AboutMyCoinCan I sell my coin for spot price?
No, and it is not a sign of a bad buyer: spot is a wholesale price for refined metal in quantity, and a coin is neither refined nor wholesale until somebody has sorted, verified, transported and processed it. Every one of those steps sits between your coin and spot, and the buyer is paid for them out of the gap.
What spot is a price for
Spot quotes refined metal of known purity, in commercial quantity, deliverable now, between parties who trade with each other daily. A coin is a small piece of alloy of uncertain provenance that has to be identified, weighed, authenticated and then accumulated with others before it is any of those things.
The gap between the two is the cost of closing that distance, and it falls as the quantity rises and the verification gets easier. That is why a sealed bar and a jar of mixed silver are quoted so differently even though the metal is identical. What spot price is covers where the number itself comes from.
When a coin sells above spot
Often, in fact. Anything with a collector premium is priced by date and grade rather than by weight, and it leaves the metal behind entirely. Bullion coins sold by a government mint carry a premium of their own, because buyers pay for a known weight and purity in a recognised form.
This is the reason the first question is never what your silver weighs. It is whether the coin is worth more than its silver, which is what the date and mint mark decide and what the coin value catalogue is for.
How to get close to spot
Quantity, sorting and form. A hundred ounces in one transaction is worth more per ounce than five, because the buyer’s costs are mostly per visit rather than per coin. Sorting by denomination and composition removes work from their side, and a pile of one thing beats a box of everything.
Form matters as much: recognised coins in known weights need less verification than scrap or unfamiliar pieces, and they are priced accordingly. A bag of 90% silver US coins is the easiest thing in the shop to price, and the quote reflects that.
Using melt value properly
Melt value is a benchmark, not a target. Calculate it before you walk in, judge every offer against it, and treat the size of the gap as the thing you are shopping for. A buyer whose gap is twice the next one’s is telling you something no price guide can.
The melt value pages here give the figure for each coin, and the group pages carry a column of what the same coin comes to at other spot prices, so the answer stays usable when the metal moves after the page was built.
Related questions
More on selling coins
Nobody pays what a coin is worth, and knowing why is what makes an offer judgeable.
Selling Coins collects every question on this topic in one place.
Not an appraisal. AboutMyCoin estimates from published specifications and does not authenticate or grade coins.