About
e-Rocks is about mineral collecting online.
Most importantly this is a friendly place and we work hard on a personal level to help customers enjoy using our site.
The site is managed 24/7 and Admin is always on hand to help.
Our community offers a daily digest of minerals for collectors with interests in all areas of mineralogy, plus thousands of pages of information for reference and research.
e-Rocks is also interactive, and we want people to use our site for sharing photos, blogs, messages, items of interest that build on what we already have.
Here is a summary of the big 6 main e-Rocks functions
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Buy & Sell - Full e-Commerce for Auctions & Marketplace for here, Facebook, eBay etc, or your own website |
Catalogue - Organise and display your collection safely and securely online |
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Contribute - Upload your mineral info & photos |
Research - Share & research mineral info in our Archive |
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Curate - See & Organise your Social Media in one place |
Publish - Publish blogs, articles in your own webpages |
Let e-Rocks help you with your collecting
Built from scratch we have extended our inventory database to include non sale items, archive and reference information in different views. This can help your collecting in many ways.
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Your own information on tap |
Mineral information & classification |
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Organise your collection |
Speed is of the essence |
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Access and extract your data & print labels Either download printed labels from our templates or CSV options for merge printing. |
Social and share |
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No need to stop at mineral specimens |
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History
We first had the idea for e-Rocks in 2001, however we started e-Rocks in January 2006 as a mineral auction site.
Initially we were a few collectors/small dealers who wanted to work together to provide something different to other mineral market places, and run by collectors for collectors.
Today our auctions have a core of over 70 sellers Worldwide contributing to an inventory that has recently exceeded 215,000 listings.
Our customer base is equally global with over 7,500 registered users.
The site is administrated and owned by Thames Valley Minerals and we been operational as mineral dealers since 2001; interested in collecting for a lot longer!
ThamesValley Minerals offers minerals through e-Rocks under the TVM Auctions brand, to date we have sold over 25,000 minerals worldwide - there are quite a few of our labels out there!
Behind the Scenes
e-Rocks is actually 5 websites, each with its own job and connections to other websites and media outside.
The picture shows our internal structure and how everything is wired together so that we can create just about any "mineral" option a person could want. With direct connections outside (in the business known as APIs) we can ask other sites like Google eBay Paypal or Facebook for information and also post back.
A good example of this is our geolocation - we give Google a location - Google sends us the map.
This principle works internally - for example if you create a blog post, you can tell the website to connect to a specific Specimen, Mineral Data, Location, Collection or Group.
If for example the Location has already been connected within a History or Organisation, then that information gets shown to the first connection.
We can create millions of these connections inside and outside of e-Rocks. To the user the options are infinite and all easy to do (undo) on the click of a mouse.
Useful Links
Terms & Conditions
Register with e-Rocks
Interested in Selling
Do you have a collection or minerals to dispose of?