eBay is still the center of the online postcard selling business in the United States due to name recognition, but it is losing ground as collectors and dealers explore their options. Playle's and Delcampe are both viable alternatives to eBay for buying and selling postcards (and other ephemera and collectibles).

Playle.com (http://www.playle.com) opened in 1997 specializing in postcards. Delcampe.net (http://www.delcampe.net) started in 2000, first specializing in stamps, and then postcards. In 2006, Delcampe expanded into the American market with Delcampe.com (http://www.delcampe.com).

Playle and Delcampe are a breath of fresh air to online postcard dealers with large inventories. Listings are more affordable to dealers, and hence the websites' postcard inventories are increasing, so much so that Delcampe, with 5,098,000 listings in July 2007, is by far the largest postcard site on the Internet. eBay is second with about 590,000 listings, and Playle's ranks third with about 100,0000 listings (average per day). Delcampe sold about 110,000 postcards in December 2007 and about 107,000 in May.

For dealers, a quick look at Playle and Delcampe reveals ways to sell less expensively. Neither Playle's nor Delcampe charges dealers for hosting listings in their online stores. In contrast, eBay charges a minimum of a nickel per month to host a store item (up to a dime for more expensive postcards). For a 25,000-item store, the nickel cost alone usually increases a penny to $0.06 to use a gallery thumbnail image, totaling an extra $1,500.00 in fees per month since eBay increased fees last summer.

Delcampe
Unlimited listings and stores are free at Delcampe. Final value fees (FVFs), calculated once a month, are modest at two to four percent. (The more you sell, the less the FVFs are.) Three pictures per listing are hosted for free. Delcampe is integrated with moneybookers.com (http://www.moneybookers.com), a London, England-based financial website that charges much less in transactional fees than does PayPal.

While Delcampe was previously defined by its buyers' interest in European postcards, topicals and American views are increasingly prominent on the website. Some American postcard dealers have already put up thousands of postcard listings, while others have committed to doing so. Delcampe may be the "new kid on the block" in terms of American postcard websites, but it appears to have a bright future.

One word of caution: Delcampe, as of June, has experienced growing pains. About 208,000 items per month are now sold on their websites (stamps and postcards). New servers were installed, in part to accommodate the growing numbers of eBayers who came to Delcampe and in part to accommodate the arrival of displaced Yahoo sellers after Yahoo closed its auction venue in June 2007. In mid-July 2007, Delcampe celebrated its 201,000th new registrant; by mid-August, that number was up to almost 207,000 registered users.

Playle.com
A store costs $30/month for unlimited listings. (For non-dealer fees, see Playle.com for up-to-date listing fees.) FVFs are a maximum of 5 percent. Playle has a nice "boiler plate" feature that allows advertising of ones' other web sites within a listing (the only auction site we found that allows this). This is a very handy feature for sellers who already have another established web site.

One picture per listing is hosted for free for the dealer package only. According to Linda Playle, the website is undergoing major renovations, with a projected date of later this year for new features such as thumbnails and stores, where items can be placed for immediate sale and left as long as the seller wants. "One of the main things we are going to push is customer - one on one - service," she said. Playle has also integrated the Moneybooker payment service into its site.

Note: The author operates http://www.vintagepostcards.org/ and writes a blog about vintage postcards at http://vintage-postcards.blogspot.com. She maintains a small presence on eBay in her http://stores.ebay.com/Postcards-Postcards store, on the off chance that the future looks brighter there some day, but primarily lists to her website and to Delcampe.com, where she and her husband maintain two postcard stores: http://www.delcampe.com/stores/vintagepostcards and http://www.delcampe.com/stores/postcardpiggy