When you are preparing to sell your toy collection, one of the hardest steps is determining the current value. Even if you sell your toys to a trusted dealer, you should have a good idea of how much your collection is worth. Without this knowledge, you lose the chance to get the correct value out of your collection. Thus, you should prioritize learning how to properly price the toys that you want to sell.
Even though this is an important step, it also is a very confusing step. Many obstacles make it hard to understand the value of your collectibles. For instance, some sellers have no idea what toys are in their collection. Thus, they do not know where to even begin.
Meanwhile, many first-time sellers do not know how to research and properly evaluate their toy collection. They may blindly look up prices on sites without confirming whether that is the going price. Thus, they falsely believe that their toys are worth more than they are.
Despite these issues, you do not have to price your collection without help. With our decades of experience, we have learned the various tactics that you can use to price your collectibles. We can also teach you the signs of a fraudulent or overpriced auction. Thus, you will fully understand what your toys are worth.
How to identify the toys in your collection
Before you consider selling your collection, you need to identify the toys that are in your possession. While many collectors may be mystified as to how someone may not know what toys they have, this is a common occurrence. many sellers inherit collections from relatives. Others may have collections that they have held onto for years and forgot what was present in their collection. So, it is common to have no idea what collectibles you have to sell.
Without knowing what they have, they do not know how to evaluate the price of their toys. The most common result is that sellers will mislabel or otherwise erroneously list their toys. This is great for buyers, for they may get a chance to collect a rare item for cheap. The seller, in turn, loses out on the chance to receive the full value of their collectibles.
With this in mind, the most essential step that a seller can take is to identify and catalog their collection. Even knowing what brand the toys came from would be a great boon. With this essential knowledge, sellers know what to expect from the sale of their collection.
However, we understand how this can be an arduous task, especially if you have no basic knowledge about the toys. Luckily, we know several techniques to help you identify your collectibles.
How to identify your collectibles
We understand how confusing it can be to identify a toy, especially if you do not recognize it. There are millions of toys in production each year with many having similar features. So, simple Google searches like “blue toy robot” will not get you very far.
Still, one of your first steps is to catalog and organize your collection based on similar looks. Toys that are approximately the same size and appearance often come from the same brand. Notably, this is a general rule of thumb and not true for every toy collection. Still, it is one of the best starts available to you.
As you organize your collection, you should also try to put together toys that appear to be of the same character. This way, you can easily identify multiple toys once you discover the character’s name. This will save you time and effort.
Look for the Country of Origin (COO)
Most companies will stamp their copyright information on the toy. In most cases, these Country of Origin stamps are located at the foot of the action figure. However, some companies will provide the mark on the back of the leg, back, or another large area with limited visibility. While this stamp will not tell you the name of the toy, it will give you the manufacturer’s name, which is crucial for identification. It may also provide a year that indicates when the company produced the toy.
Unfortunately, some manufacturers, especially bootleggers, do not provide a Country of Origin mark on their toys. In the case of bootlegs, stamps left behind when the company recasted and copied the toy will be distorted. Other companies that do not own copyrights or are produced for foreign markets simply will lack any manufacturer’s stamp.
Notably, a legitimately licensed toy can have the wrong Country of Origin information still present on it. Famously, Playmates was caught recasting and releasing Bandai Godzilla toys with the Bandai stamp still present when they got the license. In all cases, this occurs because of a rushed, low-budget production of licensed toys.
Online tools that help identify collectibles and toys
There are a few online tools that you can turn to for assistance with identifying your collection. One of the quickest, but not always most reliable, is Google’s image search. The Google app available on smartphones comes with Google Lens. With this app, you can take a picture of the toy in question and attempt to match it up.
If you try to identify your toys with Google Lens, you need to keep its limitations in mind. Attempting to search with a shot of your entire collection will not generate accurate results. While a clear image of each individual toy is optimal, you might need to dig through the results to find the exact version of the toy in question. Since the search’s accuracy relies on Google’s available data, rare toys might not be present.
Online toy dealers like Wheeljack’s Lab are more than happy to help you identify your toy collection. We welcome inquiries and are willing to help our customers identify the toys in their collections. So, do not hesitate to contact us for help.
After you identify the toys in your collection
Even when you know the exact identity of the toys in your collection, you could easily spend hours confirming their value. While it is easy to look up every toy on sites like eBay, determining the value requires more investigation. First of all, many people on eBay and other platforms set up auctions with wish fulfillment prices. These prices are often blown out of proportion and lead to no bites. For collectors that watch auctions, they will easily spot the products at are consistently relisted with no signs of selling.
To discover the value of collectibles, you must know how much people are willing to pay for those items. You may even honestly believe that the toy is worth the current asking prices. While it is always possible for a seller to ask for any given price, they will usually not be successful. That is why we always direct our customers to the sold category at places like eBay and Worthpoint.
Instead of guessing based on the prices that sellers are asking for, you can instead seek out the prices that buyers are willing to pay. This information is crucial if you want to have a realistic idea of the current value of your toys. You also need to keep in mind that prices fluctuate over time, with many increasing in value as time passes. However, there is no promise that the value would have significantly increased or even budged at all.
The sold auctions are not always honest
Unfortunately, we have discovered that there are times when you cannot trust the sold listings. For a variety of reasons, you cannot simply look at the single highest-sold listing for a product. For one thing, there are often points where bidding wars and buyers will commit to an exorbitantly high price. These are often exceptions to the rule and not the standard selling price.
There is an even more dangerous element to looking at the highest-sold price listed. Frequent users of eBay have taken note that there are both fraudulent sellers and buyers on the platform. Unfortunately, the sold listings do not indicate when the sale does not go through. Likewise, data-gathering sites do not weed through the auctions to verify them. So, these fraudulent sales will remain on the record for years to come.
A fraudulent buyer could easily cost a seller hundreds to thousands of dollars, between fees and other things. However, the lasting legacy of these auctions could easily affect unwary sellers. So, they need to understand how to spot these listings.
The dangers of trusting dishonest listings
While you are setting your expectations for a sale, you dream of receiving the highest possible price for your toys. It is natural to see the highest prices and assume that you can get that or better. This high expectation is exactly why the legacy of fraudulent sales is damaging to future sellers.
If you list your toys at an overinflated price, you will have problems finding a buyer. Not only will you spend a lot of time hoping to find a buyer, but you will also likely have to relist the collectible multiple times. Sites like eBay will charge listing fees, so you will lose money each time you relist your toys. Thus, you will easily lose out and eventually earn less from the sale of your collection than if you had listed them at the going price.
These listings affect more than future sellers, for many collectors will evaluate their collection for insurance reasons. Blindly picking up the highest sales prices could easily lead to overinflating the value of your collection that you report to your insurer. In turn, these collectors will steadily lose money as they pay high premiums.
Mislead collectors may even believe that their toys would make a good choice to send to grading services like the AFA. Believing that the toy is worth a fortune, they could spend hundreds sending it in for grading. However, these collectors will often not receive a return on their investment because the toy is not as valuable as it is.
How to debunk fraudulent listings
Now that you understand the dangers that blindly following the lead of a fraudulent lead poses, you need to know how to spot them. Even though archives and databases will not weed these auctions out for you, you can learn how to spot them. That way, you will never overestimate the value of your collectibles.
If you spot a sales price that is far outside of the range of the rest of the pack, you need to give it a good look. While prices do often rise with time, they rarely exponentially increase to over double the other prices. Thus, these outliers are a large red flag and should not be taken at face value.
If the auction had ended recently, you would want to examine two main things. First, examine the number of bids that the listing received. If there were multiple, the price is likely a result of a bidding war. However, a single bid will require further investigation. From there, you should check on the history of both the seller and the buyer. If either appears to be a new account or has no feedback, it could potentially be a fraudulent account. Otherwise, there may be many negative reviews against the accounts
eBay will ban and remove listings and users that are proven fraudulent. So, you will be easily able to spot a fake sale if you click on a listing only to be brought to a page that states that eBay can no longer find the auction. Meanwhile, fake users will be documented as not registered users.
When eBay provides no information about the buyer
There are many circumstances where you will not be able to gather any information about the sold auctions. While we were looking over known trouble spots, we spotted that eBay automatically forwarded the link to current, active auctions. In all cases, we found that the auction was only worth a fraction of the prior sold prices. This alone will tell you that the item is not worth the high price that you were investigating.
There is also the chance that the seller manually marked the item as sold. This makes it harder for you to confirm whether there ever was a buyer at all. However, a notice that the auction has ended and the seller has relisted it is a strong indicator of fraud. So, we strongly suggest that you instead look at the average price of other items.
Researching the price of rare and limited-run collectibles
Overall, it is easy to price and evaluate a common collectible that often appears online. Unfortunately, the rarest of collectibles only appear once in a blue moon. Some may have been common once but are now so old that only a few are still around. Others are parts of limited runs, where only a handful of collectors got the chance to obtain them. No matter how it is rare, these items are some of the hardest to accurately price.
Because they rarely pop up, even with over a decade of sales to search through, it is harder to determine the appropriate sales price. While we still suggest that you look closely at the sellers and buyers, that data may be lost to time. You also will not have many auctions to gather sales data from.
With little information to go on, you may have to take a gamble and pick the price that sounds right. With no guarantee on how the collector’s market will react, these items are risky to set up as buy-it-now or fixed sales. You could decide to set up an auction with a reserve amount but be prepared to compromise if your reserve is not met.
Do you have old and used collectibles and toys?
If you have a collection of old and used toys, you can turn those toys into cash. There is no reason to let those old toys collect dust. Contact us today to sell your toy collection.
Our professional, friendly, and expert staff have decades of experience as collectible toy buyers. If you are ready to sell your collection today, call us at 888-946-2895.
Made in collaboration with:
Chris Ingledue
Contact: email
Bio: I am the founder and owner of Wheeljack’s Lab pop Culture and Toy Shop. My vision has always been to reunite customers with their favorite childhood toys and pop culture, triggering fond memories, and reigniting their imaginations. Every day, I work in the “lab” where it’s Christmas 365 days a year. I scour the internet, like when we had the Sears Catalog of yesteryear, for the next great treasure. Then, I await the arrival of the postman as if he were Santa Claus himself and helping collectors worldwide with their versions of Christmas. Every day as a vintage toy buyer is an absolute joy!