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Upstate Coin & Gold started as a family coin shop in Syracuse, New York, sometime in the 1970s or 1980s.
Today it operates as a full-scale precious metals wholesaler with a proprietary 24/7 trading platform, a second headquarters in Colorado, and an inventory of over 2,000 products spanning gold, silver, platinum, palladium, and numismatics.
That is a long way from sorting coins at regional shows. The company now serves coin dealers, online retailers, IRA dealers, pawnshops, and jewelers across the country, and it has built much of its reputation on something that was rare in its early days: publishing prices openly, on a schedule, so buyers could actually plan.
Key Takeaways
- Upstate Coin & Gold is a B2B precious metals wholesaler, not a retail store, making it most relevant to dealers and businesses rather than individual collectors.
- Its proprietary platform, PlatformGold®, offers 24/7 live spot pricing and order execution across more than 2,000 products.
- The company offers services well beyond buying and selling, including confidential dropshipping, custom minting, metal refining, and API integration for third-party platforms.
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Background: From Syracuse to National Wholesaler
The founder's son, Dave, grew up working the business and eventually opened his own retail store around 2008, right as the financial crisis pushed gold prices into a multi-year bull run. By 2010, he had pivoted toward wholesale.
The move made sense: retail margins in precious metals are thin, inventory cycles are fast, and the real leverage sits in volume. What distinguished Upstate early in the wholesale phase was a daily dealer sheet sent by email to a network of buyers.
Pricing transparency at that scale was not the industry norm. It built the kind of customer base that sticks around.
Technology became the next focus. Around 2015, Dave began developing an online trading platform. The second iteration launched in 2020 as PlatformGold®, coinciding with the company's expansion into Colorado.
The timing was awkward given the pandemic, but gold hit an all-time high above $2,000 per troy ounce in August 2020, so the demand side was not a problem.
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The Upstate New York Precious Metals Market: Some Context
Central New York is not typically cited alongside New York City or Los Angeles when people talk about precious metals trading hubs. But the regional market has real depth.
Upstate New York has a dense concentration of pawnshops, estate sale companies, and independent coin dealers, particularly in the Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo corridors.
Scrap gold and silver flow out of these businesses constantly, and they need reliable wholesale partners who pay promptly and price fairly. Dealers working in smaller markets often don't have access to the same wholesale relationships that a Chicago or Dallas-based operation might take for granted.
A platform-based wholesaler that ships nationally and posts prices publicly levels that gap considerably. For a dealer in Utica or Binghamton, Upstate provides the same pricing access that a much larger operation in a major metro would receive.
Gold spot prices in 2024 averaged above $2,300 per troy ounce for much of the year, a level that pushes more sellers into the market and raises the volume of transactions moving through wholesalers.
Silver followed a similar pattern, crossing $30 per troy ounce multiple times. For a company like Upstate, higher spot prices translate directly to larger deal values and greater urgency around execution speed.
| Metal | 2023 Average (per troy oz) | 2024 Average (per troy oz) | % Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gold | ~$1,940 | ~$2,330 | +20% |
| Silver | ~$23.40 | ~$28.60 | +22% |
| Platinum | ~$1,010 | ~$965 | -4% |
| Palladium | ~$1,340 | ~$950 | -29% |
Palladium's decline is worth noting because it illustrates exactly why a broad product mix matters to a wholesaler. Dealers who were heavily palladium-focused in 2023 took hits in 2024.
Upstate's catalog spans all four major metals plus numismatics and sterling silver, which spreads exposure across market cycles rather than concentrating it.
PlatformGold: What It Actually Does
Most precious metals wholesalers still process orders by phone or email during business hours. PlatformGold® works differently. The platform runs live 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with real-time spot pricing and immediate order execution.
For a dealer who buys a bulk silver lot at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday, that kind of access is not a small thing. Precious metals prices are set by global markets that do not pause for East Coast business hours. The London fix, Asian overnight trading, and U.S. futures all move the price before most dealers have had coffee.
A platform that locks in pricing in real time gives buyers a meaningful edge over competitors calling in orders the next morning at yesterday's number.
The core features dealers actually use:
- Live markets with real-time bid and ask pricing across the full product catalog
- Daily dealer sheet with market updates and pricing summaries
- Custom watchlists to track specific products
- Full order management dashboard covering active orders, payments, and purchase history
- Limit orders that trigger automatically when the spot price hits a defined level
- ShipSecure, an integrated insured shipping label generator inside the platform
The limit order feature deserves specific attention. Precious metals markets can swing several percent in a single session. A dealer who wants to buy 100 oz of silver only if the price drops below a specific threshold can set that trigger and walk away.
The order executes automatically, without monitoring the screen. That is standard in securities trading but still relatively uncommon in physical bullion.
Services Beyond the Trade
The wholesale catalog is just one layer. Upstate runs several adjacent services that matter depending on what kind of business a customer operates.
Confidential Dropshipping is designed for online retailers who sell precious metals to end customers but don't want to handle shipping themselves. Upstate ships directly to the buyer in unmarked packaging. The packing slip carries the retailer's logo, not Upstate's.
The customer never knows where the metal came from. For small e-commerce operations, this eliminates the need for a secure receiving operation entirely. It also removes the liability of holding significant metal inventory on-site, which matters for insurance costs and basic security planning.
Refining is relevant for pawnshops and jewelers who accumulate scrap gold, silver, and mixed-metal items. Rather than taking spot-minus-something from a local refiner of unknown quality, dealers can send material to Upstate and receive payment based on actual refined metal content.
Scrap that sits in a drawer is dead capital. Refining turns it into working capital. This matters especially in a high-spot environment: scrap accumulated when gold was at $1,800 is worth meaningfully more when spot crosses $2,300, and moving it quickly into cash or credit keeps the business nimble.
Custom Minting lets businesses create branded bullion products under their own name. The use case is niche but real: a coin shop that wants to sell its own silver rounds, or a brand looking for a premium gift product, or a business building out a private-label precious metals line.
API Integration is the most technical offering. Retailers can plug PlatformGold's live pricing and inventory data directly into their own websites or point-of-sale systems, automating order flow without any manual steps on the Upstate side.
This is how a mid-sized online coin dealer can effectively resell Upstate's inventory without maintaining their own warehouse.
Product Scope
More than 2,000 SKUs is a large number for a single wholesaler. The inventory spans:
- Gold coins and bars (American Eagles, Maple Leafs, Krugerrands, generic bars in multiple weights)
- Silver coins, bars, and rounds including government-minted and private mint products
- Sterling silver for jewelers and scrap dealers
- Platinum and palladium coins and bars
- Numismatics, meaning graded and collectible coins with value beyond metal content
- IRA-eligible bullion meeting IRS purity standards
The numismatics category separates Upstate from pure-play bullion wholesalers. Graded coins trade on a premium over spot based on condition, rarity, and collector demand, so the pricing dynamics are entirely different from bullion and the buyer pool is narrower.
Carrying that inventory signals that the company serves serious collectors and estate dealers, not just bulk commodity traders.
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Who This Is (and Isn't) For
Upstate Coin & Gold is a business-to-business operation. Individual buyers looking to purchase a single gold coin for investment purposes will not find a retail checkout cart at upstatecoins.com.
The platform requires an account, and accounts are for dealers, retailers, and businesses that move metal in volume. That is not a criticism. Wholesale and retail are different businesses, and trying to run both usually dilutes both.
The customer profile that fits best:
- Coin and precious metals dealers who need a reliable wholesale supplier with live pricing
- Online retailers who want dropshipping fulfillment without managing inventory
- Pawnshops with regular scrap accumulation looking for a refining outlet
- Jewelers who buy silver and gold in quantity and need competitive wholesale rates
- IRA custodians and dealers who need IRS-compliant bullion sourced from a documented wholesale chain
Phone support runs Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern at 315-637-1300, with the platform itself accessible around the clock for trading.
Conclusion
It would be good to research the firm you are contemplating before making any kind of investment. BullionByPost is a trustworthy business.
You may be confident you are working with a respectable dealer if they have an easy-to-use website, excellent customer service, reasonable rates, a sizable inventory, insurance, and the willingness to buy back their products.
If you should have any questions about making the best investment, please feel free to contact us. We would be more than happy to discuss the options you have with BullionByPost.