About Antiques Research Guide

This site was born out of necessity. A few years ago, I launched an online store selling antiques including porcelain, glass and jewelry. It took many months of hard work to complete the site. So much work goes into a store like this, from taking pictures of your items (and taking and re-taking) to descriptions to pricing to integrating a shopping cart into the site. It may seem like it's easier to open a shop online, but when you have hundreds or thousands of items, and only 1 of each, the work is substantial. Pricing, pictures, cart buttons, descriptions and everything else must be done separately for each and every item. It's countless hours of tedious work. Anyone who has opened an online store with many items can tell you the same thing.

After launching the store, the next step is promotion, and that is yet more work, more money, more everything. After all of this, you finally start getting visitors. Only you find that many of these visitors, have absolutely no interest in buying what you have! Instead they send you gigantic pictures via email asking if we can tell them anything about their plates. Or they email you asking something like, "I just inherited (insert antique here), could you tell me what they are going for now?" or "I have a (antique) similar to the one you have on your site, can you give me an idea what it's worth?" and on and on. Literally, at one point, I got dozens of emails similar to this per week. Add in the fact that I paid for some of my promotion and marketing, via pay per click, so not only am I wasting my time helping people who are not going to buy from me, I am paying to get these requests! Yes, I end up paying to help people! Can you understand my frustration? While I understand and sympathize with people who need help, I, as a business owner, cannot take a huge chunk out of my day to help someone identify the maker of the set of blue and white porcelain they just inherited from their grandmother. 

So, this site was born! This site is meant to help exactly those people. I'm going to show you exactly what I do to research my own items, then I can just send people to this site. Maybe it will become a nice resource for people, I hope. This site is by no means comprehensive, it's just my gift of information and tips to people who need help. If you have additional tips, comments or suggestions, I certainly welcome them, click here to contact me.