I collect Austria Stamps only
There are 67,000 Items of Austrian Stamps listed as of June 7 2008 2PM
Only 507 of those listed stamps have Buyers !!!
In my more of 50 Years as buyer and Seller of Austrian Stamps, I have never seen such low sales.
Is that directly attributed to the economy and the falling $ ???
If so we all are in deep trouble !

I may be very stupid, but I don't think anything special at all is happening to the Austrian stamps.

Surely once something has a buyer and has been bought, it is no longer listed?

The 507 listed that "have buyers" must merely be those which somebody is bidding on at the moment , where the auction is not yet over. "Buy now" items would never ever be in this group.

I reckon it would be the same for any country if you looked into it, not just Austria, and it's got nothing to do with the economy and the falling dollar. Is Keyman looking only at items priced in dollars ? Items priced in euros would not be affected by the falling dollar -- or would they ? Items priced in dollars would now be CHEAPER to buyers whose own currency is the pound sterling or the euro, so you might expect Americans to sell more not less, whereas Europeans would sell less to America, but is that an important percentage of their trade in Austrian stamps ?

There are too many factors to consider to come to sweeping conclusions like this ! To give another example, if petrol is more expensive, people might actually stay at home and spend more on their stamp collections, in most cases a relatively inexpensive little pleasure.

Rogermo

I presume that you looked up the current listings in auction format which have bids already. This is not a reliable way of estimating the percentage of sales because it doesnt't include the fixed pice items (as Rogermo already correctly mentioned).

A better and more reliable method is to compare the number of the current listings with the amount of sold items. For this just check "Completed" and "Sold only" under "Contents" (left frame) and click the blue "Apply" button. After that you will see the sold items in the respective category. I don't know the exact time-range (how long it goes back into the past), so the results may be a bit unreliable if it goes back very long into the past, but it's still a good method I think.

Right now the numbers for Austria (all Delcampe sites) are:

Current listings: 68216

Sold: 22177

... so it's not THAT bad

... and an even better method may be to compare the number of all closed items (sold and unsold) with the number of only sold items:

Again for Austria and all Delcampe sites:

All closed items: 41944

Closed and sold: 22177