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Trading Cards and Memorabilia: Winning Ways to Sell
Stamps, trading cards, commemorative coins and other memorabilia are sold on the Internet every day, often by collectors who have turned their knowledge and hobby into profitable businesses.

There are no hard and fast rules for how to sell memorabilia online. Some sellers exclusively use online auctions, such as eBay. Others prefer to maintain their own websites. Still others sell some items on auction sites, using auction write-ups to link to their main online store.

A winning memorabilia website offers more than just trading cards or other collectibles. Successful sites are characterized by a love of the collectables and a thorough knowledge of the hobby. The best way to foster these traits is to provide additional content relating to memorabilia collecting.

Web content for collectors' sites can include articles on how to break into collecting, how to evaluate the condition and worth of an item and how to care for a collection. When building such a site, you may also want to include definitions of standard terminology used by collectors and hobbyists. More personal content might include how you began collecting, stories about hunting down that perfect item for your collection and breaking news about trading cards or other memorabilia.

Relevant content has two uses: it keeps visitors at your site longer (for every minute they're on the site the chance of making a sale increases), and search engines rate sites with relevant and regularly updated content well.

When selling items, provide as much visual information as possible. Take several pictures of the item, including close-ups of both special details and imperfections. Memorabilia sites that use small pictures or lists without pictures tend to project a lack of confidence in their products to potential customers. The more accurate and complete the information is that you provide for items, the more trust you foster with site visitors.

Websites run by individuals with in-depth knowledge of collectibles can offer custom orders if items are not in stock. Hard-to-find collectibles may take time to track down, but customers requesting such items are usually prepared to pay well for your expertise and legwork.

Another key aspect to building a collector's website is fostering return business. Offering a free newsletter to subscribers can considerably increase return traffic to your website. When putting together a newsletter, include new product announcements, discussions on collecting, collecting tips from readers or contest announcements. While newsletters do require your time to prepare, newsletter content can often be added to the website as well, increasing the amount of site content.

Finally, many collectable web stores arise out of the site owner's love of collecting. If your website is an extension of your hobby, remember to keep the website fun for yourself, as well as potential customers. Not only does this increase your likelihood of maintaining the site, but a love of your hobby almost always comes across to site visitors, leaving them with a positive opinion of the site and a willingness to recommend the site to other collectors.

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