1. Mission Statement
2. Brief History
3. Our Activities and Services
4. What we're up to right now
5. Our plans for the future
6. Getting more information

Collectibles Top 25 started life as a very simple Top Sites list for all kinds of collectibles but was mainly dedicated to Beanie Babies and was owned and maintained by The Underground Bean (unfortunately not active anymore). The system was based on a standard set of Top Sites scripts developed by Techno Toys Inc, Top Sites lists can be seen all over the internet using these scripts. Collectibles Top 25 was purchased in 1999 as a part time hobby with a view to improving its look and feel and to expand it to cater for a wide range of collectibles.

In our exciting first year we totally changed the look and feel of the site and added Favourite Site and Site Search features. We had begun to improve the user experience and made the site look much more professional.

After this Collectibles Top 25 moved away from its single list structure and added the Beanie, Bears, Cards, Dolls, Die-cast, Toys and Other filtered lists so a larger spread of our members could share in the referrals being generated.

Collectibles Top 25 experienced a major disaster in 2000, the ISP that was hosting the site at the time had a fairly low restriction on the amount of disk space available for Collectibles Top 25 and during the ranking process all member's registration information was lost. Imagine our horror upon waking one morning to discover we had no members and no member details left in order to contact anyone. Luckily we did find a backup we had taken and were able to contact our members in order to re-populate our lists. The lessons we learned that day!

In 2001 we started to address one of the biggest problems we felt sites similar to ours experience and that is members changing their email addresses, moving or shutting down leaving broken links and sites in the lists that don't exist anymore. Collectibles Top 25 begun it's campaign to clean up the lists and registration information and strove to provide a resource where all sites listed were active and relevant. What a task this was and of course is ongoing.

In 2002 we wanted to spread the referrals we were generating a little more to give the new and lower ranked sites a chance of some exposure and to give them the chance of competing with the more established sites. We introduced the Spotlights and New Members and Email Enquiries Sections, the Spotlights section gave some of the smaller sites the chance of some referrals and the Email Enquiries section provided contact with collectors for all sites regardless of rank.

We had started to become a victim of our own success and had grown so rapidly that the original backbone of our ranking system (the Techno Toys scripts) just couldn't cope. We had to move the website onto a dedicated server and proceeded to completely rewrite all of the system. The ranking system has now been completely rewritten and the original code isn't used anymore.

In 2003 we introduced the showcase section so our members could display specific items from their collections whether for sale or simply for show. In order for us to provide the reliable and efficient system we strove towards we decided to spend the whole of 2003 developing and improving the maintenance system behind Collectibles Top 25.

We offer a wide range of free tools and services for promoting a collectibles website or store.

When a website or store owner joins Collectibles Top 25 and adds the Collectibles Top 25 logo to their site or store they are immediately listed on our free VoteLists and are ranked by the number of visitors they send to us each day. These visitors contribute to the "community" of collectors that browse through our lists of sites and the items in our showcase.

Each site listed at Collectibles Top 25 is open to being reviewed by our visitors whether positive or negative and the rating for these reviews determines which sites are listed on our homepage in the "Top Reviewed Sites" list. When a site receives a review the site owner can respond to the review, the response will be posted under the original review and emailed to the reviewer who can in turn respond back. This allows our members to thank reviewers for positive reviews and respond to negative reviews in an attempt to correct any problems. We added this feature to allow negative reviews to be turned into a positive experience for everyone.

Each site is eligible to be displayed in our Spotlights section, if a site is receiving votes but is ranked quite low in our listings it may be displayed in our Spotlights section. Each spotlighted site is given the opportunity to write a personal message for the spotlight section and is displayed for a week starting on a Wednesday.

Each registration comes with an allocation of 20 items that can be displayed in our showcase section. Items including a description, catalogue number, price and a thumbnail image can be easily added and monitored through our website. It is also possible to import items into our showcase directly from Tias stores, websites and various file formats including .csv and xml. Our showcase section is indexed by the major search engines including Google and so provides another excellent source of referrals for our members. It is possible to see real time reports of how many times each of the items is being viewed.

By choosing which lists members wish to be displayed on they can then also receive enquiries directed at that subject. This means if a member chooses to be displayed on our Bears list, they can receive enquiries from our visitors who are looking for Bears or information about Bears. This service is not dependant on rank and is available to all our members.

Monitoring and reporting is a very important feature of Collectibles Top 25, all members receive monthly reports summarising the number of referrals that have been sent for that particular month. The summary is broken down and itemises where on our site the referrals came from, for instance VoteLists, Search Engine, Spotlight section etc. It also shows how many email enquiries have been forward for that month. Each member can also access a reporting and performance section by logging into their profile, it shows in real time every referral that has been sent out including the time, the ip address of the visitor and exactly where on our site they found them. It also includes historic information so performance can be tracked over time.

All of the services that have been described are free of charge and available to everyone with no obligations. Members can if they wish upgrade their membership and subscribe to a TrafficAccount which means their site will be displayed in our TrafficLists which are the first lists our visitors see. The VoteLists which include all our members are accessed through the TrafficLists and so the TrafficLists generate much more traffic. Each referral from the TrafficLists are charged at a nominal rate so members only pay for what they receive, they are still included on our free VoteLists and still receive free referrals from the rest of our site. TrafficAccounts can be "capped" to guarantee that an account will cost no more than a set amount each month, that way members can dictate their monthly budget and be confident that they will not incurr charges above that amount. Members can also increase their showcase allocation and so display more items in our showcase section for a small ½ yearly charge.

In essence we have created an online resource that collectors and website owners can take advantage of free of charge, where they can continually monitor their performance and if they wish can boost their results even further by investing in our charged services in a controlled manner.

If you would like to take a closer look we have a demonstration account that you may use to take a look "under the hood". Log into the account with a site code of 1 and the password demoaccount here.

We don't want to give too much away, but we have plans in the near future to create a dedicated competitions section, more information will be available shortly.

We do have many more plans for the future so please keep checking our Latest News and Press Room for more details.

If you want any more information about anything to do with Collectibles Top 25, please feel free to contact the team at:

enquiries@collectiblestop25.com