Sell sterling silver by post across the UK

Silver is worth a small fraction of gold per gram, so the arithmetic works differently and it is better to say so plainly than to let you discover it after posting. A single sterling ring weighing 3 g is worth a few pounds. That is not worth the trouble for either of us, and we will tell you so rather than take the parcel.

Where silver becomes genuinely worth sending is quantity. A canteen of cutlery, a tea service, a set of napkin rings, a tray, a collection of 925 jewellery accumulated over decades — these run to hundreds of grams and sometimes into the kilos, and they are routinely the most valuable thing in a house clearance precisely because nobody thinks of them as valuable.

Send a photograph before you send anything else. If your silver is not worth posting, that is a two-minute conversation and you have lost nothing.

British sterling silver is 925 parts per thousand fine and carries a lion passant — a walking lion in profile — alongside an assay office mark and a date letter. That lion is the quickest thing to look for, and it is why UK sterling is unusually easy to identify compared with most European silver.

The mark that catches people out is EPNS: electroplated nickel silver. It is not silver at all beyond a microscopic plated layer, it appears on an enormous amount of British tableware, and it has no scrap value. So do "silver plate", "A1", "Sheffield plate" and similar. We do not buy plated items and we do not charge to return them, but knowing what the letters mean before you pack a box saves you the disappointment.

A plain "925" stamp with no other marks is usually genuine sterling but is not a UK hallmark, and it is assayed like anything else rather than taken on trust. Our UK silver hallmarks guide works through the marks in detail.

This is the single biggest source of unpleasant surprises in silver, so it is worth understanding before you post. Candlesticks, some trophies and most silver-handled knives are weighted: the silver is a shell over a filling of pitch, plaster or resin that exists to stop them falling over or to hold the blade. A pair of candlesticks can weigh two kilos and hold a couple of hundred grams of actual silver.

Only the silver is payable, and any buyer who quotes you on gross weight is quoting a number they have no intention of honouring. We weigh what is payable, show it on the offer, and show it separately from the gross weight so you can see exactly where the difference came from.

The same applies to knife blades, which are almost always stainless steel in a sterling handle, and to bases that have been filled or bolted. None of it is a trick — it is just how these objects were made — but it needs to be on the paperwork rather than in the small print.

Tarnish is a surface effect and it makes no difference at all to the assay or to the weight, so cleaning silver before sending it gains you nothing. Aggressive polishing can lose you something: it removes a thin layer of metal every time, and on an antique piece it can flatten the hallmark and the patina that made the item worth more as an object than as scrap.

If a piece might be collectable rather than scrap — a named maker, an early date letter, a complete cased set — say so and we will look at it on those terms instead. There is more on this in cleaning silver before selling, which is mostly an argument for leaving it alone.