agate pricing

Don't think there is any set in stone figures for agate and other rough. The best bet would be to do a google search of the type of agate you're interested in buying. Different sellers will have different prices. Just take an average of a dozen or so prices.

There isn't really a standard to how rock is graded and priced other than high end faceting gem materials. How much you purchase and where you get it are huge factors. For example we bought rough in Quartzsite last year for a fraction of what we would pay at a local show or on ebay.
Ebay definitely sets the price nowadays to some degree, a good place to do research.

Lee

Very complicated problem. Agate pricing depends on a wide variety of characteristics. Things like rarity, locality, color and pattern, size in many instances, freedom from flaws or fractures etc. I do know that if you have a collection appraised, the appraisers often consider how many stones can be cut from a specimen which to me seems ridiculous. And then of course, on venues like E-bay, competition for a specimen can really be a huge factor and push prices up to as much as the market can bear. As others have said, check the retail stores like Superagates or Beautiful agates.com , the Gem shop and e-bay for prices you can compare your specimens to. But in the end, it's a buyer driven thing. You can price agates as high or low as you like but you still have to find the right buyer......Mel

... but miners and estates are only indirectly related to the going retail price. Right?

Scott, I am not sure we disagree, but you are making some fine distinctions between "recommended" and "actual", while I was trying to track the spirit of the original question as I understood it.

I would agree that ideally one would want to buy direct from a miner or pay pennies on the dollar at an estate. But, I would assert that this is generally not the case with most retail sales, which I think the OP was asking about.

I also think that when one is asking about retail sales for personal use, it is almost always a case of what a miner would call "small quantities", which you noted was a different matter.

For many materials miners are out of the country, and even for North American materials not all miners have websites or sell small lots to the public. Some do, and the web does make direct sales easier than ever. Likewise, not all miners go to Quartzite, and most buyers cannot afford to travel there.

Depending on how well estate materials are sorted, and the location, and the attendees, material will either go pennies on the dollar (i.e., by the estimated ton, or a few dollars a bucket) or may get bid up to near retail. Estates sold as a lot, without auction, usually see the lowest prices.

Also anyone looking for a variety of material (hard to get from one mine) or for reasonable consumer protections (e.g., right to return, where estates are generally all sales final) will generally deal with a vendor middleman of some sort.

So I agree that buying from a miner (where possible), or a vendor who is only one-step removed form the mine is a great idea. I also agree that buying form an estate (where prices are often low to move unsorted stuff right away), or form a vendor who has bought multiple estates for less than the material can currently be had form the miners - well or course that is great too.

But if someone wants to get a sense of what to pay for various materials under various conditions of sale (e.g., description only, pictures of actual material, windowed/blocked, quantity discount ... etc), then you want to look at the retail marketplace, not the wholesale one, and not estate sales - which have a very artificial (non market-driven) price structure.

I would certainly recommend anyone buy close to the source where feasible, or from an estate aggregation like Tony. I still think that for gauging expectations of retail price (the OP question) that mines and estates are only indirectly related. (Which is not to say unrelated. "Indirect" implies a looser or fuzzy relation compared to a direct one.)

So, I don't see that we disagree to any extent, but I do think you answered the question "Where should I buy ..." versus "Where can I form price expectations ..."