How Collectors Is Digitising the World of Collectibles

In the business of hobbies, Collectors are revolutionising the space at breakneck speed. The California-headquartered business has become the global powerhouse in authenticating, grading and vaulting collectibles – handling everything from sports cards and coins to comic books and magazines.

Collectables are not, as some might think, just nostalgia items. In the digital-first era, they are increasingly regarded as assets – tradable, insurable and often extremely valuable.  This underpins Collectors’ goal: to inspire the world to collect by making the process safe, accessible and fun. And, unsurprisingly, technology sits at the heart of this ambition more than ever.

Collectors is the parent company behind industry leaders including Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) and Professional Coin Grading Service (PCGS), boasting responsibility for more than 100 million items globally. In recent years, the company has seen an explosion in demand, with the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating a widespread return to collecting and trading. What was once seen as a niche hobby is now a multi-billion-dollar industry.

“To give you an idea of the scale in trading cards alone, we used to see tens of thousands of cards a month. Now, we’re seeing anywhere between 1.5 to 2.5 million a month,” says Collectors’ Chief Technology Officer, Dan Van Tran. More well known as DVT, he emphasises the immense scale of the business, as well as the amount of both human and technological power required behind the scenes to keep Collectors running.

Collectors’ digital transformation

The business is embarking on a radical digitalisation and modernisation journey, using its  industry-leading services as the foundation. Mixed with the creativity and passion of its employees, it is sculpting the future of both Collectors and the industry for the benefit of all.

Collectors’ transformation involves moving from a business with a proud but dated technical backbone into something fit for the 21st century: a change that requires more than a few tweaks. At its peak, Collectors was facing a backlog of up to 14 million cards, causing a temporary pause in services.

“I had to balance clearing a backlog while continuing to build new technology and ship things,” DVT explains. “The focus was on how we could both scale and solve the real immediate problem but not do it at the cost of losing what made the company great to begin with. It’s been a fun challenge.”

At the core of Dan’s work is a belief that collecting shouldn’t be exclusive, opaque or intimidating. As Dan emphasises, collecting can be overwhelming for beginners in the hobby, with countless factors that determine a coin’s worth, like scarcity, preservation, history, demand. Collectors sets out to break down those barriers. He says: “Every time our AI accurately identifies a card, we help educate and lower the barrier for a new collector. That openness brings people into the community and allows them to participate faster with more confidence.”

The technology engine driving Collectors’ change

Collectors’ database can facilitate the instant identification of a card which sits on top of nearly 40 years of card specifications and data – some of which stretches back to the dawn of trading cards back in the late 1800s. For decades, Collectors managed its operations with a technical footprint that is now seen as somewhat precarious. Servers were physically located in headquarters which, for a sector now valued at around US$400bn worldwide, is a setup Dan acknowledges as unsustainable.

The journey began with moving everything to AWS: “Step one was replatforming the entire infrastructure onto AWS to get elastic scale,” DVT adds. “Running on in-office servers is not something that most companies have done since the 90s and early 2000s, but it is a sign of how quickly businesses have scaled to keep up.

“We had to figure out how to make sure that if the power goes out that it doesn’t affect all of our customers worldwide.”

This cloud migration was more than a technology upgrade, but an existential shift. The result? Reliability, security and, crucially, the ability to iterate and improve quickly as new demands — from customers or collectors — surfaced. Alongside this, Collectors adopted AI-driven cloud ecosystems, particularly around automation, for its data architecture.

With millions of database records, the transition could have been overwhelming. However, by leveraging the power of database automation partner Tessell, Collectors has got “on top of the decades of data that we have and continue to leverage it to serve our customers well,” as DVT notes.

Tessell’s ability to automate and streamline complex data management tasks that were once a key bottleneck for innovation and scale makes it, as DVT explains, like “air traffic control for your databases.” The platform automates vital processes such as backups, failovers and hot patching, allowing Collectors to maintain the operational resilience needed to support millions of collectibles and their collectors worldwide.

By deploying Tessell, Collectors has reduced its database management costs by nearly 20%, freeing up significant resources to invest further in AI and ML research and development. The partnership has empowered Collectors’ lean database team to match the capabilities of a much larger operation, benefiting from self-healing systems and rapid, anomaly-driven recovery.

DVT shares: “Tessell allowed us to take our three-person database administration team and give them the superpowers of a 30-person team, with the ability to add self-healing. This means that, if it detects an issue, it will determine what to do to fix it and try to fix it without having to involve a human. This helps us to grow quickly without having to spend in a linear or exponential fashion, which allows us to then invest that into more customer facing features or to grow the team.”

Tessell’s automation has not only optimised costs but also accelerated the company’s ability to adapt its offerings, serving collectors globally with greater speed, transparency and reliability. As Collectors continues to expand, this relationship underpins its ambition to lead the collectibles sector with state-of-the-art data-driven technology.

Reimagining the collector experience with AI

Despite the speed and efficiency benefits, Collectors’ digital overhaul also centres on rethinking what the collector experience could be. From DVT’s perspective, the standout innovation to date is the PSA mobile app’s AI-powered scanner. 

“With the PSA app, you can snap a photo and it’ll identify the card. From there, you can see live market data of that card in seconds from sites like eBay, with the app showing sales history and listings of that card in different conditions. We also make it easy for you, since you have the card in front of you, to submit it for grading. So what used to take minutes – if not hours – to do, you can now do in seconds just by taking a picture on your phone and adding it to your cart.”

The PSA population report, which provides a record of all PSA graded cards in every condition in history and is nearing 100-million items graded, is a key part of the hobby that supplies key insights that help guide collecting and selling cards. To integrate the PSA population report at key grading and sales moments is an impressive feat in itself, but when you factor in the sheer size and scale of Collectors’ operation, Collectors and DVT’s team has to be celebrated.

DVT adds: “This ended up streamlining and building a much clearer workflow.”

Despite Collectors’ sheer volume of data posing challenges for DVT and his team, it has been a massive enabler of its AI-powered success. The AI technologies at play – deep learning, computer vision and metadata architectures, for example — all rely on more than 40 years of industry data. 

“We use computer vision and our custom machine learning models to actually take those images to determine what subtle differences there are in order to know the exact card that it is and its potential worth,” DVT notes. “We centralise all this information and make it so we can guide even the newest collector to be able to understand all of this and get this information immediately. 

“Transparency really has been key in us growing this hobby and increasing the number of collectors that we see come through our doors as well as into the industry in general,” he adds. “This is also because we’re making collecting more accessible. It's no longer something you need to study for years to understand and enjoy it. Now, anyone can go into a card shop, use our app, scan a few cards and feel like they have expert level details in their hands.”

Every item is unique

The challenge of assigning value to collectibles is very different from mass-produced consumer products. With each item unique in provenance or condition, price can be hard to establish objectively — particularly at scale. This challenge is something DVT was keen to tackle head-on. 

“The trick is actually not necessarily building that model itself,” he says, “it’s organising all of the metadata for the millions of collectibles that are being sold on a daily basis and merging it with ever-changing buyer expectations.”

Taking this analysis on board, Collectors fuses deep learning imaging image models along with prediction models and market price graphs, meaning it gathers sales information across different marketplaces to try to develop a single price range for a specific item. As a result, Collectors saw coverage for trading card price estimates increase from 81% to 93% in less than six months, which DVT says empowers users to insure, trade and submit items for auction with newfound confidence.

“We developed this machine learning model for value estimation and started to refine it and take feedback to continue to grow and evolve,” he shares. “It took a few years, but at this point the payoff is very tangible. Our last survey showed that 79% of collectors who use the scanner would recommend it to their friends – that includes the identification and the estimated value of that collectible. It just shows the level of confidence and trust that we’ve developed over the years.”

Trust is especially imperative in the collectables trade. Potential hiccups with product features and AI results could be dissected instantly on social media. This proximity to end users, he says, is both daunting and empowering. 

“When we break that trust, they’re very quick to let us know,” Dan admits. But this risk comes with high reward. “Collectors range from middle schoolers all the way through to retirees – and all of them are weighing in on how well we did, which is great.

“We get real-time input from middle schoolers to retirees. It also shows the level of confidence that we've grown and the trust that we've developed over the years by building Collectors up with technology.”

Collectors is working to continue this momentum, which shows no signs of slowing. Its future outlook comes in the form of a three-prong plan.

“One is global expansion, pushing into Canada, the EU and Asia-Pacific,” he says. “The second is being multi-asset – bringing PSA level confidence to new categories. And the third is intelligence, rolling out more AI-driven features that put a collectibles expert in everyone’s pocket.”

To read the full story in the magazine, click HERE.