ToyCollector April/May Newsletter 2011

All About The Marketplace, ToyPedia Updates, Help Needed with Pics & SlotForum Tie-Up.

All About The Marketplace!  

The marketplace will officially open for business on June 29th, which is the date from which you'll be able to buy stuff on there. For the past month, we've been working with sellers to upload their stock in order to make sure that the shelves are full when things kick-off, since we know nobody likes to go to a poorly-stocked shop! So we've made sure that there will be several thousand items on sale to choose from by the 29th. (If you're a seller and you'd like to add your stuff, you still can, of course. Just let us know on This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and we'll give you more details.)

To kick things off, we're opening the categories for Dinky and Corgi diecast models, although there'll also be some other brands mixed in. The plan is to roll it out to include other makers and subject areas thereafter.  

We've designed this to be as easy as possible to use and to get listings posted as quickly as you can: to sell something, you just browse to the item in ToyPedia and click the Sell This Item button. This will create a listing pre-populated with all the info we have about the item (years produced, reference number, etc). Of course, you'll be able to fully customise everything in the listing and add your own images (up to ten of them, all free). Then you just save the listing and that's it! Your item's up for sale.  

You can list as an auction or Buy-It-Now, and we undercut eBay on fees. There are never any listing fees and for Buy-It-Now items, there's an 8% seller fee while auction items have a 8% seller fee and an 8% buyer premium as in a real-world auction. Payment is Amazon-style via the simple-to-use Moneybookers service and - unlike PayPal - there are NO payment fees for buyers or sellers since we cover these.

This setup also allows us to add and deduct fees at source when payment is made, so you also don't have to worry about getting an invoice at the end of the month. Or about having to reclaim fees on anything that sold but didn't get paid for because fees are only charged once the item actually IS paid for. Otherwise, you can just relist it.  

Oh, and last but not least, on Toy Collector, feedback goes both ways. We hope that as few people as possible will want to leave negative feedback (and we'll take issues with people who get repeated negative feedback very seriously) but we allow both parties in a transaction to leave whatever feedback they want for each other!

As said, in creating our selling platform, we've aimed to put together a marketplace that's tailored to the specific needs of the collecting community. We're all collectors too, so we know what you like about trading online and what you hate about it, so we hope we've managed to achieve that. We certainly can't wait for you to tell us!

We'll be sending out a special alert when the marketplace goes live for buying, but in the meantime, you can find more info about it here.  

ToyPedia Updates 

Since listing on the marketplace is done through ToyPedia and Dinky and Corgi are our "kickoff" brands, we've bee making sure that their listings are as complete as possible. We've been hard at work on Dinky, which you'll now find has listings for 95% of all the models ever made in Liverpool, France, Spain, South Africa and even Chile! And Corgi's coming along nicely too - we've got the Mettoy era about 65% complete, with the rest coming soon (and holding pages for each different type of entry (trucks, cars, figures etc.) that you can use to list those items. 

We've also got more additions to the

You can see the full lineup here on the TPAB page - and we'd like to send a big thank you to all these experts for joining and sharing their knowledge with us and the community!

Picture Inserters: We Need You!

Picture this: all the great new Dinky listings in ToyPedia - with no illustrations. Doesn't look nearly as good as it will do with pictures of all the items and their variants, does it? The good news is that thanks to Bonhams, Christies and our other auctioneer friends, we've got plenty of excellent images to use of virtually every model that's listed. The not-so-good news is that inserting them is quite a job! That's why we need help.  

With our new easy-to-use image inserter, adding pics to ToyPedia pages is quick and fun. And we're looking for members who'd like to help with the job. We'll allocate you a folder of pics (as many or as few as you'd like) and you insert them - simple! Nobleco is already hard at it (thanks, Nobleco!) but he can't do it all by himself. Many hands make light work, you know! If you'd like to help, email us on This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .  

New SlotForum Tie-Up!

The other big news is that we're tying up with SlotForum International, the web's leading forum for all things slot car-oriented. The guys from SlotForum will be helping us build up the slot car sections on ToyPedia, from Scalextric to Aurora to SCX and LeMans. 

SlotForum is a great site for anyone who's interested in this area, with lively discussions and product reviews, so well worth checking out! And if you'd like to help on the slot car-cataloguing, as ever, just drop us a line on This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . 

And now, on to our regular look at the site and what's been happening on it!  

This time round, our Member of the Month is pixmax.

A member since 2010, pixmax has been sharing his amazing photography and tips on photographing toys with us ever since.  

You can see some of his fantastic photos in his gallery (and of course, that's one of his photos to the right). You'll also find even more of them in the forums. Thanks for sharing pixmax and congrats on being Member of the Month!

We have hit 5,000 members! There are now 5,067 collectors enjoying the site and 18,540 blog entries. There are 118 discussion forums with a grand total of 30,321 posts in them. Not to mention 3,648 galleries containing with 154,763 images! Plus almost 135,000 listings in ToyPedia and 23 Groups! 

Over in the blogs, we had the usual crop of fascinating things, including the untold story of Mega Bloks, some mysterious German toy soldiers, LaToya's pics of the Sandown Park Toy Fair, an awesome diorama from Battle Scene Productions, Perry Rhodan figures and the Hill-Climbing Bull!    

And in the forums, we saw the incredible Lego Garrison of Moriah, a Bulgarian Gama Granada, checked in on the Atlas reissues of British Dinky Toys, had further discussion about Far East-made military vehicles, ogled this amazing Code 3 Dinky Bedford Pallet Jekta and Trailer, were staggered by the size of the Ertl Cast IH Steiger 600QT, discussed a whole different type of collector plaything in this thread about classic computer gameplay on modern PCs, saw some great Star Trek Toys, dodged Godzilla, marvelled over a signed Palitoy Death Star and wondered about an unnamed bear...