Selling & Buying on Whatnot: A Beginner’s Guide

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Coin collecting is a hobby that has reinvented itself time and time again. New technologies, changing tastes, booms and busts—they have all reshaped how collectors buy and sell. The evolution continues today, with one of the clearest recent examples being the rise of livestream selling. Platforms like Whatnot have taken the collecting community by storm and are growing in popularity at a rapid pace. They are creating new opportunities, as well as new challenges. For numismatists who are familiar with coin shows, traditional auction houses, and online platforms like eBay, livestream selling can feel unfamiliar at first and, like with all things, will take some time to learn to navigate effectively. This article will explain how Whatnot works and explore the pros and cons for both buyers and sellers.

How Whatnot Works

Whatnot is an auction-based livestreaming platform formatted similarly to social media sites. Users can browse a feed of different shows and select specific categories, including clothing, food, antiques, and coins. After joining a particular show, viewers watch as the host presents items for sale and can compete with other bidders to win whatever item is currently being auctioned. At the same time, users can directly interact with the host and the other bidders through the live chat function, asking questions and requesting particular items. That level of real-time interaction is what separates Whatnot from more conventional marketplaces, with those features creating a unique atmosphere and sense of connection.

Pros for Buyers

Dynamic Viewing

Many collectors are drawn to the live format. While Whatnot offers many categories of items, coins are particularly well suited to livestream selling. Instead of relying solely on static photographs, which can very easily misrepresent a coin, buyers can watch as the livestream host physically rotates the coin under a light, giving a better representation of its luster, surfaces, and color, being more true to the coin’s in-hand appearance.

Instant Communication

Another advantage of the live format is the immediate access buyers have to the seller. Viewers are able to ask questions through the chat and receive answers in real time, instead of having to wait sometimes days for a response with other online platforms. Sellers are also able to describe a coin in more detail, pointing out specific qualities such as if a coin has a particular variety, error, signs of cleaning or damage, or even telling a story about the coin’s history.

Social Bonding

Whatnot’s buying-experience format adds a huge social and entertainment element to the process, which is largely absent elsewhere. The host becomes an integral part of that buying experience; customers become familiar with the sellers, especially through recurring shows. This, combined with the group presence of other bidders in the chat, can create a sense of community, elevating purchases beyond just a transaction to a shared collecting experience.

The platform can create a sense of community, elevating purchases beyond just a transaction to a shared collecting experience.

Cons for Buyers

Impulse Buying

The same attributes that make livestream selling unique and exciting can also work against buyers. One of the biggest risks comes from the psychological impact generated from all the moving parts: impulse bidding. Hosts often create energetic atmospheres with a loud voice and music, combined with an active chat and rapidly moving bids. Further reinforced by auctions that last only seconds, it can easily become an overstimulating environment. As a result, buyers become more susceptible  to emotionally driven heat-of-the-moment decisions where they abandon their predetermined budget by bidding more aggressively.

Lack of Research

The fast-paced nature of these lots, with many starting and ending all within 10 seconds, leaves little time for critical evaluation and research of the coin being auctioned. In conventional online sales, collectors are able to comfortably look up recent sales, consult references, and reconsider the item over time. With livestreamed auctions, those hallmarks become luxuries, as by the time adequate consideration can be made, in many cases, the coin will have already sold. With the buyer trying to focus on so many things at once, important details such as cleaning, scratches, damage, etc., can be easily overlooked.

Rose-Colored Glasses

It’s also important to keep in mind that, ultimately, the host is trying to sell the coin. They are incentivized to exaggerate certain positive attributes and downplay negative ones. This is not to say that sellers are dishonest, and it is important to note that the experiences vary drastically from seller to seller and must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. However, collectors should try their best to be skeptical and exercise caution as they would in any other purchase setting.

Collectors should try their best to be skeptical and exercise caution as they would in any other purchase setting.

Pros for Sellers

Efficiency

For sellers, one of Whatnot’s greatest advantages is efficiency. Sellers on other platforms spend time photographing a coin, creating a listing for it, writing a description, and waiting for a buyer. On Whatnot that process is much more streamlined and condensed: all a seller has to do is present the coin, verbally describe it, answer the occasional question, and ship it out. This is especially convenient for moving large amounts of lower-value inventory that would otherwise prove too time-consuming to list individually. A host can sell hundreds of coins rapid fire in a relatively short amount of time.

Loyalty

Setting up and running a recurring show also serves as a way to build an audience and garner greater interest in a particular seller’s shows. Viewers can become more and more familiar with the host and return for future streams, which translates into repeat customers and greater exposure for the seller. Since the coins being auctioned are up to the seller, it can also introduce bidders to new coins and spark an interest in buying them.

Low Fees

Current selling fees on Whatnot are also an advantage as they are rather friendly, sitting at 6.9 percent of the total selling price, plus 30 cents per transaction. This is lower than other auction platforms, which commonly charge fees of 13-20 percent and higher.

A host can sell hundreds of coins rapid fire in a relatively short amount of time.

Cons for Sellers

Back-End Work

However, those advantages do not mean running a successful Whatnot operation is by any means easy. Beyond just hosting the show itself, there is a substantial amount of work that goes into preparing, sourcing, organizing, managing inventory, planning, packing and shipping orders, handling customer service, and more. A three-hour livestream session can easily yield five or more hours of combined work. The biggest and most consistent Whatnot sellers are those with teams of people to help them manage the workload. However, individual sellers can still find success through building a lean and efficient system.

Fatigue

Livestreaming can be physically and mentally taxing. On platforms like eBay, a seller can list items at their discretion and continue to sell even while they sleep, but Whatnot hosts can only sell when they are live. The longer the stream, the greater the sales, but fatigue can build up. It’s not uncommon to enter a show and be greeted by a tired host with a raspy voice. Motivation and discipline play a major role in the long-term success of a livestreamer.

Energy Sells

The most successful shows are the ones where the hosts not only offer attractive inventory but are effective entertainers as well. Livestreaming is very much a performance; hosts are competing among themselves to gain and retain viewers. To do so, hosts need to maintain an exciting and engaging atmosphere to hold viewers’ attention. Different sellers do so in different ways, through engaging in sustained conversation with the audience, high-energy presentation, giveaways, or enticing buying formats, such as mystery bags.

Building an Audience

It goes without saying that the more viewers a show has, the higher the prices will go. This fact hits beginners especially hard as they may initially struggle to attract an audience large enough for competitive bidding. This can lead to coins selling for below seller expectations, which makes the early stages of building up a Whatnot show particularly challenging (but can result in some exciting treasures for buyers).

The most successful shows are the ones where the hosts not only offer attractive inventory but are effective entertainers as well.

Pricing: Highs & Lows

From what I’ve seen, there’s a lot of variation in price, as many factors can influence the hammer price of an item. Typically, the more viewers a show has and the more hype surrounds a particular item, the higher the hammer price climbs. For the bigger shows (250+ concurrent live viewers), items will regularly sell for higher than they would on eBay or even at coin shows. 

However, smaller shows (especially ones with only 10-20 viewers or less) usually underperform compared to eBay sales data. Bargain hunters may want to target shows with small audiences. These shows usually offer less entertainment value but can certainly yield better deals. With that being said, a lot of smaller streamers are reluctant to run high-value items for fear of them underperforming. For those items, it’s common for sellers to start the piece at a price already close to market value and hoping for a single bid, rather than beginning them at $1 and running them up as a true auction.

Conclusion

Whatnot does not replace the marketplaces that came before it but rather offers another tool at the disposal of collectors and dealers. When used with the knowledge and judgment applied elsewhere in numismatics, this new medium can offer considerable opportunities. Sure, livestreaming platforms may look different and daunting, but they represent something familiar: an old hobby adapting again and again to another way of bringing collectors together.

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