I had a great experience getting the newest addition to my MS69 Silver Eagle collection. I looked around on eBay for quite some time to see if the price would be right. But then I happened upon Paradise Mint, a dealer in the Bradenton, Florida area who has great prices on these, along with a large variety of slabbed NGC and PCGS graded coins. It looked like their price ($23.00 – the lowest I’ve seen anywhere) would beat any eBay auction price, and they ship all their stuff free, so I decided to go ahead and place the order on their web site.
I ordered on Monday morning and had a shipping confirmation e-mail within two hours. Wow, they received my order, packed it, produced a shipping label, and e-mailed my all that morning. Awesome! On Wednesday, I got home from the Red Sox game and there was my coin, having arrived in the mail that day.
I was kind of bummed when I examined it, though — there was a very noticeable smudge and dark mark across the “9” in the date, and even a discolored splotch on the reverse to the left of the eagle. Of course this was no fault of Paradise Mint’s – they were delivering a slabbed coin graded by NGC, so I really was disappointed with NGC that they would give this an MS69 despite these fairly major blemishes.
I sat on it for a few days, wondering if it would be worth it to ask for an exchange. If it cost $5 to send it back and $5 to have them ship another one, that would wipe out any money I had saved, not to mention the fact that I wouldn’t be guaranteed the replacement would be any better. The next Tuesday I found out it would cost me less than $2 to mail it back, so I decided to use the web site’s contact form to explain the situation and ask for a replacement. Much to my amazement, an e-mail response came within the hour saying that an exchange would not be a problem. Much more amazingly, the e-mail was in complete, grammatically-correct, punctuated sentences. After another round of e-mails making sure of the address and other details, I sent it off in the mail.
USPS tracking for the package showed that it arrived Thursday in Florida, and on Friday morning I had another tracking e-mail from Paradise Mint indicating that my replacement order had shipped. So here it is Monday evening and it’s waiting in my mailbox when I get home. I open the package, and wow, this one is beautiful! If the guys at Paradise Mint hand-selected one for me instead of just grabbing one off the stack, then hats off to them for picking a great one.
So the end result is: I’m extremely happy with the service I got from Paradise Mint, and next year when I’m looking to buy my 2010 Silver Eagle, you can bet I’ll check them out first. Sure, the coin is the same thing I could expect from any dealer or individual eBay seller, but the level of personalized service I got this time around (well, and the great price) has certainly earned my business.