Collectors' Quest

My blog today concerns the reader that wants to dispose of a few items or a collection. 

I’m one of five writers on Collectors’ Quest (CQ) and we all get questions on value and how to rid yourself of your once prized items (hopefully, at a profit.) We all have a sense of value on the items we discuss, but none of us qualify as appraisers.

 My recommendation has been to research the net for value and check local shops for comparable prices in your area. Many good resale or antique shops will tell you the retail price and what they are currently willing to pay (the wholesale price). Normally these prices are based on their knowledge of the current market in your area, how long they may wind up holding onto it before it is going to sell and what is not selling. A check of several stores may reveal a difference in price, based on different clientèle purchasing habits. It’s the same on net sites where you want to see the average selling price not the asking price.

You may want extra cash for a new play thing, computer, flat screen or fishing motor. Could be your cash flow is down due to a layoff and the extra cash is more important than your signed artworks. Or maybe your last child started full time school and you’re bored, and see potential in selling off designer clothing the grandparents flooded the kid with. Could be you just retired and finally have time to thin out your stacks of stuff before you move south.
These are all good reasons to explore selling a collection.

My first suggestion, of course, is to place your collection on Collectors’ Quest – Marketplace using the “tab” above. The easy sign-up and step by step instructions will guide you through the process, and all you will need to start is a digital camera and an idea of the item’s real value. Our Market Place will work well for the collector down-sizing or selling a complete collection of like items.

If your collectibles are bath tubs or buffets, you probably want to use a service like Craig’s List with local pick up as your best bet.

Collectors with tons of high end pottery, china and old glass will do well with a site like TIAS, over the long haul.

A new site with strong early exposure,  I Collect 24-7, is a low cost venue for the collector with a broad range of different product to unload, with the restriction, it must be old stuff.

Esty is newer too, and deals with the artsy type collectibles.  I imagine you can suggest a few places on the web you might have found for selling your stuff, that you can add to my list  by writing a reply at the bottom.

Did I leave out the big elephant in the room? Yes Ebay. Not easy for the beginning net seller to deal with for all the requirement and restrictions imposed on the seller. But still the way of selling a good quantity of items with patience.

Which ever route to success you choose, remember this one rule:
It’s retail sales, the customer is always right, unless they’re wrong.
Buy Low and Sell High, unless you paid too much.
Pack your shipments, as if you’re going to receive it. You may, if you got the label wrong.
You can satisfy all of the customers some of the time, and some of the customers all of the time, but in sales you can’t satisfy all of the customers, all of the time.
In a future post I’ll give you some suggestions on how to handle inventory, cutting costs on packaging and shipping, and lots of incidental stuff you will need to be a successful on line seller.
Good Hunting, and if you can, hold onto your collections for better times.

Thank you, dear readers, for stopping in to see the daily posts here in the blog — but hopefully you’ve realized that much, much more is going on in the other parts of Collector’s Quest.  Sharing collections online isn’t just for showing off – you might just learn something about what you’ve got.

I’ve been posting odd pictures at another website for a while, stuff in my collection that I don’t really know what it is – family photos, cars parked in the snow, and innumerable blurry photos of children.  A couple days ago, I posted one with a simple caption:  Gothic-Revival Church, 1930s. The building is a pretty generic church, with an interesting steeple, but otherwise lacking major identifying features.  The land in the distance is the flat prairies, and judging from the other photos that I got in the same batch, I assumed it was southwestern Minnesota, just on a hunch.  There were photos of a farm, a small town, cars, and children riding horses, all nondescript, nothing for me to Google from.

Later that day, I received an email with this attached:

I’ve been reading the sender’s blog for a while, and apparently he’s been returning the favor:  He wanted to know if I thought it was the same church — sure, we were allowing for the fact that these could have been ordered from the Sears Roebuck catalog and identical buildings might pepper the Great Plains, but the similarity was too uncanny.   In fact, if you look closely at the fence posts, it appears that my photo was taken only a few feet away from where my reader’s photo was taken.   His is dated 1904; mine seems 1930s, based on cars seen in other photos, which accounts for a spindly tree in the older photo appearing more bushy in the later picture.   It still wasn’t difinitive, so I emailed him a few other pictures from the set, including this one:

Those distinctive grain elevators on the right became a big clue. I received a few more pictures from my reader, which make things far more certain:  These photos are of Adrian, ND, a tiny town southeast of Jamestown, North Dakota.

If these photos had sat in a cardboard box in my closet, because I didn’t have anything to say about them, there would have been no chance of possibly identifying anything about them.   The internet is a huge resource for collectors to share and learn about the things in their collection — especially the stuff they know the least about.   I don’t expect everything I post online to be dissected and analyzed by other users, but I’ve learned something about one photo, which is well worth the effort.  Start sharing your collections — even the things that you might think aren’t the best — and you might be pleasantly surprised by what you find out!

You have the passion. No one else on the block has 145 PEZ dispensers or 28 collectible dragons. You are eccentric, so wave your flag fly high and proud. But it isn’t seen outside your living room, or basement, or worse, your back closet or attic. The simple truth is no one knows just how interesting you are or what turns you on. After all, the casual acquaintance, colleague, or even close friend doesn’t know you have a collection of over 140 compact discs.So after a while, what happens to our passion? We add to it, nurture it, and enjoy it, but only for a short time. Things get in the way and our collections get pushed aside. We make more time for our kids, home, and jobs, but not our collection. And we forget about it; it lies waiting to be rediscovered by a curious somebody, maybe even you, but then it becomes only a thought or remembrance of a past time.

This is why you are calling out for Collectors’ Quest. Instead of consigning your prized collection to a dark corner of your home and life, put it out in the open for everyone to see and share! All you need is a digital camera and some basic computer knowledge to upload the pictures. You can add to your collection, give details about individual pieces, watch for conventions and media dealing with diverse interests, and meet other collectors. You can find take your collection with you anywhere you can access a computer and internet. And others can view it when you are off-line. I had my collections up within a half hour for all to see under the name Armadillo Jack.

When you started collecting beer cans, didn’t you find it interesting that many brands had their logos on disposable coasters? Or that someone might collect these coasters? Or possibly has every magazine advertisement for your favorite brew? It is a small wonder how so many people collect so many different things. Your brother has a Star Wars action figure set, so why not send him to Collectors’ Quest so he can view 19 different Star Wars collections from a single collector? He might see something that he doesn’t have and he might be able to trade someone part of his collection for that item. The site can connect you with collectors in your area, age group, and by collecting interest so you can communicate with people just like yourself. Over 80 million Americans collect something, so you are already part of a growing movement.

We have to reinvigorate our passion from time to time. We need new ideas, inspiration, and the reason to do what it is that we do. While we can continue to collect, without any resource to share these collections, and to delight in other collectors passions, our collections will be relegated our dark closets, damp basements, and dirty attics.

Collectors’ Quest is the fan for our collective collecting flames, and with it we will live our passions on-line, and share among the many others who collect to satisfy their passions. Visit our community now and wave your collector’s flag high!

It all started with slide puzzles. Really. Like so many suburban kids in the late 1970’s, there was a certain thrill to trick or treating, like collecting a pirate’s booty of pure sucrose.

My Mom would only let us have one piece of candy a day after Halloween so we needed to choose wisely. As I took a closer look at what lay within my bag one year, I came upon a slide puzzle. I picked it up as someone might pick up a dead rat and first looked at it with disgust, feeling gypped from my sugar high. Then as I flicked my wrist, a puzzle piece slid. I was fascinated that the pieces stayed in place. What was even cooler was that I could mess up the numbers. I mean who doesn’t love a little chaos now and then? I could replace the pieces… but only if I wanted too.

Years ago, before the Internet, it was hard to find people who collected slide puzzles like I did. I had to hunt through yard sales and shopping malls for those rare and valuable items. When the Internet came around in the early 90s, I got really excited about its potential. Yet even though I searched for years, I never found a proper place where collectors could recapture those gleeful childhood moments of show and tell, where we could gather and talk about our collections or swap for something better. Three years and a lot of hard work later, we finally have a community where collectors of all things can gather.

We’ve been working very hard behind the scenes to make it easier for collectors to get together. Our tech team has been working around the clock to implement the latest in web technology, utilizing the very best searching, tagging, and social-networking tools that work so well in the websphere. And though we’ve added an enormous amount of functionality over the past few months, we’ll be adding new enhancements every day. We’ll be sure to keep you informed of that.

In the 30 odd years I’ve been collecting slide puzzles, I have amassed quite a few. I’m up to five shoe boxes with everything from Star Trek puzzles to puzzles that glow in the dark so you can play under the covers with the lights out. Interestingly enough, these days it’s about the aesthetics and not the volume but let’s be real. If you offered me one I’m going to pounce on that tasty treat like a cat on catnip.

Perhaps I like slide puzzles because they hold many parallels with life itself. Every action you make affects those around you and hasty thoughts bring repercussions. However, I fell in love with them because of the challenge. A friend of mine used to say I liked to create my own chaos. Perhaps he was right, but he neglected to mention I put the chaos away when I was done playing.

Anyway, I just wanted to write this little note to welcome you all to the new site. Why not take a look at my slide puzzles (if that’s your thing). Or even better, why not upload your own collection and see who’s out there who shares your interests? It’s easy. Take some photos, upload the group and tell us about your collection! As always, feel free to drop us a comment (my username is slideonover) and let us know how we can improve the site!

Thanks, and happy collecting!
Liz

Liz Kressel, Founder of Collectors’ Quest
Where Hunters Gather