How to Sell Antiques and Collectibles Online in 8 Steps
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Learning to sell antiques and collectibles online is quick and easy, especially with the help of our top choice antiques ecommerce website builder Shopify. The reason Shopify is ahead of the competition for selling antiques online is because it has over 100 payment options and allows you to sell unlimited products alongside great sales features!
Right now is a great time to get started with buying and selling antiques. The USA online antiques and collectibles market is currently valued at $1.7 billion in 2022, with an average market growth of 4%. So, the opportunity is huge!
In this guide, we’ll walk you through eight steps to get started with selling antiques online.
Source Your Antiques
By far the most important step in creating a successful online antique store is sourcing antiques that people want to buy.
Unlike most online stores that stock large quantities of individual products, when selling antiques you will typically deal with one-offs, or very small numbers of each product. This means that you’re more likely to spend a considerable amount of time finding and buying new stock.
Finding a niche can help you gain the knowledge you need to successfully make a profit. Your niche needs to be interesting to you, as well as desirable for others. You may use sites like eBay or other antique auction sites to see what types of antiques are selling well at the moment.
It’s also crucial to learn how to identify authentic antiques. Once you’ve decided on your niche, research how to ensure the antiques you’re buying are authentic. For example, on glass, ceramic, and metal antiques you may find identifying marks on each item to help you understand where and when they were made.
There are several options when it comes to sourcing antiques. These include:
Thrift Stores & Yard Sales
Thrift stores and yard sales will offer you the best opportunity to find antiques at a competitive price.
The people who run yard sales and thrift stores are mostly interested in selling as much stuff as possible in as little time as possible, meaning they’re more likely to be open to bartering. They are also less likely to be experts in antiques, so may drastically undervalue what they are selling, offering you an opportunity to get a great deal.
However, there are some downsides. Shopping for antiques at thrift stores and yard sales can be very time-consuming, so you’ll need to know what you’re looking for in order to sort the junk from the gems. As sellers aren’t experts, they may also overprice items, so a good knowledge of what you want to buy is crucial.
Flea Markets
Flea markets can also be a good place to grab antique bargains. These markets can be less time-consuming than thrift stores and yard sales as they typically just offer older products such as antiques.
However, sellers in flea markets are more likely to have a grasp on the value of the product they are selling, making it trickier to pick up a real bargain.
Auctions
Auctions are a staple for many antique dealers. Depending on the auction you visit, you’re more likely to find antiques of a high value that can be resold online at a profit.
Knowing how much you could realistically sell an antique for is crucial to auction success. It’s easy to get caught up in a bidding war with other dealers or collectors and end up paying over the odds, making it very difficult to make a profit.
Spend time assessing the items up for auction, and only bid on those you are confident you will be able to resell.
Other Antique Dealers
Buying from other stores can be a good way to source stock. But, as other sellers at this level are likely to have a clear idea of antique values, it can be difficult to make a profit.
However, this antique source can make sense if you specialize in specific types of antiques, giving you a competitive advantage. For example, if you specialize in selling antique clocks, you may be able to identify valuable clocks at other general antique stores, and then leverage your knowledge, audience, and network to sell them at a greater profit.
Decide Where to Sell Your Antiques Online
There are lots of options when it comes to selling your antiques online. Which one you choose will depend on your wants and needs. Here are some options to consider:
Online Store
A dedicated online store is the go-to selling option for serious antique dealers. There are many easy-to-use platforms available for creating a quality online store such as Shopify, Wix, and BigCommerce.
 |  |  |
| Shopify | Wix | BigCommerce |
| Overall rating 4.6 | Overall rating 4.7 | Overall rating 4.2 |
| Starting Price $29 | Starting Price | Starting Price $29.95 |
| Free plan or free trial 3-day free trial, then 3 months for $1/month | Free plan or free trial Free plan | Free plan or free trial 15-day free trial |
| Abandoned cart recovery | Abandoned cart recovery | Abandoned cart recovery |
| Number of products on cheapest plan Unlimited | Number of products on cheapest plan Unlimited | Number of products on cheapest plan Unlimited |
| Sales features 4.5 | Sales features 4.4 | Sales features 4.6 |
| Help and support 3.8 | Help and support 3.8 | Help and support Not yet rated |
When you use these platforms you can create a highly customized store with a dedicated domain name. This can be a good way to maintain a high level of control over your store, and offers you flexibility as you grow and want to add more functionality — or change the style of your store’s look and feel.
Setup costs and time investments are usually higher when setting up an online store compared to other options. However, online ecommerce stores typically charge less per transaction, so can work out cheaper in the long run. Let’s look at some great options for building your antique store:
Shopify For Selling Antiques Online
Shopify is the best ecommerce platform for selling antiques online, and scores an overall rating of 4.6/5 in our general research. Shopify powers over 600,000 online stores, with over 1 million active users worldwide, and works well for large stores. More than $100 billion has been sold on Shopify – so it must be doing something right!
Our research confirms this. Shopify ranks really well for its sales features, making it the reason we recommend it for selling antiques and collectibles. But, if you’re looking for a platform that’s really easy to use, it might not be the one for you. Because in our ease of use testing Wix came in top spot.
In an interesting turn of events, Shopify still came out as a really popular builder. Shopify has a 93% customer satisfaction rating, making it a great choice for most businesses.
Get building your antique and collectibles online store with Shopify’s 3-day free trial, and as a bonus, no credit card details are required!
Wix For Selling Antiques Online
Wix has over 110 million users worldwide, and three plans dedicated to ecommerce itself. With an impressive rating of 4.4/5 for its sales features, it has everything you need to build a successful antique and collectible online shop.
Wix offers great sales features for antique stores like dropshipping, which allows a third party to pack and ship your items for you. It’s also one of the easiest to use ecommerce platforms because it has a drag and drop feature that allows you to build your antique store effortlessly.
But for those stores looking to grow, Wix only has a basic inventory and limited analytics systems. This makes it harder for you to stock more products and learn from the data you get from customers to improve your business.
Nevertheless, Wix is a great platform for smaller businesses that has everything you might need to get a small antiques and collectibles store off the ground. It also offers a free plan with no limited trial that you can get started with and see if it works for you.
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BigCommerce For Selling Antiques Online
If you decide to go with BigCommerce you’ll get features that are already built into the library. This makes BigCommerce ideal if you want to really grow your online store into a large business.
Note that it requires a learning curve to use BigCommerce because the interface is a little confusing and is definitely not as simple as the previous two builders. But if you’re confident in your tech skills then BigCommerce is a wonderful choice. You won’t need to install apps to get selling your antiques — it’s all right there in BigCommerce!
To make the most of BigCommerce you need to make sure that you’ll need all of its features for your antique and collectible store. If you don’t, it might be worth going for a different option, so that you’re not paying for features you won’t use.
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Online Marketplace
Online marketplaces such as Etsy and eBay offer antique sellers an easy way to sell their products online.
These platforms invest a considerable amount in bringing ready and willing customers to their site, which you can then leverage to make sales. In exchange for this audience, online marketplaces will typically charge higher transaction fees on every sale that you make.
Online marketplaces can be a great way to test out your buying and selling skills, without the need to invest in a professional website.
Social Media
Social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest offer online businesses the opportunity to sell directly through their platforms. This can be especially beneficial to brands that have managed to build a large and engaged audience on these social channels, helping make it quick and easy for their audience to buy.
Selling on social platforms can be a good way to highlight the antiques you are selling, and reach a wider audience. Typically, most businesses will pair selling on social media with another platform, such as a dedicated online store.
Create a Brand
The antique market relies heavily on fostering trust through your brand. Your customers will need to trust that you’re selling them authentic products at a fair price before they will make a purchase.
This is why your brand is so important.
Your branding should help you communicate your values as a business. For example, using colors such as gold could help communicate the luxurious nature of what you’re selling.
Research other online antique sellers and see what colors they use, what their logo looks like, and how they have styled their website. View them like you are a customer – and ask ‘would I buy from them?’ – then take the parts that work, and use them as inspiration to create your brand.
Showcase Your Antiques
When you’re selling antiques, it’s important to remember beauty and history outweigh function. After all, you don’t really need to spend $5,000 on an antique clock when you could buy a modern wall clock for just $10. Both tell the time, but only one is going to impress guests when they walk through your front door.
So, when selling antiques online, it’s crucial to showcase them properly.
Product Images
As you’re likely to be selling one-off or small numbers of each antique, it’s really important to take photos that help the potential customer understand the style and intricacies of the product that they’re viewing.
Take product photos which show all the interesting features of the antique. Use a white background and good lighting to make your antique’s best features stand out.
You might also want to include images of the antique in a home setting to help the customer understand how it may look in their own home.
Product Description
Your product description should be made up of two key elements:
- Product details, such as dimensions, age, condition, history, and functionality
- Inspirational content that makes the buyer really imagine having that unique antique situated in their home
Price Your Antiques Fairly
As antiques are often unique in nature, they can be difficult to price. Even when you have two identical products, the age and condition of each can create a massive gap in how much you may be able to charge for them.
When pricing your products, do your research on how much other similar antiques have been sold for, and take into account the individual condition of the antiques that you’re selling.
Set Up Shop
Once you have your antiques – and you know how much you want to charge for them – it’s time to set up your shop. Depending on the platform you have decided to sell on, you’ll have to complete different steps to get selling.
Each platform will be different, but here’s a general overview of what you might be expected to do:
Online Store
- Visit the ecommerce platform you have chosen (such as Shopify or Wix) and sign up for an account
- Select the domain name for your store
- Find a theme that matches your brand and build your store using it
- Upload your product images and descriptions
- Review the payment methods you will accept
- Get selling!
Setting up your antique store with Shopify is fairly intuitive and it got the best customer score than any other builder in testing. That, coupled with a sales feature score of 4.5/5, makes it a builder that can help your collectibles store grow happily. Features like multichannel integration, checkout and order status, and great shipping options are all designed to really help your antique store flourish.
Wix has a great help and support score of 3.8/5, which is joint with Shopify’s score. Both offer 24/7 support to help businesses on their platform with any issues that arise. Wix is ideal for smaller antique stores, just starting to sell antiques and collectibles online, because it’s simple to set up with its drag-and-drop editor.. Wix has a super respectable ease of use score of 4/5 making it easier than both Shopify and BigCommerce.
Bigcommerce has the best support out of these three platforms, with a help and support score of 3.9/5. It also steals the show for sales features, with a 4.6/5 score for the category – the best of any builder we’ve tested. So why is it not our number one for selling antiques online? Well, BigCommerce falls a little behind in key areas like ease of use, customer score, and value for money.
Although it has the best support compared to Wix and Shopify, it’s also the most difficult to use, meaning you’ll be pretty reliant on its support to get set up! In short, this means that BigCommerce requires more tech-savvy users and is better for purely online antique stores.
More Information
- Learn about what causes shoppers to quit at the checkout with our article on cart abandonment rate statistics.
Online Marketplace
- Go to the marketplace you have chosen and create an account
- Create your store and upload your products
- Fill out the required information such as your store name, preferences, and payment information
- Get selling!
Social Media
- Visit the social platform you want to sell on
- Create a business account
- Upload your product information and submit them for review
- Once accepted – get selling!
Package and Ship Your Antiques
As many antiques are fragile and valuable, it’s important to consider how you’ll package and ship your antiques once they’ve been sold.
Although many shipping companies such as FedEx and DHL will ship antiques, you may need to sign a special declaration depending on their nature and value. It’s also worth checking the policy of your courier, to ensure that you’re not shipping prohibited items. For example, some couriers will have special rules about shipping antique firearms, or antiques that exceed a certain value.
It’s also worth exploring getting your items insured when they’re shipped, to limit the potential for breakages and costly refunds. Some couriers will only offer refunds if you can prove that the items have been packaged sufficiently, so check the terms and ensure you comply with all requirements.
Invest in Marketing
Even if you create the world’s best online store – and offer the most incredible antiques at the most competitive prices – if nobody ever visits your store, you’re never going to make sales. This is where good marketing comes in.
Here are a few tried and tested ways to market your products based on the platform you use:
Marketing Your Online Store
Online stores rely heavily on you driving your own traffic from external sources. You can tap into traffic from busy online spaces such as social media, search engines and other websites with the following marketing methods:
- Social media ads
- Publishing organic social media content
- Guest posting on other relevant websites
- Search engine ads
- Improving your search engine rankings
Marketing Your Online Marketplace Store
Online marketplaces such as eBay and Etsy invest heavily in bringing traffic to their sites. However, you’ll still need to beat the competition in order to earn your slice of that traffic. Try the following methods:
- Sponsored listings
- Using great quality images and product descriptions
- Driving external traffic to your listings with social media and search engines
Marketing Your Social Media Store
When it comes to selling on social media, using the platform that you’re selling on to market yourself is an obvious and natural choice. For example, if you decide to sell on Facebook, you may use the following methods:
- Publish quality content to build an engaged audience
- Use social media ads to target those most likely to be interested in buying your antiques
How to Sell Antiques Online: Summary
In this guide, we’ve walked you through every step you need to know in order to start selling antiques online. From sourcing antiques that will sell to setting up your store with a builder like Shopify. You now have the knowledge you need for online antique selling success.
Here’s a quick recap of the steps for reference:
Selling Collectables Online
- Source antiques that your customers want to buy
- Decide where you will sell antiques online
- Create a brand that represents your values
- Take great product photos and write compelling product descriptions
- Decide how you will price your antiques
- Set up your online store
- Work out how you will package and ship your antiques
- Create a marketing plan and execute it
Remember, the antiques market in the US is worth a whopping $1.7 billion – so go cut yourself a slice of that pie!
You are welcome to give us updates on how your business is going or ask our experts any questions along the way in the comments section.
FAQs
- Vintage jewelry and accessories
- Antique clocks and watches
- Vintage furniture
- Antique mirrors
- Vintage art and sculptures
- Collectible Coins
- Antique dolls and bears
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