Increasingly online portals whose entire livelihood relies on the Internet audience will have to exert greater quality control over auction houses catering to onsite audiences or taking numismatic shortcuts. To combat those and other negative attributes–and to keep up with eBay’s ever stricter quality controls–Proxibid has tolled out quality control badges noting APN Clearance, Shipping Policies, Low Buyer’s Premium, Lot Description Accuracy, and Complaint Rate

APN Clearance is as important as ever in using credit card purchases with ease and security. (Watch for a post on the downside of using PayPal.) Shipping, Low Buyer’s Premium, Lot Description Accuracy and Complaint Rate have been quality control issues that Proxiblog has monitored since launching this site in May 2011.

We now are approaching 20,000 views because of our focus on quality control for both auctioneer and bidder, in addition to our numismatic knowledge as a buyer and seller on Proxibid.

We applaud Jason Nielson, quality control exec, and his Proxibid team for instituting these much-needed badges. And one more thing: Because Proxibid now is covering with badges much of what we covered in our Honor Roll page, we now will include superior houses with higher than 15% buyer’s fees in our sidebar rankings. We’re putting a greater emphasis on quality of consignments, shipping, customer service and lack of transparency notices. Watch for a post on that in the near future.

Our reasoning is simple: While we advocate for low buyer’s fees, some of the best numismatic catalogs are being posted by Leonard Auction, Capitol Coin Auction, Scott Auctions, Fox Valley and others. They will qualify for our Best on Proxibid rankings.

Beginning next week, however, we will exclude from our sidebar rankings all auctions that see maximum bids or allow auctioneer/consignor bidding. There is just no place for either. Auctioneers should know grey sheet values. If a bid doesn’t reach it, they can pass on it. An auctioneer should NEVER ghost-bid (raise the bid even though no buyer has). And finally, a house can allow a consignor to bid on an item, but if the consignor wins, he bought it, meaning he has to pay both consignor and buyer fees. That will discourage shell-bidding entirely.

We’ll end with photos of each badge and the Proxibid description:

Proxiblog is an independent entity with no connection to the auction portal Proxibid. Our intent is to uphold basic numismatic standards as established by the American Numismatic Association and the National Auctioneer Association and to ensure a pleasurable bidding experience not only on Proxibid but also on similar portals such as iCollector and AuctionZip.