Coin collecting shops with a physical presence are few and far between. Unless they are lucky enough to live in a major town with a coin supply store or could come across a rare find in a pawnbrokers, numismatists were once confined to either waiting for their local coin club to put on a coin collecting show or traveling to the big city. The Internet has changed all this, and several coin collecting shops now have online presences. In this article, we will look at a few of the biggest.

The Coin Shop

The Coin Shop has the distinction of being the first coin collecting shop to trade online, having started its website in 1994, back when the only people with Internet access were university students, the military and a few hardcore techies. It prides itself on the accurate grading and fair pricing of its products, from the common to the rare, and also supplies wholesale.

The Coin Shop's website has sections on state quarters, dollar coins, Euros, obsolete coins and ancient and medieval coins. It also sells books and software for coin collectors.

Lynn Coins

Lynn Coins is a Tennessee-based coin collecting shop that has been in business for over 30 years. It has two websites, lynncoins.com and LynnCoins.net. The former is the older of the two sites. It has a rather old-fashioned, cluttered design that makes it rather difficult to navigate, but contains a lot of informational content that has not yet been migrated to the new site.

LynnCoins.net is much more attractive to look at, but only contains the catalog part of the old site at the time of writing. It is probably advisable to look at both sites to make sure that the item you want is on there.

About Coin Collecting

About Coin Collecting is not so much a coin collecting shop as an informational website run by the Auburn, Maine based jewelry store Republic Jewelry, that also links to their coin catalog. Their wealth of introductory articles on the history of coins and the art of coin collecting make the site the ideal first stop for the novice coin collector.

The site seems to only carry US coins, but they also sell related items such as coin folders, price guides and even state quarter teddy bears, embroidered with each state's name and date of entry to the union, with a clear vinyl pocket to store that state's quarter.