The vintage Kenner X-Wing sits in a box you bought at an estate sale two years ago. You paid $40. You think it might be worth more, but you haven't checked recently, and "might be worth more" isn't a number you can use when someone at a show makes you an offer and you have thirty seconds to decide.
That gap between owning something and knowing what you own is where most collectors live. The database is how you close it.
The Valuation Pair Nobody Else Tracks This Way
Avg. eBay sold price and Possible price are the two fields that convert a collection from sentimental storage into a managed asset base. The average eBay sold price is the comps — what three to five comparable items actually cleared for in the last ninety days, not the asking price, the sold price. The Possible price is your realistic target given your specific item's condition and completeness.
The gap between those two numbers is the conversation every collector has with themselves before a sale. A 1977 Kenner Death Star Space Station with original instructions and intact elevator might average $180 sold but realistically price at $240 in your specific configuration. A loose figure with yellowing at $12 average has a possible price of maybe $9 if you're being honest about Condition = Poor.
Running those two fields across a hundred items gives you a portfolio value that's grounded in actual market data rather than what you paid or what you hope.
Category and Type: The Two-Axis Taxonomy
Category handles the collection groupings: Vintage Star Wars, Modern Star Wars, Transformers, Star Trek, Voltron, sports cards by sport, movies, dishware, decorations. Type of Collectable cuts across categories: Modern Action Figure, Vintage Action Figure, Ships, Sport Trading Cards, Cups & Plates, Toy, Poster/Picture.
Those two fields together answer the organizational question that single-category databases can't. A Vintage Star Wars item typed as a Ship is a different animal from a Vintage Star Wars Modern Action Figure. Filtering Category = Baseball cards with Type = Sport Trading cards and Name Brand = Topps, Year = 1989 gets you a specific slice of the collection in seconds.
Name Brand carries the major trading card manufacturers — Topps, Donruss, Fleer, Score, Upper Deck, Bowman — plus Kenner and Hasbro for the action figure side. A 1991 Fleer baseball set and a 1991 Upper Deck set of the same year have completely different market dynamics, and the brand field is what keeps them distinguishable in a large collection.
The Identification Layer
Barcode, Serial Number, and Model together handle provenance documentation. For graded cards, the serial number is the PSA or BGS certification number. For figures, the model field captures the specific release variant — Early Bird, 12-Back, 20-Back — where the production run matters more than the item name.
Condition offers both the qualitative scale (Damage, Excellent, Good, Poor) and a numeric PSA-style scale (1, 3, 5, 7, 9) for items where graded condition language is the relevant standard. A card graded 7 and a card graded 9 don't belong in the same condition category, and the numeric options make that distinction possible without forcing everything into narrative text.
The Photo field is the condition reference that doesn't lie. Six months after you record a condition assessment, the photo is what you show a buyer and what protects you if the assessment is disputed.