About ActionFigure411.com

It all started with trying to figure out a way of calculating the "going price" of Orange Series 6" Black Series figures. I would do manual calculations of sold auction prices, copy them into a spreadsheet and then share with the group. Obviously very tedious, but I thought the data was very interesting.

In January, 2016 I launched this site that would dynamically query sold auctions.. The goal was to see the current average selling price for figures. Since then it has expanded to include all variations, related items, Walmart in store finder, Amazon Prime checker and more to come.

Unrelated to toy collecting, it's help reinforce my professional career. For such a niche site that gets such few visits, I have it highly optimized. Some features are that it's hosted in the Amazon cloud, bootstrap responsive enabled, SEO optimized and built for speed. The goal for me is to build a site that loads instantly, uses little computing power. To do that is not actually that easy and involves a lot of technology, testing and optimization. I'll be interesting to see how it scales as I have it on a minimal Amazon VPC configuration right now. As of 2023, the site can sustain over 1M page views a month while still mainting an avg CPU usage of <5%.

In October 2017 I moved the site off my personal domain of fperkins.com to actionfigure411.com. This allowed me to easily branch off to new genres in Marvel Legends and Transformers as well as continue to expand the Star Wars Black Series section where it all started.

In 2020 Hasbro released the G.I. Joe Classified 6" line of action figures and was easily added to the existing site.

In 2021 the Star Wars Vintage Collection, Vintage Kenner Series and Classic G.I. Joe figures from 1982. Masters of the Universe Origins added in 2021. TMNT and Power Rangers added in June 2021.

Auction Calculations

All items must be complete in the box. Loose or lot figures are excluded. Auctions that include multiple figures are also excluded.
All auctions should be complete and include all items. Marvel figures should include the BAF part.
Most data comes from US sales only, although some might be allowed from Japan for Takara Transformers.
Items that are sold through Best Offer are also flagged and removed most of the time. Unfortunately they are hard to filter out from regular auctions so some might slip through
The condition of the item should be listed as New except for vintage collections (80s/90s) which do allow for used condition items.
AFA auctions are excluded from modern figures but are included in the pricing of older figures from the 1980s and 1990s.
Shipping and auction fees are not included in the action figure values.
Buy It Now auctions are programmatically filtered, but are not manually reviewed. Some BIN auctions will automatically be excluded if the BIN price is grossly over the average going rate.
All price history graphs are built from sold auctions data that goes through several algos to cleanse but are also manually reviewed. This means all 1387273 sold auctions have been reviewed by me for accuracy.
THe site is automatically updated daily and is refreshed at 11am EST. You can see when the page was last updated based upon the time stamp in the footer. e.g. Cached on Fri 9:00:07 AM in 0.354s
And with all that, is it perfect? Far from it, but I constantly try to improve the process and the site to make it the best it can be.

For a history of how the project progressed, check out the version notes. Also check out the global stats.

Support Us: I often get emails and messages to help support the site by offering to donate money. That is not necessary and if you really want to help the site grow, share with your friends and fellow collectors (but not in a spammy way!). For example, if you created a collection, then share the link with your friends on social media, forums, etc. Feel free to check us out and follow us on: Facebook and Reddit.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve the site or found something wrong please let me know! Happy hunting and collecting!