Online Bullion Dealers
The advent of the Internet has made the purchasing of precious metals by the average person easier than at any time in the past. The readily available information in this electronic medium helps with building your collection of silver in a multitude of different ways. Some of the advantages opened up to you by looking for your silver online, rather than buying it from brick and mortar stores, includes:
• Easy access to worldwide silver dealers. You can more easily locate a dealer, regardless of your location, or order from dealers in another nation whom you would otherwise not be able to find.
• The ability to compare prices between dozens of different suppliers in a matter of minutes, in order to assure yourself you are not being cheated or paying more than the fair market value for your silver purchases.
• Instantaneous access to silver spot prices on the world markets, as well as the spot prices for other precious metals, so that you can determine exactly what premium you are paying.
• A whole planet’s worth of product listings, ensuring that you can find and purchase practically any specific type of coin you want to add to your collection. Even the rarest coins are generally for sale somewhere on Earth at any given point in time.
• Easy communication with the silver dealer you select, allowing you to ask as many questions as you want before you buy, as well as tracking your purchase afterwards.
• Electronic tracking of packages that are sent to you, though this may be impossible if you are making an international purchase, since the international mail system has not quite caught up with modern times yet.
• No need to travel to the silver dealer’s location, meaning that you can order at any time of the day or night (thus avoiding the problem of fitting a potentially lengthy trip to a physical location into an already busy schedule), can save on gas and wear and tear on your car, and can have your silver delivered directly to your door rather than experiencing the worry of bringing it home yourself.
• Ready access to both official mint online stores (for some mints – others still do not sell to the public, most notably the United States Mint), and to search functions allowing you to find authorized dealers for specific mints in your own country.
There are many fine dealers of silver online today, but of these, a handful stand out from the rest for a combination of reliability, professionalism, selection, and price, as well as the secondary services that some of them offer. A closer look at some of the better ones follows.
The American Precious Metals Exchange (APMEX)
The name of APMEX should appear at the head of any list of online silver dealers, since it is one of the web’s premier suppliers of precious metals. Their professionalism and the excellent prices they offer sets them apart from nearly every other potential supplier of your silver needs on the Internet.
The APMEX website includes pages for silver coins, silver bars, silver rounds, gold, platinum, and palladium. Not only is the whole spectrum of precious metals given full coverage, but there is also a “clearance” page for those who want to find some discount metals at just above spot, and an IRA page to help you quickly and easily find bullion which has been approved for use with a precious metals IRA.
On this site, you can search the stock by name, as well as entering types of silver (such as bars or rounds) or weights as search terms. There are a large number of contemporary silver producers represented, including not only APMEX itself but also Silvertowne, Sunshine Minting, Inc., and various others. You can find the silver products of the past (such as Silver Prospectors – the famous silver rounds struck in the 1980s) and the most cutting edge rounds and bars as well.
Official government coins from dozens of mints around the world are also represented, ranging from the United States Mint to Australian coins, Chinese, British, Canadian, and Austrian Philharmonic coins. All are in mint condition unless they appear on the “clearance” page or otherwise clearly specified, and the company offers a very affordable premium above spot on most of its listings.
The supplemental services offered by this firm are numerous and pleasantly useful as well. A toll free number with advice on how to set up a precious metals IRA, automatic alerts when specific products are back in stock, and mobile APMEX apps for the iPhone, the Blackberry, and the Android are just a few of the small but helpful additional services that you can find on this site.
APMEX not only sells precious metals, but also buys them. The company will only purchase those types of coins, silver bars, and silver rounds that are sold on its website, but this is more than many silver and gold sellers offer. The coins need to be in generally good condition, of course. The price is set lower than APMEX’s selling price, given that they need to make a profit on the coins and cannot afford to buy them for more than they sell them for.
However, this is a fairly profitable way to divest yourself of any coins that you no longer want. The proven probity and speed of APMEX will work in your favor when you want to liquidate coins through them, rounding out an already impressive array of services offered by this company.
For more information about APMEX, you can read our full APMEX review to find out everything you need to know about buying gold from an online bullion dealer.
We’ve also compared APMEX with Goldline another popular site that sells silver bullion online. Simply follow the link here to read our full APMEX vs Goldline comparison to find out why we prefer to purchase silver at APMEX.
GoldSilver.com
GoldSilver.com is another highly reputable source of gold, silver, and other precious metals, even if it cannot measure up to APMEX in terms of assortment of products. Like APMEX, the site offers a free membership which is prerequisite to ordering.
The site is easy to navigate and exudes professionalism, as well as giving you a number of options, including having your gold and silver shipped directly to you, or stored in a vault in Florida, Salt Lake City, or Hong Kong at your option. Of course, storage in a vault means that the precious metals are ultimately left in the control of other people, which means that you are also relying totally on the probity of those people – including in a crisis situation.
GoldSilver.com buys precious metals as well as selling them.
Where GoldSilver.com is weaker than APMEX is in its tiny selection of products. Although the silver and gold offered are well chosen, only two or three types of each are offered, unlike the vast, varied selection at the competing site. If you are looking to collect a wide range of coins, find fractional silver rounds or older rounds or coins, or basically expect to buy anything except the most basic American, Canadian, and Austrian offerings – and not many of those – then you will be entirely out of luck.
Furthermore, single coins are only offered in a few cases. Most of the tiny selection are only available in 500 ounce boxes, which puts them outside the reach of anyone except those who are very rich, since few precious metal collectors can dish out over $20,000 at one time.
This is a bit unfortunate, since GoldSilver.com’s website is beautifully designed and has a lot of potential. However, that potential is used in only an extremely limited way, so in the last analysis it is mostly useful for stocking up on large amounts of a few basics – something that APMEX can do just as effectively, yet offer a lot more utility and an astoundingly larger selection. Within its very narrow limits, however, GoldSilver.com is a reputable and efficient precious metals company you can use with confidence.
Continue reading our in depth GoldSilver.com review.
Other Online Bullion Seller Reviews
Ranging from completely reliable to utter ripoffs, online traders of precious metals come in all shapes and sizes. This section will help to separate the good from the bad by providing unbiased, independent reviews of all the online silver dealers (and other precious metals) that we know of.
