What is Catawiki?

The heart of Catawiki is an online catalogue with images of collectables and information about them. The catalogue is filled by users in the same way as Wikipedia.

There is more:

Help complete world's largest catalogue for collectors.	Get notified automatically when items you are looking for appear for sale. You can always access your collection easily online	Stock your own shop quickly from the central catalogue Dependable buying and selling

Yes! Searching the catalog, managing your collection as well as your search list, opening a shop and selling items is completely free. Just for placing items in your shopping with a market value of € 75 or more, you pay 7% of the purchase price (excluding VAT) as installation costs. After selling an item no commission will be charged. Besides these revenues Catawiki can exist by the commission from the weekly auctions, held for special collectibles (eg stamps, coins, comics, books).

Catawiki was founded in 2008 by René Schoenmakers and Marco Jansen. René is an enthusiastic collector of comics strips, among other things. Marco collects DVDs. René focuses on the concept and the 'community' of collectors. Marco is responsible for the technical aspects. He makes sure that the website runs smoothly.

Catawiki has been made possible thanks to a grant from the European Community, the European Regional Development Fund and the Innovative Action programme of the province of Drenthe, the Netherlands.

Catawiki is a contraction of catalogue and wiki. A wiki is website on which users can easily add and edit information. The term wiki is best known from Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia. It comes from the Hawaiian and means 'fast'.

You can help by making the catalogue more complete and improving its quality. By doing this, you will help all users of Catawiki. So: add all the items that you have in your collection that are not yet on Catawiki. You can also check if the information about current items is correct. If you are an expert in a certain area, you can become a moderator.

In the search bar, at the top in the blue bar, you can search for a specific word. You are then directed to a results page with the collectors' areas that were found (in the left-hand column) and items (in the right-hand column) that contain the search keyword. We are working on more detailed search options.

Catawiki has been tested on all the major browsers: Internet Explorer (from version 6), Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

When you register, you can chose a username with which you can log in. Logging in is necessary to keep track of your collection, start your own shop or to add or edit items in the catalogue.

Click the Register button in the Catawiki toolbar. You need an e-mail address, a unique username and a password. We don't ask for any more than that. Usernames can consist of letters, numbers and if necessary a dash ("-"). Special characters are not allowed. You can use both lowercase letters and capitals. For the passwords, it matters whether you enter a lowercase letter or a capital. This isn't the case for usernames; they are not case-sensitive when you log in (though they are when shown on the website). A password consists of at least 4 and at most 15 characters. After you have registered you will receive an e-mail. Click the link in the e-mail to confirm your registration; this also activates your username.

You automatically receive the newsletter when you create a free account. Catawiki will send out a newsletter about once a month. The newsletter will contain discounts for collectors' fairs, information about new collectors' areas, special collectors' items and much more. To get an idea of the content of the newsletters, you can take a look at the archive of previous newsletters.

Below every newsletter there is a link that you can use to unsubscribe from the newsletter.

Sign up as an event organizer through the contact page. You will then receive options for promotions and their prices via e-mail.

No, you can't change your username once you've chosen it. So think carefully about what name you chose. Note that if you start a shop, it is directly accessible through www.catawiki.nl/your-username. So your chosen username is also important for your shop.

On the My Profile page, select the option 'Change your password' in the main column.

Change the field "E-mail address" under My Profile.

The confirmation e-mail may perhaps have been blocked by your spam filter after we sent it. Check your spam folder. Turn off your spam filter, or add catawiki.nl to the exceptions in your spam filter.

You can log in by clicking [sign in] on the right in the Catawiki toolbar. You can log in with your username or e-mail address. You also need your password.

You can only log in with an activated username. To activate your username, you have to click the link in the confirmation e-mail you received from us after registering. Pay attention to the difference between lowercase letters and capitals when typing your password. Make sure CAPS LOCK is turned off.

You can ask for a password by clicking the link 'I lost my password'. Insert your username or e-mail address and you will receive a new password by e-mail. This will let you log in. On your profile page you can then change your password again.

Catawiki is a community for collectors. So, yes it is of course possible to exchange items with other collectors. You can use the forum to place a message that contains the items you want to exchange.

Select the 'Delete my account' option at the bottom of the My Profile page.