Let’s Talk Tech

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Resourceful coin dealer Steven Sinatra believes that a better business tool is just a little hard work away. Several years ago, he noticed a deficiency in an app his business used to total the amount of gold in specific coins. Determined that a more efficient app was within reach, he contacted a developer to create one. He has since learned how to program apps himself and has pioneered two apps, Scrap Gold Pro and Coin Rectify, available to dealers to improve their listing process for online inventory.  I spoke with Sinatra about the benefits of technology.

Olivia McCommons: What features do your two apps, Scrap Gold Pro and Coin Rectify, offer? 

Steven Sinatra: Released in 2018, Scrap Gold Pro is a free calculator for precious-metal dealers. You type in the weight and karat of each piece, and it totals them all up at once. Then you can set one payout percentage across all the karats. The older apps made you add each karat up by hand, and I didn’t think that was necessary. My app does gold, silver, platinum, and gold filled. It also has a karat to gram and dwt converter for removing a large gemstone weight from the gold price. It runs on iPhone, Android, and the web. It has around 10,000 users and about 200,000 sessions a month.

Coin Rectify is a new app that I built this year. It started as a way to clean up coin photos for eBay. Users upload a phone picture, and the app cuts out the coin and places it onto a clean, square background with your logo, so every listing looks the same. It has quickly grown into a full listing generator. It reads the coin and writes the title, description, and item specifics, then provides a draft to upload. You can use it on a phone or a computer via the web right now. It will be available on the Apple App Store and Google Play soon. Free accounts get 50 cutouts a month.

OM: What’s your background in tech? 

SS: I run a pawn shop in Oregon. I’m a dealer first, not a programmer. The first version of Scrap Gold Pro I paid a developer to build. But this newer, more advanced version, and all of Coin Rectify, I built myself this past year. I hadn’t really coded before. I use AI (Claude) to help me do it. The hardest part used to be getting a hold of my developer. Now I’m the developer, and that has made a big difference.

OM: How long did it take you to build these two apps, and what inspired you to create each one? 

SS: Scrap Gold Pro came out of plain annoyance. We were using an app that didn’t total the karats. So if you had 2 grams of 10 karats, 3 grams of 14karats, and 9 grams of 18 karats, you had to add each one up yourself. That seemed like extra work for no reason. So I made one that totals them and puts your payout across all of them at once. I made it free so my employees could use it, and so other dealers and their employees could too. The first version took a couple of weeks with the developer.

Coin Rectify started when I came across Great Southern Coins’s shop on eBay. Their photos were all clean backgrounds, with a logo, every coin cropped to the same square. I knew doing that by hand wasn’t practical for me. I sell coins mostly from $40 to $400, usually under $150. The time per coin has to be small, or it isn’t worth it. So I built something to speed it up, and it grew into the listing part from there. It took about a month of going back and forth on it.

OM: What are the benefits—and challenges—of delving into the tech industry? 

SS: Scrap Gold Pro is easy to train an employee on and hard to make a mistake with. Coin Rectify lets me list 5 to 10 times more coins in a day than I could before. Those are real benefits.

The challenge was the learning curve, which was also kind of fun. And it isn’t just the code. There’s the hosting, and the other services that have to connect to it, like AWS or a metals price API or web hosting. You also have to make it work on every kind of phone and setting. Someone with bad vision and giant text would have a problem, and I’d have to go fix it for them.

OM: What advice would you offer dealers who are looking to build their own tools?

SS: If you’re up for it and you have a little free time, give it a go. And know that not every app has to be public. Going public brings a lot more work and hassle. An app just for yourself can be built fast, and you can start using it right away. I built a little desktop app for our shop in one afternoon. It figures the real ROI on buying silver bullion. It takes the spot price, what our dealer charges, our margin, and the shipping, insurance, and signature costs. That made it easy to see the true profit on a deal, and whether we were working for peanuts. We were. Don’t be scared to try it.

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