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Without doing anything different, we had a great week of sales. Just happened to attract sellers who were buying $100+ weird vintage gew gaws, doo dad[See the full post at: he Numbers: March 13-19, 2022]
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Sadly 100+ buyers are absentee and I’m getting all the sub $20 buyers. I’m still thankful because if it wasn’t for those I’d have a REALLY bad week!
nunbers in the morning.
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Items in Store 1763
Items Sold 25
Total Sales $567.00
COGS $96.00
Total Profit $471.00
Average profit $18.84
Average sales price $22.68
New Listings 55
Items scavenged 42
Listing 2022 weekly Avg 58
Sourcing Allotment 12Ugh, this is not a good trend! Still hoping it’s the usual March downturn. People are out enjoying the start of spring and not buying junk on ebay. I listed a bunch of shorts yesterday in hopes people are looking for spring clothes.
I’m selling a decent amount of items, but it’s only low dollar stuff. I picked up a bunch of Stephen King and Anne Rice Hardcover 1st edition books in great condition at the local goodwill. I guess they decided to stop scanning and pulling all the valuable books.
It’s sad seeing this group slowly die. Less and less people post numbers each week. I’ll keep posting because it is good accountability for myself. Hopefully others will too.
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It’s sad seeing this group slowly die. Less and less people post numbers each week. I’ll keep posting because it is good accountability for myself. Hopefully others will too.
Yeah, having been a part of numerous online community, it’s natural for them to come and go (unless you monetize the community and then it becomes something else).
We remind ourselves that our business has to keep chugging along no matter what. It’s fun to have community, but can we stay focused and motivated without it? This is the unglamorous part of on line selling.
I’ll be here as long as someone else keeps posting. It’ll be me and you 😉
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Weekly sales 3/13 -3/22
Total items: 8260
Items sold: 147
New items listed: 350
Gross sales: $1,453.71
Net sales: $1,038.01
New buyers: 113
Repeat buyers: 5Etsy
Orders: 24
Gross sales: $229.00
Net sales: $194.65Gross sales total: $1,682.71
Net sales total: $1,232.66Well, I netted $300 more than last week so I’ll take it! My antique booth did terribly this week so I think maybe people are just getting out in their yards and doing springtime activities instead of shopping on eBay. Who knows
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03/13/22 – 03/19/22
Total Items In Store: 4313 (was 4292 previously listed)
Items Sold: 19
Total Sales: $ 560.05 (no shipping or included)
Highest Price Sold: $ 50 (VCR)
Average Price Sold: $ 29.48
Money Spent on New Inventory: $ 175 ish
Number of items listed: 40Gut Sales Report for the week: Not a great week, but it was ok.
Focus for the week : Get items listed. Finish up on taxes.
Scavenge of the week: I went to a very old barn sale of an Antique dealer. Looked like they opened an Antique store in the 1970’s and closed the store in the mid 1990’s and all thier stuff has been sitting in the barn since. Most was the left over junk that they didn’t sell. But, I found a box of mostly old RCA Radiotron tubes. My electronics background interest was engaged, and on a hunch, I bought the box for about $1. Well, little did I know that these tubes were from the 1920’s. The lot is worth in the $500 range. One of them alone if worth about $160 if it works. And that is the rub, I have to get them tested. Not sure how much they are worth, if anything, if they don’t work.
I bought 8 of one type of tube. Here is a link to a descritpion of that tube: http://vinylsavor.blogspot.com/2013/10/tube-of-month-ux201a.html
Thoughts for the week: Sales are not great, but ok. I am trying to list more to give the sales a kick start. That is working ok, but not as good as I would expect. I am still trying to get 10,000 items in my store. In the best case scenario, it will take me at least 3.5 years to get to 10,000 items. 10,000 items for me should generate about $100,000 in annual sales and about $6,000\month before taxes at my current rate.
Mark S
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@Mark-S – I’ve passed up lots of tubes in the past just because of that. I have come across an occasional tube tester for sale and have considered buying one just because of that. Returns seem to be VERY good if you can guarantee them working. The risk is that you just bought someone’s saved bad, replaced tubes. Another thought is that you could see if you have a local repair place that might test them for you for a fee. Your initial investment is low, so even paying $5 to have someone test it would be worth it for a tube that will sell for $500.
Good luck with those.
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Had our slowest week since early October. Would have been worse if I hadn’t started cross-listing to Etsy. Spent a good portion of the week finishing taxes. As I mentioned in the tax thread, having migrated to Managed Payments part-way through the year made things much more confusing and it took much longer than normal, taking me away from focusing on listing.
The pandemic has really turned things upside down for us regarding sourcing. I used to get the majority of our inventory from online auctions. I would target 10% – 20% of what I expected to sell something for and would win a comfortable amount of new inventory. These days most things I target are going for 30 – 70%, or more, of what I’m willing to pay for them. Makes margins too thin for me. The thrifts locally either have little of what we target, or have their prices at eBay levels. In contrast, we’ve been getting more inventory from estate sales, which used to be the high dollar options. I guess it makes sense with the fear of the virus. Hit three last day sales Sunday and there was still plenty to scavenge for good value. Spent over $300 on new inventory that I hope to get listed this week. Will include those $$ on next weeks report.
Week Ending 3/19/22
Gross Sales: $292.60
Net Sales: $249.31
Total Items in eBay Store: 1061
Items Sold eBay: 7
Total Items in Etsy Store: 141
Items Sold Etsy: 2
Cost of Items Sold: $11.01
COGS Percent 4.42%
Highest Price Sold: $74.95 Bull Fighting Poster
Average Price Sold: $36.58
Returns: 0
Money Spent on New Inventory: $7.00Average Days Listed: 438.67
Longest Listed: 1605
New items listed: 3 -
Week of March 13-19
Total Items in Store: 437
Items Sold: 19
Gross Sales: $910
Net Sales: $595
Cost of Items Sold: $46
Highest Price Sold: $80 (new in box cookie press)
Average Price Sold: $47.93
Returns: 0Even though I don’t post regularly I still check in most weeks. Maybe there are more like me. Miss the sound of your voices! Sales have been half of what they were last year. This week was a bit better but still well below my weekly average for 2021. I think the postal increases and eBay’s continued push for Promoted Listings placement hasn’t done me any favors. Hope things improve as the year goes on.
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Week of Mar 13 – 19
Total Items in Store: 1471 eBay, 37 Etsy
Items Sold: 7 eBay, 1 Etsy
Cost of Items Sold: $20 + $45 Commission
Total Sales: $176.32 eBay, $24.65 Etsy; Includes fees but no shipping
Highest Price Sold: eBay $40 new in box sandals
Average price: $25.12
Returns: 1 – 1 = 0 (see story below)
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 38A few things to mention:
Earlier in the week, I refunded a buyer for a package that got stuck in a USPS black hole since the end of February. I gave the buyer my PayPal email with the refund. His package suddenly reappeared at the end of the week and was delivered. The buyer promptly re-paid me! This is why I have “Returns: 1 – 1 = 0” in my numbers above.
I had a few listings taken down by eBay in the past week. First was an empty bottle for Russian vodka. It was taken down because there is now an embargo against the country. Funny since no money will leave the US. I took down another empty Russia vodka bottle as a precaution. In a few other listings, I took out the word Russia, but left in Soviet.
Then I listed a bunch of perfumes. I have a special shipping policy set up for Parcel only within the continental US. However, there were two bottles of shower gel that I figured were OK for international. I got a VERO because they can’t be imported into the UK without the “right’s owner” permission. I will set them back up for US only, but they can go Priority.
I checked out the process to run a charity auction, and it’s very easy. A friend asked me to list an item for charity, and I won’t take a commission. (In fact, I might just be paying the fee out of my own pocket). I’ll report on that when it happens.
I’m also planning on attending a live auction next Sunday. The last time I went to one was February LAST year. All my other live auctions have moved online since the pandemic, and I’m not sure that they will ever go back. They get a much bigger audience that way.
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Week of March 13-19
Total Items in Store: 1893
Items Sold: 12
Gross Sales: $514
Net Sales: $294
Cost of Items Sold: $28
Highest Price Sold: $49 – 4 Mikasa dinner plates
Average Price Sold: $42
Returns: 1 – $25 dutch ovenAltho I have not posted numbers for a while, I have been checking in here every week. After a long run of really good sales the last few weeks have really dropped off for me. Sourcing has been a little more challenging with most of the local thrift stores raising their prices more than I like to pay but there are still plenty of items to find if one is willing to put in the time. Spring may finally be here so time to source and hopefully sales bounce back. Bring on the warmer weather and yard sales. Hope everyone has a good week.
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I live at the border of two different regional goodwill chains. Both regions prices have been swinging WILDLY the last year. There have been days I’ve laughed out loud in the store and walked out with nothing, then 2 weeks later I come in and prices are rock bottom.
bottom line that I live by though – cogs is meaningless if the margin is good. Would I like to pay $1 or less for everything? Yes! Is that realistic in my area? Nope. I just paid $30 for a OEM car radio that I would normally have paid $3 for at a yard sale or even the same goodwill just a few months ago. I bought it because I know I can sell it for $150+ , usually to a used car dealer. A retail business would kill to get margins like that.
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Hey everyone! It’s been a few years since I’ve posted on here. I like to lurk from time to time, but I wanted to start contributing to this great community. I started selling on eBay a few years ago as a hobby and for side income with the dream of making this my full time job some day. I was also working from home as an independent contractor for a Chinese ESL company teaching English to kids, but China changed the laws regarding outside teachers which essentially caused the collapse of the ESL industry back in November. I’ve been selling on eBay full time ever since. With a few exceptions, my numbers have been ramping up each month, which has been really nice to see. I’ve taken the process that Jay and Ryanne preach in the podcast to heart and have modeled much of my own workflow and thoughts to coincide with theirs. With all that being said, on to the numbers!
3/13/2022 to 3/19/2022
Total Items in Store: 1852
Items Sold: 25
Gross Sales: $763.36 (including eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Net Sales: $367.25 (minus eBay fees, shipping, and taxes)
Cost of Items Sold: $59.03 (most is from commission)
Highest Price Sold: $113.95 (Air Jordan 11 retro shoes)
Average Price Sold: $30.53
Returns: 1 (Refunded cuisinart ICE-21 frozen yogurt maker because it arrived damaged)
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $0
Number of items listed this week: 45
Number of hours worked: 34.5
Average hourly salary: $10.64 (net sales divided by hours worked rounded to nearest half hour)I’m keeping track of the number of hours I work using the website clockify to help hold myself accountable and as another metric to track progress. I was formerly in the sciences, so I’m all about as much data and analysis as possible.
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I hit a physical space limit with my inventory and especially the unlisted stuff a few months ago, so I’ve been reducing my inventory over that time by sending 1 or 2 full priority mail boxes every week to sell on consignment. There are a lot of very large card sellers who sell on consignment through eBay auctions, but I don’t like to sell on auctions because the prices vary so much. So I use COMC, a company in Washington which has their own standalone website, cross-posts many of their listings to eBay via buy it now listing and over the last 5-10 years has basically become the biggest card seller with massive warehouses which are full of cards they sell on consignment. Now that I’m a few months in, basically every night a few more cards trickle into my account with nice scans. All I have to do is price them and wait for the sales to roll in.
There are plenty of drawbacks to selling this way. It’s much more expensive to sell on than eBay, a minimum $0.50 to process each card, plus a percentage when it sells, and there are a lot of add-on fees for items like graded cards. The processing can take a few months unless you want to pay $1 or more per card. What is most frustrating is that COMC listings are not always optimized. There are mistakes or information missing from the title in one out of every five listings and maybe more. Because they are such a large company, so many things are automated and it’s easy to submit a correction. But it’s annoying to do that over and over again and wait a few days for the corrections.
Also, you can only list individual cards on COMC, not large lots or sets. So it’s not a perfect outlet for every type of listing by any means. It’s an interesting buying and selling market where I often see the same COMC buyer ID’s snapping up my underpriced cards in minutes, sometimes seconds, and immediately they price them higher. Do they ever sell for higher? Maybe, but that’s not my game. I bet a number of the top buyers make their living buying and repricing on COMC, considering how often they are buying my listings and I’m a pretty small fish in terms of the big ocean of sellers.
In addition to the users on the site, a few times each day someone on eBay will buy one of my cards under the comc_consignment eBay ID which has 500,000+ feedback. When I first started sending to COMC a few months ago, I only sent a few dozen items at a time and mostly less valuable cards. But I was pleasantly surprised to see how quickly things sell on there, so I’ve gotten much more aggressive with what I send over the last 4-6 weeks. I have been sending almost all of my unlisted and excess inventory and going through my eBay store for items that have been sitting around for months or years without watchers and ending those listings. They may sell for half price on COMC but for some items, that’s a good sale. Especially when you have space limitations!
I received my first check for $2500 from COMC just over a week ago which was basically my profits for January and February. This month has been even better. I have another check in the same amount coming in the next few weeks, plus thousands of items listed and thousands more in the queue to be listed. I expect the steady sales to continue. It’s funny because if it weren’t for my space limitations, I never would have considered selling on another platform. But now a lot of my time this spring and summer will be figuring out the balance between selling on COMC and selling on eBay. Basically figuring out which cards are the best ones for the eBay store and send the rest to sell through COMC. This will allow me to figure out new ways to expand my eBay store while also giving me more time back.
I think back to those exciting moments of growth that we all got to hear about on this podcast over the years like hiring your first helper (you guys used to model all your clothes for listings!!!), the Air BnB’s and of course the coffee shop. It’s such a thrill to see my own version of that, and I’m so grateful for this community. Maybe I’d be doing just as well on eBay completely on my own, but more likely I’d be working some job that I hate and living paycheck to paycheck and struggling to find the time or energy to supplement that with eBay. It’s amazing to dream bigger than that.
3/13/2022 – 3/19/2022
Total items in store: 2668 (down from 3349) — despite this decrease I am still listing a few new items every day. I really recommend this to anyone whose sales are slow or who is trying to build up their store. Even 3 or 4 new items a day will make an impact on your sales over a series of weeks. It has been a factor in my sales staying relatively steady even as I significantly decreased the number of listings in my store.
Items sold: 49 (38 via best offer, 5 via seller initiated offer)
Gross sales: $2612.35 (down 27% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1812.79 (down 27% from one year ago)
Lowest price sold (net): $16.85 — The Andy Clyne Columbia Comedies softcover book
This wasn’t quite my lowest sale of the week, but for the purposes of this post I’m going to pretend it is because it made me happy to sell a book. One that I got for free a couple years ago off a library rack so it was all profit.
This sale made me so happy that I took the plunge and drove to two library sales last week. My first in-person scavenging in almost two years! It felt really great to scratch the itch for true scavenging again, even if it will never be as profitable as the cards have been. It took a little bit of dumb luck, but I found some really unusual items at both sales that I think will sell for nice prices. My favorite was an out of print wrestling documentary DVD that surprisingly sells for $50 and up — and my copy is autographed by someone. If I can identify the signature, I might have stumbled onto a really desirable item for some fanatic collector — and it cost me all of $1.
I haven’t listed any items in the books or DVD categories in at least a year, so it will be interesting to see if listing these new items leads to some older listings selling. I have a few hundred items in books and CD categories that are all at least a few years old. I have to figure out a better organization system for these items as they’re all just piled on a single bookcase.
Highest price sold (net): $188.92 — Lonnie Walker zebra prizm rookie card PSA 9
This one sale explains a lot about the modern card market. Lonnie Walker is a pretty good, but not a star, 23 year old basketball forward in his fourth year with the San Antonio Spurs, who are a fairly popular but average team. This is one of Walker’s rarest prizm (shiny) rookie cards, but it’s not the most premium set and there are other valuable prizm designs for him like tiger stripes and white sparkles. This card is not autographed or serial numbered and it’s graded, but PSA 9 is not a grade for modern cards that really increases the value.
Despite all of those factors, it sold for $250! Mostly because the zebra prizms are quite desirable and it’s Walker’s rookie card. Plus, he’s not a bad young player. I may be selling him short as I don’t know a ton about him (or anyone) beyond a quick Google and general knowledge of different players. I bought this card for about $100 a few months ago via auction, since all sold listings of the same type of card were $300 or higher. I didn’t expect to win the auction, but often how I end up with new inventory.
My sold price was less than I was hoping for, especially after priority shipping to the Czech Republic which cost me a pretty penny. But I don’t sweat that stuff much. At this point, I am much more focused on scaling my business up than maximizing profit on one single card. This buyer will most likely be thrilled with receiving a nicely packed card much more quickly than eBay’s estimates. Maybe Walker turns out to be great and his card prices go way up, but that’s the buyer’s gamble or whoever buys it from them.
I hadn’t been on the forums in a few weeks before tonight, and the whole time I was missing this place terribly. But it has been great to see so many new posts and threads. I have a lot of reading to get caught up on this week and I’m really excited for it. Sell trash be free!
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This reminds me of the companies that would list people’s excess clothes for a cut of the action. But that model failed because scavengers would just go to church thrifts and send the company bags of low quality clothes that wouldnt sell. The amount of time/effort to photograph and list clothes doesnt make sense for $5. These kind of companies now only accept certain fancy brands that are high quality to guarantee big sales. But for a scavenger, why bother having someone else sell an item that is guaranteed to sell?
For COMC:
–Do they have standards for what you can send in? I assume they don’t want cards that sell for common, lo quality cards.
–Do they have a huge office complex with hundreds of people in cubicles listing all day long? How is that cost effective for them?
–Are you only sending in cards that you personally dont want to list? I assume you keep the cards that you know will make big money, quickly?
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–Do they have standards for what you can send in? I assume they don’t want cards that sell for common, lo quality cards.
COMC will pretty much accept almost any licensed trading cards, but the site’s been around for 10 years (maybe longer) so more common junk wax cards, like a 1991 Topps Ken Griffey Jr. have hundreds of copies available and it’s a race to the bottom in terms of price. Same goes for modern base cards, even of star players like this 2019 Panini Chronicles LeBron James base card which has hundreds of copies available, most at $2 or less and I doubt most of those will sell unless the seller drops their price to lowest.
The cards I send to COMC (and sell in my eBay store) are primarily ones with unique features, like an individual serial number, autograph or insert design. So they sell for higher prices and more quickly than cards with hundreds of copies available. Depending on the player and quality of card/set, often my copy is the only one available of the particular card on COMC or on eBay. Or maybe there are 1 or 2 other copies. My work is a matter of figuring out the right price using Terapeak and my own knowledge.
A lot of sellers on COMC (and eBay) have a habit of pricing their cards extremely high, 5 to 10 times above any sold listings of similar cards. I tend to go more on the lower end of sold listings, similar to how I approach eBay, where I’m usually aiming for 3 or 4 times. I price the really unusual cards very high and wait for the right buyer and perfect time to sell.
–Do they have a huge office complex with hundreds of people in cubicles listing all day long? How is that cost effective for them?
COMC handles the sorting, scanning and cataloging, and all I have to do is price the card. They handle shipping as well, but a good chunk of their transactions (maybe half?) are internal within the site — a user buys a card for a good deal and then reprices. So that’s not nearly as much work on their end. The beauty of the site from a collector’s standpoint is that you can hold your cards and ship them to you once you accumulate dozens or even hundreds, instead of buying one or two at a time.
Here is a short video from COMC’s YouTube which gets into how they process all the cards. It’s a few years old but I think the general process is the same. COMC has grown dramatically since that video was published, probably 5x growth in terms of users and the size of their warehouses. I don’t pay a ton of attention to the nitty gritty details about how they operate, but I know I’ve read that they have some automated sorting machines involved in the process. I’m sure it would make for a fascinating documentary like on a “How It’s Made” type of show.
I have slightly over 3000 cards in my COMC port, and they add more every day since I have a few thousand more cards in the processing queue. Because my prices are reasonable, I sell 10 to 20 cards daily and often get to about $100 in sales. But I’m a very small seller in terms of the site as a whole. The biggest users have 100,000 cards and some have a million or more. It’s pretty easy to understand how that accumulation can happen. There are dozens of new sets in every sport each year, and modern cards with unique serial numbers and the chase for the top “hit” insert or rookie have been going on to some degree since the late 1990s. If I keep up my normal buying habits, and keep sending in boxes every week, I will probably end up with 10,000 cards in my port by this time next year. That’s really amazing now that I typed it out, especially thinking back to how long it took me to build up to 500 and 1000 listing in my eBay store!
COMC takes about 5% out of every sale on the site or on eBay, plus $0.50 or more when the card was originally sent in. They also run weekly eBay auctions (which I frequently buy from) which have additional fees. Multiply that by thousands of sellers and millions of cards, and I can see how they have created a sizeable business that keeps growing every year.
My last five sales today were all $3 to $5. I purchased 2 of the cards via individual auction for $0.99 and the 3 others were all part of larger lots where the average price for each card less than $1. It would be an unbelievable amount of work to list and sell those cards individually on eBay, which is why I have been so easily able to send them so many boxes of cards.
–Are you only sending in cards that you personally dont want to list? I assume you keep the cards that you know will make big money, quickly?
Your assumption is correct. With the store, I have been trying to focus more on cards that I think will sell quickly, or ones that are especially valuable or unusual.
I use a nice quality scanner to create front and back photos of each card for my listings. About six weeks ago, I decided to spend most of a week scanning and cropping photos to create a nice backlog of about 250 scanned cards where all I had to do from there was create the new listing using one of my templates. I’ve been listing a few cards from that backlog every day since then, and every once in a while (like tonight) I add a few dozen more scans to the photo pile. It’s a real shift from my previous lack of any real process, but it’s worked out well so far.
I have been going through my store’s inventory and pulling out older listings without any watchers or offers. I built up my inventory on tons of purchases of cards which I bought for $1 to $10 and listed for $10 to $30. Many of them sold, but some have just sat in boxes for a few years. Maybe the right buyer is out there and just hasn’t found it yet, but there’s also the possibility that the card won’t sell until I cut the price dramatically. That’s where sending to COMC has been really useful.
If I have a card listed for $19.99 on eBay, but it can sell for around $8-10 on COMC, and it’s been listed for 6 months or longer, I’ve been sending it in 9 times out of 10. Modern cards also come in all different shapes and sizes, and I have been aggressive about sending in larger sized cards like booklet cards since they take up more space. I’ve kept the booklet card in the previous link in my store’s inventory because it has 19 (!) watchers and has received 25 (!!) offers. I don’t want to end that listing. Eventually someone will purchase it at my buy it now price or close to it.
I’m a little afraid that I might go too far with removing too many listings and drastically reduce my eBay sales. This is my only source of income so that would be a huge problem. But so far, so good. I think it’s helped that I’m listing every day, and I have a huge number (1000+) listings with anywhere from 2 to 20+ watchers. A few of those listings are bound to sell each and every day, as long as I respond to offers and keep shipping on time.
I am hopeful that over the next few months, I can continue to feed the COMC pipeline while using my eBay store for the “best of the best” cards, as well as adding in new listings like small sets or lots which can’t be sold on COMC. And I hope to sprinkle in scavenging for other kinds of items as well. I know modern trading cards and unique media items (books, CDs, DVDs) at an expert level. But I have always wanted to learn about and sell other types of items, and I am finally in a place financially where I can experiment and it’s okay if it doesn’t lead to huge profits immediately.
So that’s the plan for this spring and summer. Hopefully along with some traveling this year or next. It’s all really exciting, and almost unbelievable when I think back over the last few years of building up my eBay store.
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So fascinating to know there’s some huge warehouse with tens of millions of cards where collectors are simply buying and the selling the “existence” of the card. They dont even touch it. The card just lives on a shelf in a warehouse waiting to be resold.
I’ve read that they have some automated sorting machines involved in the process.
I assumed there’s be some sorting machines to deal with that many cards, but I thought the whole point was to keep cards pristine? One little bend ruins the value. This is why I thought doing it all by human hand would not make it worth selling $2 cards.
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@craig – thought of you this week when I saw this local auction full of sports cards. Not sure where you are but might be worth your look if you are within driving distance of Alexandria, VA. It is a relatively new auction house that has lowish traffic. https://capitalareatreasures.hibid.com/
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I appreciate the tip. I am in New Jersey, so this would be quite a drive for me even if it wasn’t mostly stuff from the junk wax era of 1980s and early 90s that isn’t worth all that much. I actually made a trip like that maybe 3-4 years ago, when I was building up my store towards the magical 1000 listing mark. I won an eBay auction for someone’s entire collection. It wasn’t as large as most huge collection purchases, maybe 4-5 boxes worth which is a few thousand cards.
But this was the largest auction I had ever won — something like $300? In hindsight, it would have been cheaper to pay for FedEx shipping. But this was my first real scavenger adventure, and there were enough nice cards in the photos that I knew I would make a nice profit even with all the extra costs of a rental car and gas. I was afraid the cards would get damaged in shipping too. My eBay life is a lot less complicated now. Sometimes I romanticize those early days. It is often tedious scrolling through thousands of auctions every week looking for the gems and listing errors. But that is nothing compared to the stress of needing the $500 profit from one sale to pay my bills and pay for the next round of new inventory to keep the pipeline flowing.
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@craigrex – I couldn’t resist and ended up buying two lots of cards from the auction. One lot of about 20 prism cards and another lot of 5000 that gave no indication of what was inside. I think I lucked out on the prism cards as one of them is a David Robinson that I have found recent solids in the $80s. Haven’t had the chance to look through the remainder yet but a quick glance and they are at least in great condition. Figure it is a good way to educate myself for cheap. Paid $37.50 for all. Worst case, I send them into COMC if I get bored. Reading your posts has been motivational. Thanks for being so generous in sharing your knowledge.
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Nice to see this group is still active. I popped in because I was considering posting weekly numbers, I’ll try to start next week. We are selling mostly model trains if you can believe it!
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