General Questions

Collectors Quest was created by collectors, for collectors.

Here, you can upload and organize your own interesting collections, meet and talk with your fellow passionate collectors, and see different and unique collections from around the world. You can also buy and sell treasures and get global news about the vast world of collecting.

If you collect it or it’s about collecting, you’ll find it here at Collectors Quest—Where Hunters Gather!

From time to time, parts of the website will fall ill. If you notice something unusual, broken, or otherwise unpleasant, please use our feedback form to tell us what you’ve found (in as much detail as you can) so we can can assign the proper team to apply the right kind of bandage. And, of course, we apologize for any inconvenience!

You didn’t tattoo it on the inside of your arm? We’re disappointed in you, but we also understand fear of commitment.

To retrieve your password, click here and we'll walk you through it!

Easy! Click here to access your ‘MY CQ’ page. You may be asked to log in first. Click on any area you’d like to edit, and you’ll be able to edit and enter all of the information you want : your bio, your profile image, your favorite collections, whether or not you actually enjoy that Leonard Nimoy album for its aesthetic value over its kitsch value, etcetera. Please notice that there are multiple tabs for different parts of your account. Enjoy!

Uploading and displaying your personal collection is the core of Collectors Quest, so we’ve made the process as easy as possible for you. Check out the tutorial on the right called Guide to Photo Uploading and Editing which should lead you through the whole process.

By assigning tags to your items and collections, you’re helping other people find your great stuff on Collectors Quest. Other Batmobile collectors won’t be able to find your sleek, dangerous Bat-cars if you don’t give them a name and list a few things about them.

In short, tags are the words which match your stuff with other peoples’ stuff. When you’re tagging stuff, you can be both as general and/or specific as you can be, but make your tags relevant and keep them to one or two words per tag.

For example, a Batman action figure would be tagged “action figure” “Batman” “DC Comics” “comic books”, and “toys” (along with other possible tags), so when people type those words into a search, or click on that tag from someone else’s item, they’ll be taken right to your stuff! Ultra-specific tag phrases like “DC Comics Batman action figure 1989” or "green cup that my grandma gave me" won’t really match up with anything. Short and sweet is the way to go!

All of the information you provide to Collectors Quest is for internal use only and will never be given to anyone else. If you are a seller, some of the info you provide is used to verify your PayPal account.

We’ll occasionally contact you at the email address you've provided with special promotions, to verify and complete Market transactions with people you've purchased items from, if you've received a comment or a message on our site, or with our weekly newsletter (if you've signed up for it). All of these options can be turned on and off from your account preferences tab.

CQ is a place where you can show off your cool stuff. Organize your entire coffee mug collection by color, size, or order of preference and create a personal archive—or just upload an item you’d like your fellow collectors to help you identify. Seek out other collections who may have items you've missed, and talk to other collectors about the who, what, where, when and why of collecting what you love. Fill out your profile so other robot collectors can find you. Our community is here for you to interact, so get out there and start talking to people!

And if you eventually decide to sell items in your collection, all it takes is one click to convert any item to an item for sale, keeping all of the information you've entered in one piece! All you do is add a price and some shipping information and you're set!

Please note that all selling on Collectors Quest must be done through our Market, for the safety of our community. All buyers and sellers are registered on the site and with PayPal, affording both parties protection. If you list an item as 'for sale' without placing it in our Market, it is subject to editing and/or removal.

Signing up is easy - just enter your desired username, e-mail address and password in our signup screen at the bottom of any page, or at this link.

Why should you sign up? By becoming a member, you can communicate with everyone else on the site, from your fellow collectors to the management here at CQ (who all have profiles and collections on the site)—and allow other people to contact you if they have something you want, and vice versa. You’re a collector of neat stuff, and one of the best parts about collecting is sharing your love and treasures with others. You'll have the option to receive a regular newsletter featuring the best stuff from our site and the world of collecting, as well as special promotions and discounts. A free membership allows you to do all of these things, so please join us!

Collecting has never been hotter. We have our theories, but everyone has their own reason for accumulating 500 pairs of Converse shoes, or even five plastic elephants. Collecting is an integral part of history, culture, and (some would argue) social and intellectual development. It’s not about having more than someone else, but about sharing what you love and gathering it around you. This is why we’re here, and we want to give you a place to be a vocal part of it all!

Collectors Quest doesn’t buy or sell your items directly, but we do provide a venue for you to do these things.

We provide a Market where anyone can sign up to sell their items, and anyone can purchase items listed for sale. All transactions are conducted between our community members, and not with Collectors Quest directly - but we'll be happy to assist you!

Note that all items you'd like to sell should be officially listed in the Market. Items outside of the official Market listed as 'for sale' are subject to editing and/or removal from the site. We also discourage members from messaging other members with messages asking them to buy their items. These messages will be marked as spam by our system and deleted. If you want to sell something, list it!

Nope! You can purchase any item from any seller on Collectors Quest without having an account at our site. All of your receipt and contact information will be emailed to you, and you'll be given an option to create an account at the end of the checkout process, if you'd like to streamline future purchases, or just interact more on the site.

You DO need to be a member to sell an item, and all transactions must be conducted through our Market. Any items not in our official Market which are listed as 'for sale' are subject to editing and/or removal, for the safety and protection of all of our members.

Organizing and cataloging your stuff is a fairly personal process. As a collector, do you collect by year of production or manufacturer? By color, size, rarity, or shape? At Collectors Quest, you can organize your collectibles any any way you see fit, which is the beauty of the site. We feature a convenient drag-and-drop interface so you can rearrange everything in your collection as you see fit. Try it out!

While we don't suggest that you upload everything into one HUGE collection (as organizing things is a simpler process in manageable segments, and enormous collections will slow page loading times), bear in mind that any item can be cross-referenced between different collections. This means that, for example, a Batman coffee mug can be placed in both your "Batman" and "coffee mug" collections without uploading the photo twice. Just upload your photo using the normal process, and when you're creating a description, start typing the name of any collection you've started in the 'collection' bar and you'll get all of your collections to choose from. So, the possibilities are endless!

If you'd like to remove your item from the Market, simply switch the 'YES/NO' button underneath your item's description to 'NO' (right next to the 'Make this item available for sale?' option), and it'll be a regular ol' collectible again.

You can also delete your items from the site entirely, but bear this in mind: by uploading and tagging items, you give your potential customers more ways to find your store. For each item you remove from the site, you have one less way that people can find your stuff. For this reason, it benefits you as a seller to upload and describe items in full, and keep them on the site!

You can see our current pricing at this link.

We only charge an up-front listing fee, and we never charge a commission. All of the money you make is completely yours to keep.

It's not easy to determine how well your items will do on any site. We can offer no guarantees, since 75% of a listing's success depends on the quality of the listing itself. Here are some things to consider:

• Have you included multiple, clear pictures with your listing?
• Are the items you're selling desirable to a collecting audience?
• Are these items rare or common?
• Are they in good condition?
• Can you offer a clear, accurate, concise, detailed description of your items that will appeal to a buying audience?
• Ultimately, are you willing to put in the work to market your items?

Our audience is pretty diverse, so there's no real way to determine the success of any single item until it sells, but we invite you to browse around and find similar items to the ones you're selling to gauge their past success for yourself. Good luck!

There's a tab within your profile called 'Email Preferences' which allows you to choose which mailings you'll get from us. All you have to do is click YES (or NO), and we'll send (or not send) you our weekly newsletter!

Selling on CQ is super easy.

While you're editing your own items, you'll see that under every item you upload is a banner that says 'Want to sell this item?' By clicking on this banner, you'll be able to purchase credits on the site. Or, you can just click here to find out more!

Once you purchase credits, you'll be able to put any item you've already uploaded into our Market with the click of a button. Just access your item's edit screen and you'll see a 'YES/NO' option, asking you if you'd like to list your item for sale. Simply by clicking this button, your item's description will remain exactly the same, and now you'll be able to add pricing and shipping information, and your item will be placed in our Market.

What you DON'T do is message other members of the site asking them to buy your stuff. While we encourage communication, harassing other members by pressuring them to buy your stuff creates an unfriendly environment. These messages as flagged as spam by our system and removed for the safety of our community. We can't help anyone who engages in buying or selling that does not occur directly through the Market.

You're probably not reading the error message carefully. We allow all manner of characters in our 'password' section, because a password with crazy characters in it is just safe, and we encourage online safety. Have another look at that error message and notice that it's pointing to your USERNAME field. 99% of the time, members are trying to create a username with a space in it. Go for an underscore or a period instead.

Without getting too complicated, your web browser reads certain characters as instructions (or it doesn't understand them at all), and when we display your username at the top of your unique profile page, we need to be sure that it fits into a standard URL format. This is universal across the Internet. Welcome to cyberspace.

While we're not professional appraisers or hunters, we do have an audience of people who know a lot about antiques and collectibles. Our strength is that we provide a forum for people to discover this information from one another.

Our best suggestion is to upload an image of this picture to our site, with as much detail as you can find (artist or manufacturer, date, size, subject, title, author, publisher, any distinguishing marks), and our readers might be able to help. Either way, identifying unique and antique items over the Internet requires a clear picture to make any progress at all. Online estimates are notoriously difficult, since so much of an item's value depends on physically verifying if it's authentic and in good condition.

Post some images into our community with this information and we can send the mysterious item out to our audience, who is a lot smarter than us when it comes to IDing antiques and collectibles. You can also post a link to your item (once you've uploaded it to our site) directly on our Facebook page. Our audience has a lot of experts in it!

All transactions on Collectors Quest are conducted through PayPal, for the protection of everyone in our community. This applies to seller memberships, as well as all payments made by buyers and to sellers.

If you see something unusual, send us a message. We'll seek clarification from the original seller and allow them 48 hours to edit or remove the item in question. Since every item is unique, we'll seek verification in any appropriate manner. If you are a seller whose item is in question and do not respond to an inquiry within 48 hours, we'll 'hide' your item from public view so you can edit it at your convenience at a later time.

We reserve the right to remove items from the site if they are determined to be fraudulent, or feature intentionally misleading descriptions or photographs.

Drop us a line from the email address you used when you created your account and include your username, and explain to use why you're leaving. You can find our contact form at the end of our feedback wizard.

It's a simple process!

1) The buyer clicks on the 'Purchase This Item' button and they're walked through the checkout process, where they enter their shipping and billing information. All of this is processed through PayPal, and payment is made immediately.

2) The buyer and seller will get an invoice sent to their email from CQ including all of the information you'll need to ship the item, as well as a payment notification from PayPal. Both parties will also get a link to an invoice page on Collectors Quest for future reference. This information will also appear in your own account dashboard under either 'purchases' or 'my market' (depending on if you were the buyer or seller).

3) The seller ships out the item, and everything's awesome.

The item will also remain on the site in 'SOLD' status. We recommend that you leave sold items on the site instead of removing them, since every item you have on the site is a gateway into your entire Market. If someone searches for 'Batman', your Batman action figure might have already been sold, but our sidebars will display other items being sold by you which the same buyer might be interested in. Basically, if you close a door, less people will be able to find their way in and buy your stuff. Leave those doors open.