My Version of TV's Antiques Roadshow Valuations
First of all, forget the actual Antiques Roadshow website as an online resource. It is geared towards promoting the TV show. It has a searchable database which takes you to the snippets of the show which have featured your search keyword. My personal area of interest is Rosenthal. There is one item listed. Hmmmm. Moving on..... BUT... don't confuse these Roadshow type valuations with my free public forum where we all help identify each others items for free. We never discuss values on the public forums though, as this is a touchy subject and always needs trained and professional valuers to do the job. To seek out the best online valuers, I searched around, tested and re-tested and came to my conclusions. The bottom line is, I now run my own service where I use the people who came out best in my tests. So you can go to any of the companies mentioned below direct and test them for yourself, but remember, if you use my own in-house service you are saving yourself a lot of bother and have peace of mind. Anyway, here I will share my results with you on this review of how to go online and get the nearest thing to TV's Antiques Roadshow valuations - for the best value for money.
One of the very best-of-breed of online appraisers is Valuemystuff.com. This page is not an advert for Valuemystuff.com, it is a 'review' which means I tell it like it is. All the various expert services have their own strengths and weaknesses, but I find Valuemystuff to be one of the fastest, cheapest and most efficient. ....But it depends what you want. Although
Valuemystuff
gives all the essential information, their reports are not as detailed as some, and they are not overly bothered about identifying an obscure pottery mark. As long as they know the genre, they know the auction price estimate. However, their service is a fraction of the price that some vendors who do promise to give you these details. Worthpoint.com is around the $20 price per valuation (possibly more now) and you also have to pay through the nose for monthly membership. Mark4Ceramics.com (Marks4Antiques.com) have a closed membership site which you pay to join (around the $30 USD per month mark) but you have to do all the research yourself. No reports here. They do have an incredible database of knowledge though. They banned me for joining the site, then researching and publishing their information for free on my public pottery mark forum. I was given my marching orders summarily! Mark4Antiques.com are very useful for dealers and people with lots of research to do, and not so much for the ordinary public.
Another provider is Justanswer.com. They have taken the format of presenting the marketing 'hook' that there are experts awaiting your query live online. They say if you get no answer, you pay nothing. You have to first define how much urgency your query should be dealt with. There was a slider you had to adjust to define the urgency of your query - and this slider told you the money you would have to pay for an answer. The prices went like this if you didn't want to wait, you paid in the region of $70 USD per query (£43 GBP). If medium urgent, you pay around the $45 USD and if not so urgent you pay around $25 USD. So it costs to jump the queue! They don't actually define the waiting time for any of the options, so I had no clue whether I would be waiting a week or an hour. I didn't actually get around to testing the quality of their actual reports yet. For my money, even the cheapest option was a bit steep. I will save up and continue my research on this vendor when I'm a bit richer. If you have any feedback to report, please let me know.
There are a zillion other contenders, but these are the ones who have come to my attention up to now. If you have any experiences good or bad, please do relate them to me so I can add them here (email me at peter@theclayartist.com). On balance Valuemystuff is right for those of us who just need confirmation of what we've got and how much it's worth. I regularly ask Valuemystuff.com for an opinion about many of the valuation requests I receive (which run into the thousands), but not all. You can go to them direct, and feel free, but when you do, you lose some of the advantages I offer. In other words, I am an ordinary person trying to help my site visitors. And, unusually for online, you will find me very accessible and easy to reach. I don't charge extra for jumping the queue! Where I do strongly advise you to go to Valuemystuff direct is their agency consignment service , where they take items of a higher value and place them for you at the appropriate up-market international auction room. I have used this myself and I would recommend it.
I never ask for money up front which everyone else does. My online form says 'Pay no money now!'. Everyone else, (including Valuemystuff.com) says "Pay me right now, otherwise don't bother to even talk to us"...... or words to that effect! If you use my service and have any problems with any part of the valuation process, I am here to help. If you go direct to any of the online valuation services, I won't be there as back up. You have been warned! I am completely independent as a website publisher. I have over a million unique visitors per year. Go to my antique valuations page to check out the latest prices on offer (keep a sharp look out for the 'specials' and take advantage as they come and go). People who have signed up for my newsletter always get tipped-off about the latest reductions and specials.
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