We Are APMEX

Many years ago, my grandfather was a small mail order coin dealer. And when I was growing up, I would go over to his house because my mother had kidney problems and she needed dialysis. He would have me sort pennies for him in his living room. And so that kind of started me off in collecting coins. And I’d put together these little Whitman folders of pennies, nickels and dimes, and searching through dates and trying to find the empty holes in my album that I needed with what he had

After he passed away in 1982, we kind of took the inventory that he had, in a basement, and we literally just closed the door and said, "We'll deal with this another time." It wasn't until 1999 when my grandmother started to get older and we needed to move her into a place where she could have greater care than she was giving to herself. We went back to New York which is where we were from. We opened up the door to the basement, and it wasn't like you stumbled into a treasure chest of gold and silver. It was probably at most $100,000 worth of inventory that was there. But somebody needed to do something with it. And so we started to take some of these products and list them and sell them on eBay because that was really where we could get, I would say, maximum value for us as a seller.

We started buying and selling old coins. After doing that for about six months, we wind up running out of space and I thought, "Wow, wouldn't it be great if we could take these products that we were buying, put 'em on our website." Our customers supported it, our employees got behind it, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

Our building is the former Federal Reserve Bank of Oklahoma City. It was built in the early 1920s. It's an 80,000 square foot fortress. We've got multiple vaults within the facility that are walls ranging from two to three feet thick. For us, it's perfect because we're in a building that was originally designed for us almost a hundred years ago to house gold and silver, and it's come full circle now.

APMEX is really about offering the best overall shopping experience to our customers. We're really focused on making sure we live the experience all the way through and we own that experience. A lot of times people just want to sell you a product. We want to educate you. We want you to really understand the products and understand the options that are available to you.

The reason precious metals are a good investment for people is they serve as a defensive asset during times of political and economic uncertainty.

We deal with mints from all over the world. We try to go find those unique items such when people come in, they can locate something they've never seen before.

What's nice is we have the inventory readily available on the shelf at all times. And that allows you to sleep at night knowing, as a customer, when you give us your funds, not only are you going to get product shipped to you quickly, you can feel confident that we had the product onsite at all times and that we're actually capitalized very well to be able to support you.

So many of the things that we do that are different from other online retailers is focusing our energy and efforts around providing a great website experience for our customers, delivering a broad selection of products that they can find easily on our website.

You want a wide assortment. You want to be able to find that assortment. You want to be able to have a quick identification and a quick check-out process.

Whenever there's big moves in the stock markets, people are going to come in and transact with the website, so we need to make sure that it's always up, and that people feel confident that they are able to complete their transactions.

We also want to offer a two-way market. We want you to have the ability to sell back to us as well. When that time comes, we want to divest of your investments.

The beauty of it is, is that you can always go online and get a good feel for what it is you'll be able to sell the product for at any given time.

One of things we do is we take great care in making your packages indistinguishable in the process. We also want to make sure, at the same time, that all your customer information is protected.

This is a significant investment that people are making, and they need to have a trust factor, and they need to know that when their product comes it is treated at the level that they invested it in.

We have a great selection of product, we have depth of inventory, and we put those products, in many cases within 24 hours from the time in which they order it. We want to make sure that our customers have a good experience and that they come back again and again and again.