Walter started his career in numismatics on eBay in 2004 building a strong and stable reputation selling quality, and accurately described coins. At the time the Australian numismatic market lacked the on-line tools it has today such as on-line auctions, valuations, and other research tools.
Walter pioneered Australia's first on-line coin reference called the Retail Price Guide in 2004. This used community-based input to maintain up-to-date pricing. While at the time the numismatic market wasn't ready for the tool, it set the standard for many of the advancements Walter would provide the industry.
From 2004 to 2008, eBay's reputation in the coin community deteriorated with an increasing amount of doctored, overgraded, and overvalued coins appearing. Walter at first sought to protect collectors by writing articles on coin grading and through his valuation website but this was largely unsuccessful so Walter sought to build his own alternative auction platform to eBay called NumisBid. NumisBid ran its first auction in 2007 though this was largely unsuccessful due to high reserves and insufficient interest.
Due to the efforts of other dealers which Walter later joined in on, third-party certification was introduced to the Australian market which helped clean eBay up as collectors focused on certified coins. This however didn't rectify the problem of overvaluations and to some degrees exacerbated it as PCGS, the third-party grading service primarily used in Australia, graded to a different standard to what the book price guides used.
To resolve this, in 2008 Walter rebranded the Retail Price Guide as the Blue Sheet and priced coins to the PCGS grading system. This greatly improved the accuracy and because of the consistent grading standard used by PCGS, it could reliably base valuations on recent sales.
The Blue Sheet was widely accepted by collectors of certified coins and became the standard price reference used by collectors. With this new audience, Walter then re-created NumisBid in 2011 running no reserve auctions and right from the first auction, achieved strong prices.
Walter focused on expanding NumisBid since then and in 2013 incorporated Walter Eigner Pty Ltd as the holding company of NumisBid. From 2011 to 2019 Numisbid sold in excess of $3 million via public auction alone, all while providing a low cost platform for collectors to trade their coins.
In selling about 5000 coins per year, Walter saw value in this data and utilised it to enhance the automated valuation system of the Blue Sheet. This, in combination with existing sales entry, was sufficient to automate the valuation process so in 2011 the Blue Sheet migrated to full sales-backed valuations. This meant that it was no longer required dealer input effecting a fully independent valuation reference.
This improved efficiency allowed Walter to expand the Blue Sheet to the growing coin markets in Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Thailand. This however added its own level of complexity as some of the other valued offerings of the Blue Sheet like its encyclopaedic reference still needed expert advice. For this reason, Walter teamed up with other global experts to form NumisTip, the world's first global reference for certified coins.
TBA