We have collected various things for a long time. We bought our first piece of Native American pottery in 1971. We started attending Navajo rug auctions in Crown Point, NM in 1973. We learned about Erzgebirge handcrafts from our German exchange student in 1986. When Ebay came along we discovered we could buy all sorts of collectibles at very reasonable prices.
It’s been fun, but now it is time to organize and document what we have and think about selling some of it. This post is the first of what we expect will become a series of post about how to do this.
At the present time much of our collections are in storage. We know that eventually we will probably want to sell them online so we will need pictures and descriptions which include as much specific information as possible. Since we are talking about several thousand items this becomes an interesting management challenge. So, an initial requirement is to develop a system that connects pictures to each individual item. The connection must be obvious enough that our kids or hired assistants could make the connections without help from us.
I think collectibles sellers on Ebay miss a huge opportunity when they delete their item descriptions and photos as soon as an auction ends. Their only opportunity to profit is from the actual sale of the item. Since I already profit each month from informational websites I wrote years ago I am not willing to do that. I want a system where those pictures and information stay around and generate ad clicks and/or other income on an ongoing basis.
One way to do that is to build website(s) which include the pictures and descriptions of items we plan to sell. Our inventory if you will. When we sell something we add the sales information to the website and leave it visible. New visitors to our website see and learn about it and can also see how well it sold.
In the beginning we don’t know for sure what we want to sell and are not always current on how they should be priced. So we need a way to organize things online to show off what we have or had, while not offering it for sale immediately. It should also be easy to transfer the pictures and content into an auction format with a minimal amount of work.
We want to achieve all of the above goals in a way that maximizes the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of our content.
We will share our plans for doing this in future posts.