I believe there's a lot more competition buying online now, but I just started again, and from past experience my first week or two sucks, and then good things start to happen. For some reason I have sort of had a knack for it, for both what to buy and where to look, and my % of good buys to bad used to be incredible. I bet on 100 purchases I'd break even maybe 5 times, and lose just two or three.... and that was just putting them to auction! Now there's a few things that changed, there is more competition, sellers being smarter, and ebay making it cheap to list fixed price so many people will sit on items until they get their price instead of auctioning them... which means less deals to be had. After about 11 years of basically doing things the same way I think I might have to change and it's going to cost me way more in fees, and will have to tie up WAY more money just to try and make close to what I used to. I've always adapted for the little stuff, but this time it looks like my entire model that worked for so long will be flipped on it's head. Funny, like detecting, I wish my buying was like my early days, but things change and if you don't go with the times, you're toast.
PS: An online friend of mine who is a serious dealer/collector on the West coast is much more optimistic about better coins increasing in the future. He tells me to put some better stuff away, but I see it different and would rather have the cash. Hard to say how it will all end up.