by Judy Gonyeau, managing editor
Sponsored
Like any online information tools you use to research something, you need to know where to turn to and what to trust. Where do they get their information and data from? Can it be validated? Does it tend to concentrate on one area or era of antiquing? Does the information stay up-to-date? How much does it cost to access the information? Is it easy to navigate?
Results from a search can get confusing. Online “sponsored” websites are listed first (these are paid-for promotions), advertising, and AI-derived answers to your query. And, when you add in results from websites from around the globe, you can end up getting information that does not apply to trends in the U.S. Searching within a website you feel offers knowledgeable information where using “antiques-speak” does not derail the search but enhance it can ease the stress when you want to know more about what you have, and what you want to buy.
There are several online options available for you to work with depending upon your own knowledge of the item at hand and what information you need to find out before you make your decision. Below is a smattering of those websites and their apps available to use on the go, at the moment, or when you just want to learn more about what you have and what you would like to add to your collection.
Websites With General Information
Access to two large categories of information is offered to subscribers on a monthly or yearly basis.
Kovel’s Knowledge: provides access to over 25,000 premium articles, identification guides, market trends, monthly sales reports, and expert answers to reader questions, along with a digital version of the Kovels On Antiques & Collectibles newsletter and its archives. $4.99/month or $29.99/year
Kovel’s Detailed Guides: gets down to the nitty-gritty of antiquing research with access to the Marks Guide, Price Guide, Identification Guides, and Kovel’s exclusive “Downsizing Guide,” “How to Settle an Estate,” and “Important Information to Have Before You Sell at Auction.” $5.99/month or $39.99/year.
For full access to the website, the cost is $9.98/month or $59.99/year. (Check with your local library to see if you can gain access through the library’s website using your library card. Access may be limited.)
Online Price Guide: a unique list of over 1,000,000 prices for antiques and collectibles sold in the United States, Canada, and Europe. The guide has been designed to provide relevant prices in a wide variety of categories. All entries are real prices. AccuValue™ prices are reviewed by experts for accuracy. Each entry gives a description, price, and year of sale so the information can be used to price items today, track trends, or for tax and estate purposes.
Dictionary of Marks: Categories include American silver and other metals; English silver marks; fashion, accessories, and textiles marks; jewelry marks; Mexican silver marks; natural and man-made materials; pottery and porcelain marks; toys and dolls marks.
Identification Guides: a diverse list of “how to identify …” topics when looking at and assessing any number of antiques, antique features, right on down to what types of nails were used when, or what makes something made from diamonds vs. glass/crystals. This is an endless labyrinth of possible areas of study. Searching by keyword can bring you to information you thought you didn’t need to know but suddenly find fascinating.
Online access to two divisions of information is offered to subscribers on a monthly or annual basis. It is available as an app.
WorthPoint partners with a diverse group of auction houses and online marketplaces—including industry leaders such as Hindman Auctions, Rago Auctions, Julien’s, and of course, eBay—to provide sales data for art, antiques, vintage, luxury, and collectible items.
ALL plans include “The Vault,” an online space where you can store the value and history of your items to possibly sell later, and organize collections/heirlooms where the Vault will track their values over time. “The Dictionary” is where you will learn how to identify, value, and learn the history of antiques, art, and collectibles. The Worthpoint Insider is a weekly newsletter packed full of current trends, tips on picking, and stories about recent discoveries written and delivered by Wothpoint’s team of experts.
Price Guide: Sales information on more than 840 million items. Use nearly two decades of historical pricing data aggregated from the world’s leading auction houses and online marketplaces to buy and sell with confidence. Includes “storage of unlimited items in the ‘Vault’” and unlimited “WorthScore Insights” for all of those items. $28.99/month or $259.99/year
Marks & Library: The Marks Gallery is a visual library with over 270,000 unique maker’s marks, autographs, patterns, and symbols (or Marks) that help you identify what an item is, where it came from, and its authenticity.
The Library offers over 18,000 books, guides, and catalogs from leading publishers and institutional archives to help uncover the history and value of your items. $27.99/month or $264.99/year
All Access: $46.99/month or $449.99/year.
Websites with Auction/Sales Results
Thanks to auction houses going online with live auctions and online-only auctions, anyone can sign up with auction houses such as Heritage Auctions, Christie’s, Bonham Skinner, Sotheby’s, etc., and get access to past auction results, and additional well-rounded information for items currently selling or have sold. Some include company blogs on a variety of topics, ways to discern an item’s history and provenance, and more.
Thanks to a new generation of online auction tools, auction houses—large and small, generalist or specialist, regional or international—are able to connect buyers and sellers of art, jewelry, antiques, and collectibles both nation- and worldwide. These sites are great resources for both buyers and sellers.
These sites host a number of different auctions on their platforms for one-stop sold results. Here are a few of the most popular and dependable.
Invaluable calls itself “the world’s leading online auction marketplace “ where “thousands of auction houses use Invaluable to deepen relationships with millions of clients around the world.” The site offers collector’s tips, artistic insights, and a guide to style, culture, and interiors. Their mission is to “make discovering and acquiring exceptional art and objects accessible to anyone, anytime, anywhere.” To view sold prices, you need an “upgraded subscription” in one of three levels: Basic, which includes unlimited searches with data from the past year and view over 4 million completed auctions at $30/month or $250/year; Premium, which includes unlimited searches with data from the past 5 years and access to over 20 million completed auctions for $55/month or $500/year; or Professional for unlimited searches, data from the past 15+years, information on over 50 million completed auctions, a way to set up to 500 keyword and artist alerts for daily emails at a cost of $29.95/day, $69.95/week, $199.95/month, or $1,995/year.
Once you sign up with your email, you will gain access to unlimited free searches of auction results from auction houses large and small that use Liveauctioneers online auction software, and information on nearly all categories of items within the world of antiques and collectibles. You can even bid on items that are currently live online when you are searching. Auction results are limited to those results that are affiliated with LiveAuctioneers’ participating auction houses, using their results as their online data source. You can simply sign up with LiveAuctioneers not only to look at and bid on items in auctions near or far, but you gain access to its Auction Price Results Database, a free research tool for those who want to buy or sell. Access 29 million art, antique, jewelry, furniture, collectible, and fashion results that were auctioned off from thousands of global auction houses. Search by keyword and refine by auction house, location, origin, style & period, creator, materials, techniques, and more to research and determine the value of items in your existing or future collection. Auction results are updated daily with new hammer prices so you can always access recently sold to historical results dating back to 1999.
If you are all about the finer things in life such as fine jewelry, home décor, and extraordinary design, you have found your website/app/resource. “Since 2000, we have captured the magic of the Paris flea market, connecting those seeking the most beautiful things on earth with highly coveted sellers and makers [in the realms of] vintage, antique, and contemporary.”
As you may expect from a higher-end market-driven, trendsetting company, 1stDibs screens and qualifies dealers from around the world to sell on its site. “If you’re interested in becoming a seller on 1stDibs, you’ll first need to be approved and selected to become a vetted dealer or seller. All prospective sellers must submit an application and provide at least two references who can verify they are a seller or organization in good standing, with top-quality inventory that adheres to strict standards for service and quality. “These are the movers and shakers of trending antiques, vintage, and modern goods. There is a level of language that comes with experienced auctioneers seeking to lay out the specifics of these items with solid detailed information, provenance, condition, marks, etc. The buyer can interact directly with the seller to negotiate pricing and ask questions that need answering before a purchase is made.
Becoming a qualified dealer or buyer will give you access to weekly Introspective magazines, The Study blog, and The 1stDibs 50, an annual celebration of interior design’s most compelling talents. 1stDibs also offers sourcing services (when you need an item that meets your qualifications or that of a client) and has a “Trade 1st Program” with specialized benefits to help a new business thrive, with net price discounts and personalized support.
As for items-sold information, just put “sold items” in the search bar, and today, for example, sold prices on 7,612 items pop right up. You can sort them by category, sold-for price ranges, what period they are from, where they were located, who the maker was, or who the seller was – either by selecting a category or getting specific when putting information into the search.
Sponsored
Specialty Websites
Sponsored
If you own something that is collectible, chances are there is a website for that. Have souvenir spoons? Visit https://spoonfulofworld.com/spoons/. Enjoy Victorian buttons? You can go to https://www.vicbuttonclub.com.au/. Have a few vintage baseball gloves? Check out https://baseballglovecollector.com/. Looking for that elusive wooden hand plane? You may wish to join the Hand Plane Buy Sell or Trade group on Facebook.
Here are a few examples of websites that offer good information in an easy-to-use format.
An online encyclopedia of silver marks, hallmarks, and makers marks, so much more. This site may be best viewed on an ipad or computer screen as the information is extensive. That said, the pages appear clear and are very enlargeable when viewed on an iPhone. Silver content and dating indicators all depend upon where your item comes from, where you are searching (British, American, Norwegian marks?), and when they began using a standard marking system on their goods. This site is free to use so there will be some pop-up ads, etc., when using it, but not bad at all compared to other free sites.
Here, you can buy and sell your books as well as use its search engine to learn asking prices for any number of books and ephemera – from photos and magazines to manuscripts and paper collectibles. Like many buying/selling sites, Abebooks pulls its information from the affiliated book and ephemera dealers associated with this site. Search for free.
If you are into buying, selling, and valuing fine art, this is the site to turn to. Its list of artists is extensive (over 350,000 artists) with updated auction information, examples of the painter’s works, currently available, and more. You can also search art for sale, auctions, auction houses, galleries and dealers, museums, and other statistics. Access to this site comes at a cost: $29.95/month, $325/year, and if you only need to use it just for a day they charge $19.95.
Beckett is renowned for its sports card price guides, authentication, and grading. The data for this company comes from an ever-changing list of sales results, marketplace information, and an organizing tool to track your collection. Today that includes over 11 million cards, about 420 thousand sets, 175 thousand players, and over $251 million of total value. Your access can be for one sport only, certified autographs of sports players, access to all pre-1980 pricing in the Beckett database, market data reports, or total access to the online price guides. Each iteration can be purchased according to the amount of time you need to utilize the data, whether it is for 15 days or a full year. Total Access Online Price Guide starts at $33.99 for 15 days up to $349.99 for a full year.
This search engine grabs information from over 150 million books for sale: new, used, rare, out-of-print, and textbooks. It also includes books from booksellers in over 50 countries and books written in English, French, German, Italian, and Dutch. This search engine is an independent subsidiary of AbeBooks.com.
Our very own website is a great resource for learning more about many genres of antiques and collectibles, interesting antique and vintage topics with multiple stories, upcoming shows and auctions, antique shops and businesses, collector clubs, and the magazine’s editorial archives. Our monthly columns are also archived on the website including those that were discontinued at one point or another. As always, good reading.
This is a good site to reference when you do not know what your item’s specific makers, marks, and values are as represented on the piece. The three subsets of the overall site are values4antiques, marks4ceramics, and marks4silver. Each division charges a monthly fee for its data: $12.95/month for a visual pricing guide of antiques and collectibles; $9.95/month for porcelain, pottery, chinaware, figurines, and vase marks; and $14.95/month for jewelry, silver, pewter, silverplate, and precious metal marks. It costs $29.95/ month for all three.
Comics, comics, and more comics with in-depth information on artists, publishers, current pricing, characters, story arcs, and more from Gemstone Publishing, producers of the top valuation guides in the industry since 1971. Carrying Bob Overstreet’s relentless dedication to listening to all serious parties in the marketplace, as well as comic book historians, Overstreet Access is a vehicle for delivering updated prices to collectors and dealers alike, along with top-level collection management tools and more. Pricing for access to the data ranges from Free to Bronze ($3/month), Silver ($5/month and includes access to a mobile app), and Gold ($9/month for complete access), depending upon how much information you feel you need.
These examples are just a drop in the very large bucket of websites providing useful information and special online platforms for the antiques, vintage, and collectibles available on the World Wide Web. Share these resources with your colleagues, friends, and associates. Start a coffee clatch to talk about what you are learning, and what you want to learn more about regarding growing your collection, business, or online antiquing habits.
Related posts: