I recommend Numista.com

[Cerulean]

Earlier this year, I signed up for the World Coin Gallery trading service. I assume anybody reading this thread knows about WCG, and might know about their new-ish coin trading service launched over the summer. WCG is a great web resource for foreign coin numismatists, but it lacks important facts such as composition, mintage, physical parameters, and lists of minted dates. Anyway, I was approached last month by a potential WCG trader, and he casually mentioned his good trade feedback on Numista.com. Naturally, I googled this name, and discovered the Shangri-La of foreign numismatics.

Numista is a foreign coin collecting and trading website run by a Frenchman named Xavier. The user base is still predominantly French and other Europeans of various flavors, but the website is bilingual, having fully implemented both English and French. As an English-only speaker, I have had little trouble using Numista. The English-speaking presence there is growing rapidly, and the website is attracting new members faster than Xavier can buy new servers to keep up with demand.

Why should you check out Numista? Because they have all the coin information you've always hoped to find on the web, all in one place. Diameter, weight, thickness, composition, edge style, mintmarks, varieties and errors, years and mintages... everything. It's like having three volumes of Krause Standard at your fingertips at once. Mind you, there are still lots of holes in Numista's coverage, especially with older pre-1800 coins, and errors are being caught every day. But the Numista team works hard to make corrections, and usually fixes problems within a few days. Numista is the web v2.0 of coin collecting sites, user-driven. You have the power to make it better. If you see something that's not right, you can speak up about it in the forums, or in some cases make the correction yourself.

Did I mention the trading service? There are thousands of active traders, and since most of them aren't Americans, they have access to all kinds of coins that are hard to find over here. Unlike WCG's trade feature, you can actually specify the individual years or varieties of interest, not just by type as WCG does.

I used to troll the web looking for good information on foreign coinage, piecing things together from World Coin Gallery, Wikipedia, and various coin blogs. But now I've found everything I've been looking for in a single site. If you specialize in foreign coins, or just have some to trade away for the good stuff you want, you owe it to yourself to check out Numista.com.

(I do not now, nor have I ever, worked for or officially represented Numista.com, and I receive no compensation for this post that sounds so much like an advert. I just want to spread the word about something cool I found.)

[Rexor]

I have found Numista reasonably useful. There are pretty large gaps and some errors that really shouldn't be there, for example, it lists the French 5 Franc as a Nickel coin. Also when it comes to composition I really want to know the details, is that coin 97% Cu or 95% or 95.5% etc. It doesn't provide that level of detail. It can still be a valuable resource, just my ignorant opinion .

[uthminsta]

Nice. I just spent almost an hour looking at the site. I'm impressed.

[aloneibreak]

thanks for the link.

pretty sweet !

[BCNumismatics]

I'm a member over on there as well.

Aidan.

[Blarry]

Great website!