origin. It's very possible that the attacker does not like the "USA" in "USA Coin Book", which is why they decided to target us.

Important note: User data is safe and secure. We never store credit/debit card data, nor PayPal passwords on USA Coin Book, all sensitive payment information of that kind is stored and handled exclusively on PayPal's secure servers! DDoS attackers are different than hackers trying to steal information. DDoS attacks are designed to overwhelm popular website servers so that they crash and prevent normal visitors from using the website. Usually, they do this to either troll websites and/or demand ransoms be paid to end the attack.

June 7, 2022

New Bulk Editor

Due to much feedback and feature suggestion requests, we have finally released a new bulk editor for item listings. At the moment, this feature is limited and we may add a few additional fields in the future. To access the new feature, you must first login and click the "My Coin Book" button at the top of the page and select the new "Bulk Editor" link. The link is made available on the standard editing interface as well and your Coin Book Admin Options dropdown list.

The bulk editor will display a basic, editable list of all fixed-priced sales listings all in one place. This means it cannot support auction, wishlist and collection formatted listings. Only live items or items in Vacation Mode can be edited. The editor will only allow sellers to edit the item sales prices and shipping methods/prices. Sales prices can only be edited individually. However, shipping methods and prices (primary price and additional item price) can all be bulk edited to a single value. For example, if you have 1000 coins for sale and you want to increase the your primary shipping price from $3.00 to $3.50, you can enter this new amount into the "edit all" field and it will be applied across all items in your inventory. So if you have to edit shipping prices, it is no longer necessary to edit listings one at a time.

After you've finished editing, you can click the "Save Changes" button to apply the changes to your listings. You can click the "Reset / Restart" button to reload the page if something goes wrong. Lastly, we do keep a limited-time backup on our end of your current item attributes when the "Save Changes" button is clicked, just in case a bulk update goes wrong. As always with any new major update, please report any bugs or problems with the bulk editor.

January 20, 2022

2022 Update: New Categories - Updated mintage/price figures

Most of the major updates are done, which includes the new categories for all known 2022 coin releases. The biggest addition to the site is the new American Women Quarters series, which honors notable women in American history. This new series will run from 2022 through 2025.

In addition, we've added the 100th anniversary Morgan and Peace dollars to the main Morgan Silver Dollars and Peace Silver Dollars categories. Originally, these coins were going to be a 1-year commemorative issue. However, due to popular demand, the US Mint intends to extend mintage of these coins indefinitely into a series, with various coin finishes in the future as well. So we've added the 2021 and 2022 categories for these coins. We will keep an eye out for the new coin finishes that the Mint may decide to produce, and add these categories later in the year if there is any news.

We've also organized and separated the American Silver Eagles and American Gold Eagles into their Type 1 and Type 2 varieties in the categories and price charts.

Lastly, all of the mintages are up to date through 2021 based on the most recently updated US Mint sales figures from 4 days ago (January 16th, 2022). New photos and the price guide are also updated as well. In addition, we've made a few minor changes in the background to help with site navigation and usage, and will continue ongoing work to help improve the site. We will keep an eye out for new coin releases from the US Mint later in the year, as well as new photo examples for the coin encyclopedia.

October 30, 2021

Shopping Cart Update - Minor New Features

Last week on October 23rd, we completed a major backend redesigning of the shopping cart and the "make an offer" cart. On the shopping cart page itself, not much has changed as 99% of the update was done in the background with the programming. This was done to address some occasional strange behavior that a small handful of customers reported, rare invoice anomalies, occasional issues with cookies/sessions and related browser anomalies, and makes it easier for us to troubleshoot user issues/questions, makes the cart more user-friendly, etc.

Minor new features:

• When an item sells out or gets deleted, the customer will now receive a notification in the cart of what was removed and from what seller, so they can look for a replacement item.
• When the quantity of an item is reduced to less than what the customer wants, the customer also receive a notification in the cart describing the changes before the cart automatically reduces quantity.
• Shopping Cart and "Make An Offer" Cart no longer stores item and seller data in cookies/sessions and now stores data long-term in the database. This means users can browse anonymously, add items to their cart and we'll keep track shopping cart items much longer (years even) until they clear their browser cookies. After login or complete user registration, those items will be attached to their account and will remain permanently in their cart until items are removed, deleted or sold out. This will should help make it more convenient for buyers and improve sales for sellers.

The most prominent new feature: Due to the design of the new shopping cart, we found that it is now easily possible for us to display on item listing pages how many customers have the item in their shopping cart. In the shopping cart, customers can view how many other customers have that item in their shopping cart. Important Note: We display the count based on registered users only. Although we keep track of items in the shopping cart for anonymous users (and logged out users), we do not use these in the count that gets displayed to the public, nor do we count sellers who put their own items in their carts. This is to prevent inaccurate or manipulated count figures.

The goal of displaying how many customers have an item in their cart, is to help induce sales for sellers, show which items appear to be popular, or will result in imminent sales. It also gives customers an early warning that an item might be selling out soon to a different customer, so they may be more inclined to purchase sooner rather than later. Note however that some customers can keep items in their cart as a "watch list" to keep track of them for purchasing options, comparisons, or purchase ideas later on, so it doesn't mean these items will sell immediately.

Any feedback from sellers is greatly appreciated regarding the new display on their item listings of how many customers have items in their cart. While this was intended to be a bonus to help increase sales volume for sellers during the holiday season and afterwards, we still want to make sure that this is actually a good feature to have, or if it instead ends up being counterproductive and should be removed. Note that the day after we released the new cart update, USA Coin Book had the 2nd largest single-day sales volume for our sellers in our site's 11-year history and largest single-day sales volume in over a year. We'll keep an eye on feedback as well as longer-term sales count statistics as this update settles in for a little while longer.

February 16, 2021

2021 Update: Coin Values/Mintage Figures Updated, New Categories

We just finished updating the coin values for 2021 and finished adding the rest of the categories for the preliminary schedule of 2021 coins. These are subject to change depending on new information from the US Mint. In addition, we've also added new coin images and all new mintage figures up to 2020 for the newer coins. On that same note, we fixed our US Mint Sales Figures and Mintage Figures tool, which is what we use to come up with the most recent mintage figures for 2019-2020 coins and their proof mintages, along with the final official mintage figures when the Mint stops selling items. All mintage figures on USA Coin Book are current as of February 7, 2021 when the latest US Mint sales data was released. If you haven't already known, this tool automatically checks the US Mint daily for any updates on their sales figures, and saves the new data to be shown on our tool, for everyone to use.

The America The Beautiful Quarters program is coming to a close in 2021, with only the Tuskegee Airmen quarter being released. The US Mint plans on restoring John Flanagan's original design for the obverse of the quarter (used from 1932-1998) and adding the "Washington Crossing The Delaware" design to the reverse. This is going to be the new permanent design for the US quarter until at least 2022 when Congress may possibly consider a new 56 States/Territories quarter series. In case you are wondering where the new category will be on USA Coin Book, the 2021 quarter will be added to the original Washington Quarters page for now.

In addition, the US Mint will be issuing new designs for the first time since 1986 for the American Silver Eagles and American Gold Eagles later in the year. Both the old design and new designs are being released in 2021, so the categories and coin info may update later on. At the moment, the categories for both old and new designs are available.

February 21, 2020

2020 Update: Coin Values Updated, New Categories, New US Mint Sales Data Tool

If you haven't already noticed yet, we've added the new 2020 coin categories and finished updating our coin values/prices. In addition, there are also a few missing 2019 coin categories from the previous year that are now included. We have most of the example photos for the new coins added as well, and will add the rest as they become available.

We spent a lot of time trying to find the correct and proper mintage figures for many of the special coins, proof coins and sets being released over the past few years. It is very difficult to find these figures anywhere, and some of the data provided by the US Mint is also very difficult and time consuming to keep track of on a week-by-week basis. Because of this, we developed a new program that automatically records and analyses the latest and most accurate data directly from the US Mint, and displays it into a more useful, interactive table. Our new page is located here: US Mint Cumulative Sales Figures and Mintage Data Analysis. We've used this as a tool to get the most accurate mintage figures (much more easily) into our own coin tables.

Hopefully, this will be a very useful reference tool for collectors and investors who are interested in this kind of data. This data includes the cumulative sales figures (and eventually final mintage figures) of every US Mint product, including commemorative coins, coin sets and individual numismatic items, going back to around 2015, up to the present. This interactive tool can be sorted by column and filtered by keywords, such by year or the name of a coin program. You can also seek the weekly sales volume for each individual Mint product. For more information about how we get our mintage figures, visit our encyclopedia page: How to get the most recent mintage figures from the US Mint. The US mintage figures featured on USA Coin Book are now some of the most accurate and updated mintage figures found anywhere. However, keep in mind that the most recent mintage figures in our coin value tables are added manually once per year. Some numismatic coins for 2017, 2018 and 2019 (i.e. coins being sold directly by the US Mint, such as proof coins, silver proofs, San Francisco Mint coins, sets, American Eagles, etc.) are still being sold in 2020. We are using the current, running cumulative sales figure for these coins in our coin tables (it is not final). This means the mintage figures will still be changed on our site in the future, as described in our encyclopedia page. Once the US Mint stops selling that product, the final cumulative sales figure becomes the "set in stone" mintage figure that goes into the history book. However, mintage figures for all common circulating coins and bullion coins (those without mint marks), become final at the end of the production year, and those will not change!

January 19, 2019

2019 Update: New Categories & Updated Prices/Mintage Figures

Happy New Year 2019 to everyone! We've just completed a major update of USA Coin Book. We've updated the numismatic prices throughout the site and some of the more recent mintage figures have been updated as well. In addition, we've added all of the new images for 2018 coins and a few of the 2019 coin images that we could find.

In addition, we've added all of the new categories for 2019 coins and a few more recent individual categories for 2017 and 2018 enhanced uncirculated coinage and reverse proofs. The newest and most major addition is a new dollar coin series that was just released by the US Mint: American Innovation $1 Coin Program. This is a multi-year series that began in 2018 with 1 introductory coin and will continue up until 2032. Starting in 2019, there will be 4 coins released each year. Each coin features a unique design commemorating an American innovation or innovator in each US State. The coins will be released in the order that each US State/Territory joined the Union - similar to how the 50 State Quarters program worked. These coins will be golden dollars just like the Presidential Dollars and Sacagawea Dollars. More information about this series can be found in our coin encyclopedia, including which States will be out in each year and a US coin map: American Innovation Dollars.

We will continue to keep an eye out for newer mintage figures and images as they are released.

December 20, 2018

Photo Uploading Server Fixed

Due to recent, ongoing network problems with our hosting service, we have migrated our photo uploading server over to a new web hosting company. Photo uploading now appears to be working normally again. This should also fix numerous slowdown issues and errors throughout the site that were related to the server network issues. Please note that there could still be a few temporary glitches/errors over the next 24 hours as the DNS server IP changes are still propagating across the internet.

March 27, 2018

New Server Migration

We finished migrating our server to a much faster and more modern cloud server, which is much more powerful and greatly reduces costs for us at the same time. There should be a noticeable increase in site speed. The benefits include better conversions for seller, an increase in traffic and better user experience. However, even though we completed the major updates, there are still a few minor bugs to work out. Here are a few things to look out for, along with possible fixes:

1) Missing emails. There was a glitch today that prevented automated messages from getting sent out and possibly some support emails from reaching us. However, all notifications of sales are always saved in your USA Coin Book private message inbox on-site. Please check your USA Coin Book private message inbox on the site for new sales or contact information which did not arrive by email during the past 24 hours. There may still be a delay in email notifications for the next day or so depending on each email service.

2) All images are gone. The images are actually working fine. However, because of moving everything over to a CDN cloud server with new URLs, some browsers may still have the old image files/URLs in cache - which no longer exist at the old URLs. Please clear your browser cache so the browser can reload the new image locations. The site is currently working fine with the images.

3) Error uploading images. Some users today reported images not uploading for items. We have investigated this and it was due to our new server canceling the script too early for the larger images. After some server tweaks, this is fixed now and photo uploading can resume normally.

4) Various "Forbidden" Errors. We are aware of these errors and will be keeping an eye on them in the logs. This is related to our new server's security settings for page requests and sending messages or submitting listings/edits. The security script is a bit sensitive and tends to report more false-positives than we would like. Over time, we should be able to tune the settings to prevent these from happening as often.

As always with any major update, please let us know if you experience any major issues or persistent bugs not described here.

January 21, 2018

2018 Update: New Prices and Coins

Happy New Year 2018 to everyone! We just rolled out a site-wide update of the coin prices for 2018. In addition, we also added categories for the scheduled upcoming 2018 coins & sets from each Mint, estimated prices and example photos. These 2018 coins can now be listed on USA Coin Book as soon as they become available from the US Mint. Later in the year, we will add photos for the remaining 2018 coins into our encyclopedia as they become available.

We've also updated mintage figures and photos for various coins in previous years, as there is a lag in the official reporting of these figures for more recent years, so we will try to update these as they become available. All coins should be updated up through 2018 as best as possible.

January 3, 2017

2017 Update: New Prices and Coins

Happy New Year 2017 to everyone! We just rolled out a site-wide update of the coin prices for 2017. In addition, we also added categories for the predicted upcoming 2017 coins/sets from each Mint and estimated prices, so these new coins can be listed on USA Coin Book as soon as they become available from the US Mint. Later in the year, we will add photos for each of the 2017 coins into our encyclopedia as they become available.

We also included some more of the 2015 and 2016 coins to our categories as well, specifically the Presidential Dollar special Reverse Proof varieties along with estimated prices. We also included photos of various coins in 2016 and included them to our encyclopedia as well, so all of the coins should be updated up to 2017.

August 8, 2016

New Image Editing Interface

Due to recent complaints and issues with images disappearing, we've finally finished researching and developing a new image editing interface. This new interface should be much more user-friendly, faster and more intuitive. Most importantly, it should completely eliminate the problem of images disappearing unexpectedly during edits. As always, with any major upgrade, please let us know if you experience any bugs or glitches related to the new changes.

June 7, 2016

Exclude Shipping Locations - Finished Coin Pictures

We've released another major update today that now allows sellers to restrict shipping locations for their sales. The new feature can be found in your Account Settings under the "Exclude Shipping Locations" field. Sellers can exclude shipping locations based on entire regions, specific countries, or outlying regions of the US. By default, United States Mainland is enabled and cannot be excluded.

When shipping zones are excluded on your account, the settings will be applied to all items that you have for sale and the excluded locations will be clearly and publicly displayed on your item listings in the "Payment and Shipping Details" section. Buyers who reside in an excluded region who attempt to purchase your items, bid on auctions or make offers on your items - will automatically be declined with an explanatory message. This feature should greatly help sellers who do not offer international shipping and will help prevent inconvenient purchases that end up requiring cancellations and refunds.

In addition, we have finally completed the USA Coin Book image gallery, which consists of nearly 6,000 high quality example images of every individual US coin ever made, based on year, mint mark and major varieties. However, there are still a few 2016 coin images missing as we are waiting for the US Mint to release them later on in the year. This provides an excellent encyclopedic coin book resource for those who are searching for example images of US coins on the internet and also provides sellers with additional exposure for their listings when visitors come across these pages on the net.

As always, with any new and major updates, please let us know if you experience any bugs or glitches with the new shipping restriction features.

May 24, 2016

Editing Coin Book in Vacation Mode

Due to a number of suggestions and feedback, we've rolled out an update to allow members to edit their coin books while in vacation mode. Typically, items within the coin books and categories will remain hidden in vacation (except for the specific item pages themselves), and items cannot be purchased, nor can anyone bid on them while an item is in vacation mode.

With the new update, these items will appear live in member's coin books as they would normally, although they will only be seen by the page owner. Not only can inventory be deleted, but item prices and details can now be edited as well. This should greatly help with administering items in order to prevent purchasing of items that may have already been sold offline, or if there is an emergency that requires the entire store to be shut down and the items to be revised.

As always with any new and major update, please let us know if any bugs or glitches appear with the new changes.

February 2, 2016

Coin Prices Update - New 2016 Categories

We've finished rolling out an update of the numismatic coin prices in our coin value charts for all coins. This includes both the numismatic factor and also the precious metal (melt) value factors used in the coin's value. In addition, we've also added around 100 new category slots for all of the 2016 coins. So sellers should now be able to add 2016 coins to USA Coin Book.

December 23, 2015

Upgraded coin melt values page - added values for individual coin pages

We've finished adding a new feature for the individual coin pages. All pages that list an individual coin will now have a green "melt value" displayed under the numismatic value table. Even though our numismatic values table updates on a live basis depending on spot prices for gold, silver, platinum and copper metal, the melt value will also update on a live basis to give collectors an idea of what the bare minimum value of their coin is based on the coin's metal content. This can be extremely useful for coming up with a value for old coins that are too heavily worn to identify, help collectors get an idea of defining what the "metal" value of the coin is vs the "numismatic" premium, and for bullion investors who want to value their coins based on metal content alone.

We've also straightened a few things out with our primary coin melt values page. First, we corrected the date ranges in which a specific type of coin was produced in. They were correct not too long ago, but unfortunately there was an error that caused the dating range on a number of coins to get thrown out of whack. We've also fixed a few calculator issues with pictures for a few specific coins not loading up properly.

Lastly, we are finally getting back on track to finish locating example images and variety/error diagnostic images for each individual coin in our charts, so hopefully we get all of these up in the following weeks or months. Images, along with the new coin melt value updates, should help attract more collectors and interest to these pages. As always with any major update, let us know if there are any major problems with the new melt values feature.

October 1, 2015

Passing of longtime member CatchPennyCoins

It is with regret and sadness that we announce the passing of longtime USA Coin Book member C. L. Wyatt (catchpennycoins) who lost his fight with cancer. C. L. Wyatt was another one of our top dealers on USA Coin Book who sold coins to hundreds of members in our community. C. L. Wyatt from Daytona Beach, was very knowledgeable and passionate about numismatics and coins. He was also very kind and helpful to others and worked very hard to make his customers happy and make fair deals.

Rich from RnRcoins, a long-time friend of C. L. Wyatt, will be managing his catchpennycoins account here on USA Coin Book, so please contact Rich if you need any further information or help with your orders.

Thank you and God bless you C. L. Wyatt and your family. You will be missed here by many.
- USA Coin Book

July 3, 2015

Passing of longtime member Bruce

It is with regret and sadness that we announce the passing of longtime USA Coin Book member Bruce Schlink who lost his fight with cancer. Bruce was our Top Coin Dealer and Seller on USA Coin Book who sold coins to, and dealt with, nearly 1000 members of our community. Bruce, former President of the Lafayette Numismatic Society in Indiana, was very knowledgeable and passionate about numismatics and coins. He was also very kind and helpful to others, worked very hard to make his customers happy and make fair deals, and took time to educate others in the field of numismatics.

Thank you and God bless you Bruce, your wife Denese and family. You will be missed here by many.
- USA Coin Book

***** USA Coin Book 2.0 Released! *****

May 20, 2015

Major Update - New design and features

We are happy to announce the release of USA Coin Book 2.0. This is our design update since the beginning of USA Coin Book. The entire site has been overhauled with a sleek, new design. One of the most noticeable changes is larger and clearer images of coin listings. This new design change makes our site "mobile-friendly". This means that visitors using mobile devices such as iPhones, Android, iPad, tablets and any other devices, will be able to browse coin prices and use every page of our site. This includes buying and selling using a mobile device - which opens up a major user base of potential buyers. When you are on the go, you can quickly look up coin prices on a phone as well!

We've added a few additional features to the site as well based on suggestions and demand. Users can now look up recent sales and realized auction prices and other sales prices on USA Coin Book here: Recent sales on USA Coin Book, or through the link at the bottom of the page.

On the product listing pages where coins are listed for sale, we've added a magnifier so members can zoom in on coins by simply using the mouse and hovering the cursor over the image, instead of requiring each full image to be opened up. However, visitors can still click on the image to view the full images.

Also on the listing pages, a list of related items is displayed towards the bottom of the listing. If you have similar items listed for sale, a few of these will also be displayed for potential buyers to view, along with items from different sellers as well. This should hopefully increase the number of sales and interest by collectors looking for coins.

We also made a slight change with our checkout system, particularly for sellers who have chosen to collect Sales Taxes. When a buyer goes through checkout, sales tax will automatically be charged based on the buyer's shipping location when compared to the seller's sale tax location set during configuration.

There were a number of background changes done to help speed the site up and make it more compatible with virtually every internet browsing device. We will continue working on other updates that we plan on adding in the future. As always with any new and major update, please let us know if you experience any problems or glitches.

March 1, 2015

New Seller Features and Invoice Tools

Over the past month, we've added a number of new seller features/tools to USA Coin Book, which should help ease the listing and selling process. You may have noticed some of these recently, but we will detail some of the new features below.

Sellers can now add Tracking Numbers to invoices. These tracking numbers will appear on the list of buyer purchase invoices and seller sold invoices. If a major shipping carrier is used such as USPS, UPS, FedEx or DHL, buyers can click on the tracking number and view the status of shipment directly from the carrier's tracking number page. Sellers now have options to Mark an invoice as "Shipped" or "Not Shipped" to help with sales organization.

Sellers can also now add Additional Charges and Discounts to existing invoices. This comes in handy if you need to add international shipping charges or extra insurance charges at the buyer's request. In addition, sellers can enter a negative amount (-$5.00 for example) and this will minus or discount a charge off the total amount. A description note of the additional charge/discount can also be added to the invoice as well. Once the charge has been added, the buyer will receive a private message notification and an email notification letting them know about the updated invoice. Please note that you may want to describe in your item description and/or shipping policy to check out the items but hold off on actual payment until you can update the invoice. Once an invoice is updated, buyers can login and click the "Make Payment" link on their invoice page (if they choose to pay with PayPal), and they will be redirected to PayPal along with the updated invoice and new total cost to pay.

Members can now edit and update their main categories for their coin listings. In addition, there is now a "Add similar item" link on item pages. This will allow members to partially "clone" or copy a listing without having to copy and paste everything for every new item listing. Main USA Coin Book categories and store categories will be pre-selected during the copying phase, although you can now edit these categories as well. This is especially helpful if you have a number of similar items to list.

Invoices now have a "Print Invoice / Packing Slip" link for sellers. You can now print a clean packing slip, formatted for printing, directly through USA Coin Book to be included with your shipment and with your records.

As with any new major updates, please let us know if you experience any error messages, glitches or broken features and we will try to correct these as soon as possible. In the meantime, we are currently researching ways to make our site "mobile-friendly" as a significant number of our users are now using mobile devices to browse our site. We recently made a small change to allow our site to be displayed without the requirement of needing to zoom in (although it requires users to scroll horizontally). Any feedback regarding this small temporary change would be appreciated, at least until we make our site truly "mobile-friendly".

December 3, 2014

Upgraded Database Servers - Upgraded Cookies and Login Session

We were able to get our database servers upgraded and migrated to a private system dedicated just for USA Coin Book and a few of our sites in our network, such as UniSquare. Initially, it appears that USA Coin Book is now loading up noticeably faster, ridiculously fast in some cases now. We hope our members and visitors also notice a faster website. In addition, we now have an "ocean" of server resources available, which should help clear up occasional slowdown problems and should be able to handle extremely heavy traffic loads at levels many times higher than we have at the moment. We hope the speed stays consistent throughout the day and in the coming days ahead, and will continue to keep an eye on the new server.

In addition, we recently upgraded our cookies and session login scripts over the past few weeks. Most of this is backend behind-the-scenes activity. We upgraded the cookies to make them more secure and to make the login session more secure. Some members have noticed login problems, which is likely due to old cookies still in the web browser. To members having problems, please visit our logout page directly by clicking the following link: (Click Here To Log Out and Clear Cookies). This link should clear out any USA Coin Book cookies in your browser and any old login sessions. Once this is done, login again and you should receive the new secure cookies and login session. If this does not work, please clear your browser cache/cookies in addition to logging out and then see if it works. As always with any new update, please contact us if you are experiencing problems with the new updates.

December 2, 2014

Site Downtime and Completed Auctions

We greatly apologize for the site downtime yesterday and the day before. We are working with our hosting provider to upgrade our private database server and prevent this problem from happening again. We've already made a few other changes to our scripts to help reduce the chance of another overload.

In addition, we recognize that some sellers had auctions listed for sale which ended after the USA Coin Book servers crashed and also had bidders bidding on those auctions. We understand the unfairness and inconvenience of these auctions ending without giving other bidders a chance to bid in these auctions. Please contact us if you have any completed auctions that need to be canceled, we will be happy to help.

August 20, 2014

New and Improved Search Engine - Much Quicker and More Accurate!

Due to the recent massive increase in traffic volume and the number of new item listings on our sister-site UniSquare, our original search engine was beginning to slow down quite a bit and was becoming less accurate. Because of this, we pushed up our search engine upgrade to top priority. Due to the success of testing and user approval, we've gone ahead and integrated the new search engine into USA Coin Book as well!

Our new shiny, chrome-plated search engine is now live! Search queries across nearly 50,000 coin listings now load up in less than a second in most cases. Equally enjoyable is a much more accurate result list that appears during search queries. This upgrade also applies to the individual store search engine script. If you've built a customized store on USA Coin Book, the store search engine will also be faster and more accurate. This new search engine means buyers will be able to quickly find what they are looking for - hence a higher probability of items getting sold and successful sales for USA Coin Book sellers - and happy buyers!

Our new search engine searches for keywords found in the titles, descriptions, coin denomination, coin type, coin certification agency name and number, coin grade and the seller username related to each item. If you want your items found in the USA Coin Book search queries, place a few key words in your item description that a buyer might search for. This is why you don't want to leave your description empty! Not only will this help your items get found in our powerful USA Coin Book search engine, but also in major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing where millions more people are searching.

As always with any new update, please contact us if you experience any bugs, glitches and errors related to the new update.

May 21, 2014

Coin Prices and Values Update - New Feature

We've just completed a major update on the coin prices and values on USA Coin Book. During the update, we've also corrected a few small errors and inconsistencies with our coin mintage figures, mints and prices. We've added a number of new coins, slightly altered a few category names and added a brand new bullion category for the 5oz America The Beautiful Bullion Coins, which are larger versions of the America the Beautiful Quarters in the form of Silver Bullion. Both the numismatic factor of the prices and the intrinsic metal values have been factored in. In addition, we will continue adding more images and additional content throughout the site.

In addition, we've added a new feature called "Quick Page Admin Options" to all listings based on suggested feedback from members. Basically, when you have coins for sale and they are listed in "My Coin Book" and elsewhere throughout the site, there will now be a grey bar that includes Admin options that include an Edit Link, Delete link and the Page ID number reference. When you are logged in, you will see these links only on your own listings, they are hidden from anyone else. When you want to edit a listing, you can now click the quick edit link on the item listing to be taken directly to the edit page, without having to click the actual item first. You can quickly delete an item in the same way if the item sold out elsewhere and needs to be removed from USA Coin Book.

October 27, 2013

*** Major Update *** - Make an Offer - Bundle Builder

Due to high demand and the number of suggestions, we've finally added the "Make an Offer" feature to USA Coin Book. This feature is now available only for Buy It Now (fixed-priced) items. During the item listing process, sellers will now see a check box under the item quantity and selling price. Clicking the check box will allow buyers to make offers on your items.

When buyers attempt to make an offer, the item gets added into a separate shopping cart called the "Bundle Builder". In this cart, buyers can add a group of coins together and make a bundle offer an on entire lot. In addition, this cart will keep track of one or more coins from multiple sellers that you would like to make offers for, similar to the normal cart. Buyers can then checkout their offer by selecting the payment method they would like to use, add a shipping address and additional notes before submitting the final offer to the seller.

Once an offer is submitted, the seller will receive an instant email notice of the offer. They can then review it in an the standard invoice format. At the bottom of the invoice there are two choices: "Accept Offer" or "Decline Offer", with an additional text box to add optional comments. After making a choice, the buyer will be notified of whether their offer was accepted or declined and the comments will appear on the offer invoice.

If the offer is accepted by the seller, the sale will be completed instantly. Since the offer contains the shipping details, payment method and all necessary information, the invoice will be created and finalized, and the buyer will be notified instantly by email. The buyer can then login later and view their Purchase Invoices and click the "Make Payment" link under the "Options" column in order to complete the payment on the invoice. If the buyer is not paying by PayPal, they can submit their check, money order or arrange their payment method chosen during the offer.

As always, with any new major upgrade, please let us know if you notice any glitches or issues with the new features.

October 16, 2013

US Coin Encyclopedia Expansion - New Copper Coin Calculator - New eBay Feedback Importer

USA Coin Book has recently made a number of changes throughout the site. We made a major content addition to our coin encyclopedia and added a number of popular US coin series and programs. On this page and the main encyclopedia page are a list of links to each of the major modern coin series, such as the 50 State Quarters Program, America the Beautiful Quarters Series, Presidential Dollar Program, Native American Sacagawea Dollars Series, American Platinum Eagles Series, First Spouse Gold Coin Series, Westward Journey Nickels Program and the Bicentennial Lincoln Cents Program.

The pages on these series contains some of the highest quality images, photos, pictures and details found anywhere, including the color coded maps, mintages, names of the designers, sculptors and engravers and just about any other information on these commemorative coins. In addition, we've expanded our primary coin listing pages to include default images of the designs for all of these coins, so collectors can view what they look like in higher detail.

Due to high demand, we've also added the US copper coin melt value calculator so folks can now calculate the melt value of any US copper coin ever made (coins made primarily of copper). This is incredibly popular among copper bullion investors interested in the pre-1982 Lincoln cents made of 95% copper. In addition, we've updated a number of the coin prices and values throughout the site.

We've also added more security to our marketplace. Recently, a few scammers have been abusing the eBay feedback history (honor system) feature by manually inserting fake eBay usernames and fake feedback count records. To combat this, we've integrated the eBay API into USA Coin Book for importing feedback. To import your feedback, simply login and click "My Coin Book" >> "Edit Profile" and browse down to the "Import eBay Feedback" field and click the "Edit" link. You will then be prompted to visit the link to import/update your eBay feedback. This will redirect you to eBay, where you will be required to login, verify your account at eBay and then give USA Coin Book permission to import your feedback. Your verified eBay User ID and total feedback score count will then be imported into USA Coin Book. Please note that we cannot import the feedback comments themselves, only the numerical score. You can update this score at any time by clicking the import/update eBay feedback link again, and you may also remove your eBay feedback record from USA Coin Book at any time.

We have not modified or deleted any eBay feedback history for past and current members. All new members and current members who want to edit their eBay feedback history, must go through the eBay verification process to get their true, verified eBay feedback imported as it can no longer be manually entered.

*** Major Update *** - Google Checkout Retired

Google has announced that they will be retiring Google Checkout, their online payment processor, on November 20th, 2013. Unfortunately, USA Coin Book is forced to no longer support Google Checkout as a payment method on the site. Google does not plan on developing an alternative, so will continue to look for an alternative. Most likely, we will try integrating Amazon Checkout as a future alternative. To any members who were accepting Google Checkout, we have modified your account's payment methods and removed any Google Checkout info. We are announcing this now to give time for members to adapt to the new changes before the major holiday season begins and during the time when Google Checkout would shut down.

In other updates, a few weeks ago, USA Coin Book modified the PayPal online payment processor due to complaints by some buyers. Buyers had reported that PayPal was not appearing and not allowing them to complete payments. We found that this was largely due to buyer's internet browser blocking popups, which is how PayPal loads up. We talked with PayPal and they modified their API scripts to prevent this and we also made additional changes to prevent problems such as this. So far, there have been 0 complaints regarding this issue since the new changes.

On August 1, 2013, the USA Coin Book servers were upgraded and pages now load much faster. Google statistics show that our servers allow pages to load up in 1/4th the time that they previously loaded up in. In addition, we made many backend changes throughout the site, which allows the pages to load up faster, improve efficiency and provide stronger scalability for our recent tremendous growth. We've change certain color layouts to make them less of an eyesore and have altered individual product URLs to make them more SEO-friendly, meaning they will show up higher in search results, ultimately drawing in more traffic and sales. The old, shortened URLs will still work just fine as well.

In addition, you may have noticed new changes in our US Coin Encyclopedia and coin denomination/type pages over the last few days. We've added a new section that includes biographies which honor and tell the history of our US coin designers and engravers. This page features all of the most prominent coin designers, sculptors and artists throughout US history - the people behind and responsible for designing all of our US coinage. This list ultimately will grow in the future as we work on more content within our encyclopedia. Again, this should help draw in more people to USA Coin Book!

On August 6th, 2013, USA Coin Book celebrated it's 3rd anniversary. Traffic and sales have more-than tripled in volume since this time last year! We hope to continue that strong growth and trend over the next year and beyond!

December 20, 2012

Email Contact Notifications Delayed - Payment Statuses Changed

Members have contacted us about delays in email notifications, never receiving emails and contact questions not reaching USA Coin Book. We were able to track down some potential problems on the server which were causing some messages to be blocked. We believe it should be fixed, but please let us know if messages are not making it through.

In addition, the payment status within the invoicing system have been changed a little. From now on, all default payment statuses will be initially "Marked as Unpaid" instead of "Marked as Paid". PayPal's API lets us know if a payment was completed, so any invoices successfully paid with PayPal will change to "Marked as Paid" automatically. For Google Checkout, Checks, Money Orders and Payment Upon Pickup methods, the seller must first verify that the buyer has actually sent a payment and then manually mark the invoice as "Marked as Paid". This should clear up some confusion with this system... Supposedly the world is going to end tomorrow (December 21st, 2012), but we figured we better get this cleared up anyways.

September 14, 2012

Coupon/Promo Code Management - Security and Non-Paying Buyer Upgrades

Members who have items for sale at USA Coin Book can now create and manage their own coupon or promotional codes. These codes can be given to buyers or promoted in your store or anywhere on or off the internet. When buyers add your items to the shopping cart, they have the opportunity to enter in your specified coupon code in order to receive a discount on their order before checkout. Sellers can create discounts such as free shipping, percentage discount off the order (10% off for example), or a fixed price discount ($5 off order). An unlimited number of different codes can be created as well. These codes can be configured to apply to everyone or to select members, such as your most loyal and regular buyers. In addition, these codes can be configured to be used an unlimited number of times or one-time use. Coupon/Promo codes are applied to all items for sale within in both your store and Coin Book. To view the coupon code management page, click "My Coin Book" >> "Edit Profile" >> browse down to the "Coupon Code Management" field and click the edit link.

In addition, we've added more steps to prevent fraudulent transactions. We now require all buyers who pay with PayPal to input a shipping address on the PayPal checkout page in order to ensure stronger Seller Protection. In addition, we've placed a warning on the first step of the checkout process if a seller only accepts checks and money orders. These kinds of sellers present the highest risk for fraud since there is no seller protection for checks and money orders.

Lastly, we've added one more feature to the invoicing system related to non-paying buyers. There are some cases when a seller is dealt with a non-paying buyer and they would like to cancel the order, re-list their items for sale and have their USA Coin Book fees refunded. To view a list of invoices for items you've sold, click "My Coin Book" >> "My Invoices" in your Control Panel. Each item has a dropdown box to select options that apply to each item. Now we've added a "Cancel Invoice" option. Clicking this will bring you to your invoice page along with a warning explaining what happens when you cancel your order, followed by a confirmation link.

When you cancel the order, the invoice will be removed, ALL items within the invoice will automatically be re-listed (except auctions). The invoice will still be stored on our side in case there are problems. All fees will be automatically refunded (except those already paid to us through PayPal, in which you can contact us for a manual refund). Canceled auctions will appear in your "Unsold Auctions" list. In this list, you can either click the Delete link to remove the auction permanently, or click the Edit and Relist link to make any changes and re-list your auction.

September 2, 2012

*MAJOR OVERHAUL*

Only about a month after our second anniversary of the launch of USA Coin Book, we have completed another major overhaul. We've added a number of features over the last few weeks, which range from reducing fee costs, more payment methods, a faster website, additional tracking information, better security and other features. Many of these features were beta tested first on UniSquare to get the bugs out before being integrated into USA Coin Book. Although if you notice a bug or some kind of glitch, please contact us, we will be happy to help.

Reduced Fee Costs - New Fee Tracking

We've overhauled the member's administration section so you can now see the USA Coin Book 2% fees taken for each item sold. In the past, buyers who bought items from the seller using PayPal would complete the payment and the USA Coin Book fees would be taken out automatically upon each sale. We learned that in doing this, the seller was being charged double PayPal fees for receiving money from the buyer, plus the automatic fees being sent to USA Coin Book, which is an extra 2.958% of the fee amount plus $0.30.

With our new system, the fees are added up on-site within the USA Coin Book site and not paid to us automatically. Instead, a balance builds up upon each sale and the fees do not have to be paid until they accumulate to $2.00 or more. Then the fees must be paid within 30 days. Members can view the accumulated balance, which fees are due and which ones have already been paid. It's a much simpler and convenient system, and it saves more money for the seller with less fees!

New Payment Method - Google Checkout - Payment Upon Pickup

Due to suggestions from members, we've now added Google Checkout as a new payment method for sales. The fee structure for Google Checkout is pretty much the same as PayPal. In addition, sellers can also choose to accept payment upon pickup when a buyer is required to meet with the seller in person and pick up an item locally.

Custom Stores - Customized Categories

When you are in your account preferences page, there is now a tab called "My Store". This is a feature which will allow sellers to design their own stores, including custom categories up to 6 levels deep, customized colors, your own search engine within your store, upload your store logo and description and more. This is different than your normal Coin Book page, which will show up regardless. The store is just a supplemental feature for the serious seller who would like a little more customizable features or something else to link to than their Coin Book page. Note that only auctions and fixed priced items can be added here, no wishlist or personal collections. The style is much more like an eBay store, but the store feature is free. Note: only coin, paper money and numismatic related categories please!

Sales now integrated into Bing Shopping, Google Shopping and TheFind.com

We found another opportunity to bring in more potential buyers to your products if you are selling anything. All fixed priced items are automatically generated into a feed and sent to Bing Shopping, Google Shopping and TheFind.com, which are basically shopping search engines. Note that these are different than the regular organic search engines (Google Shopping works differently than Google.com). Anyone searching on Google Shopping for example is purely looking to buy things. This is a very new feature added over the last few days and we've been accepted into all of them except Bing Shopping, which is still pending and hope to work out pretty soon. Note, you don't have to do anything on your end, this is something we do automatically!

Google Analytics and Visitor Counters

Members can now integrate Google Analytics into their Coin Book, Store Pages, Member Categories and items. To do this, view your account preferences when you edit your profile and browse down to the Google Analytics Tracking field and click the "edit" link to input your tracking code. You must have an account at Google Analytics to get a tracking code. Once you have inputted the code, tracking begins immediately. Also in the account preferences below Google Analytics is the Visitor Counter field, which you can enable to show your counters or disable. Note that counting is done in the background whether the feature is disabled or enabled. This feature just displays the count. Also, counting is current as of 9/2/2012 - we did not start counting visitors until today.

Block Members

Another small feature we set up allows you to block certain problem members from bidding or purchasing your items. You can edit this in your account preferences by editing your profile - edit the Block Members field. You can block as many people as you want, just separate each name with a comma. You can also remove a member from the list at anytime by simply deleting their username from the list.

New Invoicing and Feedback System

Our new invoicing system makes it easier to see all the items you have bought or sold at a glance. You can view every item on a list, which will display which invoice it is in, what the price was, when it was sold, who the seller was and so on. Again, this is a much simpler and convenient design. We did a similar change with the feedback system, which now shows feedback at a glance in 6 tabs for you as a buyer or as a seller, positive, neutral, negative and feedback left for others. In addition, your feedback page (and member page) will now show your eBay name and positive feedback if you have inputted these in your account preferences page.

Faster and More Secure Site

Lastly, we overhauled our database, programming and design a bit, which drastically reduced loading time and resources. Most of the changes are in the background, but we also made the coin price tables look a little nicer and sleeker than before. We've made the shopping cart and invoice pages a little nicer looking too. As for security features, we've added a few scripts to block members based on IP address recording/matching as well as a few other factors. When a buyer or seller makes a purchase, your invoice should now display a warning whether the other member has multiple accounts or not, which has been a problem a few times lately. At least this can serve as a bit of an early warning of fraudulent buyers or sellers.

Conclusion

That's about it for our major updates. As always, please report any bugs, glitches or problems with these new features. On a side note, we are receiving more traffic (potential buyers) than ever. Currently we are receiving between 1,500 visitors PER DAY (1,800 if you want count return visitors). The site is breaking traffic records each week and we are still going stronger than ever. Again, we will continue working on additional updates to add even more features to USA Coin Book!

December 27, 2011

Default Shipping and Return Policy - eBay History

We've made a few convenient upgrades lately. One of them now allows members to save shipping and return policy details after each listing. When you list an item for sale, the site will now save all of your shipping options and return policy information for your next listing. This speeds up the listing process because members no longer have to enter in shipping details and return policy for every single item. Note, the site will automatically save your most recent options.

The next upgrade we did was to allow members to post their eBay history. To enter your new information, login and view "My Coin Book" and click "Edit Profile". There will now be an option available called "eBay History". When you edit this, you must enter your eBay username as a requirement. If you would like, enter the positive feedback rating count. After you have done this, your eBay history will then show up on every listing. The purpose of this is to help long-time eBay members gain trust at USA Coin Book by showing previously earned reputation earned over the years at eBay.

November 23, 2011

*MAJOR OVERHAUL*

USA Coin Book is pleased to announce our major overhaul of the website with a number of useful upgrades. Listing coins is now easier to do and the process is much smoother as well as the interface itself. Also, members can now add up to 10 images at a time and no longer have to add all the images at the same time. In addition, members have multiple shipping options available and a place to enter a return policy and other instructions.

Our new shopping cart now allows members to add products from multiple dealers, unlike the old shopping cart! Buyers can now compare coins and prices from multiple dealers on a single page and can checkout all items from one dealer at a time. Buyers can also choose different shipping methods for different coins. In addition, sellers can add shipping rules for discounted shipping on all items or full shipping for each item. Sellers can modify the shipping rules by editing their profile account details from the control panel.

In addition, we have upgraded the individual items page, which now looks sleeker than before and more organized. New additions to the page include a list of the shipping options available, return policy and other instructions. 10 images of a coin are now viewable here. When you roll your mouse over the smaller thumbnails, it instantly appears enlarge. Members can email a friend to show them an item straight from the page, print item in printable format and report item. Also, members can click the facebook or twitter icon to quickly share or market their coins! All of this will improve presentation and exposure, which should bring in more visitors and sales.

Finally, we have upgraded the display of all of the coins on the homepage as well as the listings on specific types of coins. The images have been enlarged to show off more coin details from our listing pages and made the design sleeker. We also added an additional browsing display type for the coins. Rather than just our normal default list, members may now browse coins in a grid layout, again with larger pictures!

There will be other ongoing smaller changes and upgrades in the near future, many of which will not be shown here. As with all upgrades, if you experience any problems, bugs or glitches, please report them so we can get them worked out.

November 06, 2011

Corrections and Improvements with Price Guides and Shopping Cart

We were notified that some of our price guides were greatly inaccurate, specifically coins being shown less valuable than they actually are. The cause of the problem was due to the prices not updating accurately when the prices of precious metals changed with silver, gold and platinum coins. Due to the highly volatile nature of precious metal prices and how long ago we set our baseline numismatic values, the values became out of sync due to the precious metal prices. The price of gold has doubled in about 1 year, hence gold coins are vastly more valuable today than last year. This problem is now sorted out and the prices should all be in sync with precious metal prices at any time in the future. We apologize for any problems or inconveniences this has caused.

In addition, we have improved the shopping cart and the system of how coins are purchased. We have run into problems in the past were once coins were added to the cart and then the buyer attempts to purchase them. When a buyer continues to the PayPal screen or to finalize the order, the coins get taken "out of stock" so that no one else can buy the coin at the same time. When the buyer has to close up the browser or return to a point before the finalization screen, the coins are out of stock and the buyer has to wait until the end of the hour for coins to "re-stock" as no one bought the coin. If you have experienced this before, you will be happy to know that this will no longer happen unless the coin is definitely sold to another buyer.

There are other smaller changes such as a smoother shopping cart and smoother login/logout process that cuts down on useless output messages. In the near future, we will also be attempting to renovation some of the major functions of the site such as adding and editing of coins, the user control panel and the display of the item pages themselves.

September 27, 2011

New Search Engine Feature and Inbox System

As you may have noticed, USA Coin Book now has a nice search engine feature for the site. Members may now have an easier and faster time finding items. To accommodate the new search box, we made some slight changes to the design of the site to make room for it. The old menu navigation bar has been replaced with the search feature and the old link menu has been relocated above the logo. The search results page also has a new design for displaying items in a list. In addition, there is a grid layout if you prefer browsing through coins this way. Eventually, this redesign may replace all the item display listings throughout the site.

You may have also noticed a few weeks back that we redesigned the USA Coin Book inbox system. The new sleek look makes it easier to manage your messages.

As for traffic stats, we are still receiving a record number of visitors. USA Coin Book now has 653 members and has sold 323 items. In addition, there are about 450 to 500 visitors browsing through the site every day. USA Coin Book is still going stronger than ever. We will be making more design and feature upgrades in the near future!

January 18, 2011

Visitor Traffic Reports

We are pleased to announce that USA Coin Book is now receiving on average of over 350 visitors per day (or about 15 visitors and potential customers every hour of the day). Visitor traffic records are also being broke just about every week including today. This is great news for sellers as there are many more people looking at your products each and every day and this is great news for buyers since more sellers are getting involved and listing coins.

We would like to thank all the folks who wrote in and are having very positive experiences with our site. We are also happy that visitors are finding the information they are looking for and are using many of our tools on a daily basis. USA Coin Book will continue its effort to draw in more collectors and make the site even more active and productive while keeping the concept simple and easy to use!

November 10, 2010

Alternative to PayPal - Additional Payment Methods

We now allow sellers the option to accept payments through check or money order by mail as an alternative to PayPal. All sellers are still required to have a PayPal ID as PayPal is still the primary payment method but at least there are now other options. There are a few benefits to allowing your customers to pay by Check or Money Order. The biggest advantage is that sellers do not have to pay the additional 2.90% + $0.30 PayPal fee for money being sent to them nor do they have to pay this same fee again in order to transfer our 2% USA Coin Book commissions. This means the only fee you have to pay is our 2% USA Coin Book commissions and that's it.

The disadvantage is that our 2% commissions do not get paid automatically when the sale happens. Sellers will have to follow an "honor system" and they will have an additional responsibility to pay us. Commission fees will add up and when they reach $2.00 or more, a large notice will appear in your account and those fees must be paid within 30 days or else your account gets temporarily suspended (customers will no longer be able to purchase from you). When this notice appears, just follow the link and payment instructions. You do not have to worry about paying the fees until they reach a total of $2.00 or more.

Another issue that needs to be dealt with when it comes to Checks or Money Orders is that all transaction problems will need to be dealt with between the buyer and seller as there is no professional 3rd party such as PayPal to enforce problems related to fraud, fake coins, chargebacks and etc.

To accept Checks or Money Orders, login to your account and click the "Edit Profile" link. Then click the checkbox under "Additional Payment Methods that you Accept". All of your existing and future product listings will then let customers know and give them the option to pay by check or money order through the mail. As with any of our new updates, let us know if you are experiencing any bugs or if you have any questions about this.

November 8, 2010

Sellers can now add Sales Tax options

In this newest update, sellers can now choose to add sales taxes on their items. To do this, they much first log in and click the "Edit Profile" link in your Control Panel. Then select a US State from the drop down menu where you are located and enter the tax rate used in this State. This rate will then be automatically applied to all of your existing and future product listings.

November 6, 2010

Important Updated Fee Information

There were a few issues over the last few days with sellers that sold coins and were unpleasantly surprised by additional fees that came from PayPal, particularly regarding a smaller secondary fee. There was also a small secondary PayPal fee that we did not realize was happening until we were contacted. We protested with PayPal and asked for a solution about this fee but were unable to do anything about it at the moment except try to give a warning for everyone to know exactly what is going on.

We wrote up a clear fee policy that we greatly urge sellers to read and understand: https://www.usacoinbook.com/fees.php. We will always charge the low flat 2% USA Coin Book commission fee that we promised but sellers also need to take into account the PayPal fees described on that page, which actually makes up the majority of fees. Also, I created a few calculators there so you can see how much more you save (and profit) versus eBay fees and to strategically set prices to prevent losing money.

November 1, 2010

Sudden 1000% increase in search engine visitors

This announcement is a heads up just to let sellers and dealers know that over the last 2 days, traffic and potential customers from search engines have suddenly increased by about 1000% for the very specific keywords and coins. For those who are not familiar with search engine marketing, the large engines such as Google and Yahoo will usually intentionally block a brand new site such as USA Coin Book from ranking well in the search results until they "trust" the site some more.

This is sometimes known as the "aging factor" or "aging filter" which Google uses to watch a site for some time to make sure it is legitimate and not a spammer or hostile spyware site before listing it at the top of the search results for all visitors to see and visit. When a new site gains some "trust factor" in Google's search algorithm, Google will flip the on-switch and allow the site to suddenly rank for various keywords. As a site ages and continues ethical practices, it will gain higher levels of trust and even more visitors.

This is a normal and un-controllable process that takes some time so we would like to let sellers know about this as it is important for marketing strategy. This is virtually our first major appearance in the search engines and we are looking at an average of at least one potential customer entering our site every 10 minutes. This may not seem like much to some folks but it is phenomenal for a new site that didn't even exist less than 3 months ago. The current progress is much faster and well ahead of our original expectations, especially since there are a lot of return visitors, which is great news for anyone selling coins here.

The type of keywords people have searched for over the last 24 hours in Google are specific such as: "1963 double die reverse 10 cent", "1873 closed 3 $5 gold", "1925s peace dollar", "1994-p silver american eagle", "$2.50 gold indian head 1925 d", "1847 5 dollar eagle", "us large cents 1823", "1882 cc $20", "1906-d us gold liberty coronet 10 $ coin". They may or may not be looking to buy these coins but there are real and potential customers landing on those pages!

October 30, 2010

More User-Friendly and Organized "Coin Book"

Due to a number of complaints, we decided to clean up the "Coin Book" section, which is the page that everyone lands on when they log in. The first major change is that we added "Control Panel" options and "Add Coin Listing" options. We added user administration buttons here in the Control Panel that will only appear for the user so they can edit profile, view invoices, re-list auctions and leave feedback.

In the "Add Coin Listings" section, there are four links for Auctions, Sell Coins, Wish List and Personal Collection. Now users can click those links to add coins. The next page will allow you to quickly select the major categories of the coins, which will redirect to the traditional table where you can select specific coins and add them.

The big "blue box" in the middle of the screen is now reduced and a lot of the "junk" is removed. It will now only display category links to coins that you are connected with instead of showing every category available regardless of if you have those coins or not. That way members can still view all of your coins of a particular category. We will not display any unnecessary category links if you do not have any of those coins listed. Also, you will not have to add coin listings this way anymore as you can now use the "Add Coin Listing" options just under the "Control Panel" options as explained above.

I hope this will make things more organized and will make adding coins easier to understand. I would appreciate any feedback or reporting of bugs for these major feature additions.

October 24, 2010

View the Melt Value of US Coins

We programmed a new and exciting feature into USA Coin Book. You can now view the intrinsic metal content value of every US coin ever made. This means you can now see how much the gold, silver, platinum, copper, zinc, nickel and manganese are worth in any coin.

Here is the main page of this new addition: US Coin Melt Values

Since we already had information about the metal composition in each coin, we decided to take it one step further and show you how much the composition of metal is worth. This information is very interesting and educational for coin collectors but also useful for anyone interested in bullion. Even if you have a totally ruined coin in numismatic terms, the metal content can still be worth quite a bit, especially if it is made out of gold or silver.

Our gold and silver coin prices are now "pegged" to the international market exchanges. When we update the current spot prices of gold and silver, the entire pricing table for these coins will update accordingly. This makes our coin pricing guides some of the most accurate and current in the world when it comes to factoring in precious metal values in a frequently volatile precious metal market.

Our new coin melt values main page shows a table of every US coin along with the current spot price of base metals and precious metals. We broke this table up into smaller parts on 4 different pages so you can bookmark these and view only gold, silver, platinum or copper coins without having to scroll through the main table. Also, we added calculators for gold, silver and platinum coins so you can choose any one of these coins, enter the quantity that you own and find the total weight and value of metal in these coins. The current spot prices for these precious metals are already inserted into the calculators, but you can customize the spot prices to see what your coins would be worth at a different price.

September 15, 2010

Track your Invoices in your Coin Book

We made another major upgrade today. Members can now view invoices of all purchases "as a buyer" or "as a seller". To view your invoices, login and view your Coin Book. Next to the "Edit Profile" link, there will now be a "My Invoices" link. This should be much more convenient than logging into PayPal every time you want to look up which coins you sold to customers or which ones you bought from sellers.

September 9, 2010

Re-listing Auctions and Changing Listing Formats

Members who list items up for auction but receive 0 bids will now have the option to easily re-list auctions without having to re-type the entire description and upload all the pictures over again. When an auction ends and there are no bidders, you must first login and view that page, which will give an option to re-list the auction. You will then be taken to a form with all of the original descriptions and information to review. At this time, you can enter a different auction duration and price.

Also, members can now easily move items from the "auction" format to "for sale (BIN) format or back to "personal collection" if you would no longer like to sell the products. Members can easily move coins from one format to another without having to delete the page and re-write the description and upload the pictures.

One major limitation to these options is if you completely sell out the product or if there are more than 0 bidders, the page will be un-editable so that the buyer will have a reference invoice to view the product later.

A major advantage to re-listing auctions is the fact that you can re-use the same page, meaning you get to keep the same search engine benefits and exposure of the page that was built up over a period of time. This makes it more likely that visitors will find your product and that it will sell during the next time.

September 5, 2010

Corrected Price and Value Charts - More Accurate

We went through all of the price tables for each type of coin and changed the prices or the grading reference. The original problem was spotting in great price differences specifically in the uncirculated (MS) and proof (PR) scale. Some prices, especially with the older coins, were being corresponded with grade MS-65 when they should have been for MS-63 coins. The same issue was happening with PR-65 coins which had prices that should have been for PR-63 or PR-69 coins.

This was a major issue as the prices were inaccurate by a few dollars to as much as a hundred thousand dollars just for being off by 2 grades. For all of you collectors with old and uncirculated coins, this is a lesson that shows how wise it is to spend a few extra bucks for good protective coin holders and especially get your coins graded by a professional grading service as the difference between an MS-63 and MS-65 grade could be the difference of a quarter million dollars...

September 3, 2010

Added Presidential Dollar and First Spouse Categories

We added two new and major categories: the Presidential Dollar Coins and First Spouse $10 Half Ounce Gold Bullion Coins. You can now view the statistics on these coins, sell them or add them to your coin book.

New Coin Listing Editor

We upgraded our listing editor so that it is easier to use and removed many of the useless and confusing features. We tried to make the process more simple and convenient for adding coins and making custom formatted descriptions for your coins.

August 31, 2010

Shopping Cart for "Buy It Now" stores

Over the last few days, we made some major overhauls to USA Coin Book. The largest upgrade we did was create a "shopping cart" atmosphere for dealers. This upgrade is very special and makes us even more unique than eBay or other auction sites, which will be explained in more details below.

When a customer purchased multiple products from a dealer (30 coins for example), there was a problem in that the dealer would receive 30 separate invoices from PayPal and so would the customer. There was another problem regarding shipping in that the customer would have been grossly overcharged the full shipping rate for 30 different products.

The solution that we developed was a "shopping cart" in which the customer could browse through a dealer's inventory and add 30 coins to the cart. At the same time, the customer would be charged the full rate shipping for item that had the greatest shipping cost and then the reduced "additional shipping costs for multiple items" fee for the rest of the items. Both the dealer and customer will receive just 1 invoice.

Please read our shipping cost policy for more details.

The one major limitation to this system is that the customer may only purchase coins or add coins to the cart from one dealer at a time.

Fixed "looping" login problems

We fixed a major "bug" that was related to logging in. We learned that multiple members had problems logging in. Even when they correctly entered their username and password, they still kept getting the "you must be logged in before viewing this page" message that kept looping regardless of how many times they correctly entered the username and password combination. Everything is fixed and we greatly apologize for the inconvenience.

We greatly appreciate the suggestions, feedback and reporting of problems and bugs. This will make our site much greater for everyone.

Thank you
Kind regards
USA Coin Book