Sale of the week September 3-9, 2023

Shipping was exhausting last week, not because I had a ton of outgoing mail but because I was sick, so my routine was completely disrupted and everything was painful and difficult and took me a lot longer than it normally does. I am finally feeling like myself again and can’t wait to get back to the shipping grind this week. I had a few big sales from my Chicago classical music haul which I will discuss in a long overdue post this week (no spoilers!) but I had a few good sales for sale of the week besides that.

First up, this medium flat rate box of hockey cards for $239. I have reached a point in my eBay career where I can start to think about what to do with my excess, and that’s where these lots came from. All cards that are not valuable enough to list individually, don’t have a logical home to sell in a small lot sorted by team, and not worth enough to send to my consignment port to sell that way. I have accumulated thousands of cards like this since I went all-in on cards in the last few years. A lot of them I sent to my consignment port, but I have 15,000 cards there and the fees to add new cards ($0.50 to $1 each) can really start to add up.

I tried a new experiment just before I got sick and made six or seven lots like this. Mostly I sorted them by sport since there are plenty of collectors and flippers who mostly (or only) focus on baseball, or hockey, or whatever sport they know and love. Probably more generalists like me who can do all sports and non-sports, but I had to organize myself somehow. It took me a few weeks to figure out a method to get everything sorted and figure out my process for taking pictures and pricing. This hockey lot was the first to sell. Hopefully not the last! But even if the other lots only net me $100 each, this has been a profitable venture and a way to move a few thousand cards fairly quickly. I don’t have too many unsorted boxes of cards left either.

Speaking of stock that I’m running out of, I sold another flat rate box of trading card plastic holders for $50. I accumulated these just before and during the pandemic because supplies were in short order, and it’s nice to make that money back (plus a little profit) and clean up my storage space at the same time.

This Hank Aaron piece of bat card was just a $20 sale but it’s a good example of the types of trading cards that I have focused on this year — collector’s type of items with a more established value. I could have probably held out a few months and gotten $40 out of this card, and perhaps there’s a time in the future where I’ll get a bit more choosy about the offers I take and auctions I run. I bought this card on July 10th from the consignment site I use for $24.57, which charges me a 10% cash out fee, so a lot of times I try and find cards which are a bargain instead of cashing out. I slightly overpaid for this one, so it’s a small lesson learned, but right now I am focused on selling as much as I can (within reason) in part to keep learning which items I should be using my consignment dollars on. Exciting to see the lifecycle of card from purchase to sale within two months. That shows that my eye for what sells is getting better and better.

What did you sell this week?