Introducing the eBay Vault

[IndySales]

The market for trading cards and collectibles continues to accelerate, and eBay is the biggest trading platform for these categories. Our headline announcement today was the eBay Vault, coming next quarter. This is a 31 thousand square foot, secure storage facility and digital marketplace for trading cards and collectibles, with plans to expand into luxury goods.

Once an item is in the eBay Vault, customers know their valuables are secure and “instant sale” becomes possible. While many customers will keep their items in the vault for years, once it is in the Vault then ownership can transfer from seller to buyer in a matter of seconds – without the need to re-authenticate, re-package or ship the item anywhere. This unlocks a new way to engage with eBay: imagine instantly buying and selling cards and sports memorabilia as a great new rookie lands a play in the final minutes of a tight game.

Within a few years, we expect the Vault will hold up to $3 billion in assets, which would make it one of the largest stores of non-governmental assets in the world. Keeping high-value inventory within the eBay ecosystem is great for everyone, and the Vault will make other planned features possible, like fractionalization.

Source: https://community.ebay.com/t5/Announcements/Announcing-the-eBay-Vault-and-What-s-Next-for-Our-Marketplace/ba-p/32768031

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrneEAcfVPI

Basically, you ship a high-priced collectible to the “eBay Vault” for storage, where you can then then decide to sell the item outright (after which it changes ownership immediately, without shipping) or sell shares of the item (fractionalization.) This means you can now “own” an item without ever seeing it/touching it.

Thoughts?

[Sharyn]

Kind of like NFTs, but in the real world?

Doesn’t sound all that exciting to me, but I’m sure eBay knows what it is doing.

[Antique Frog]

I watched the video, and I was disappointed that they didn’t show the 90 foot by 340 foot shed they’re going to use to store this 3 billion dollars worth of cardboard.

[Temudgin]

I don’t know that there are that many card flippers and speculators out there who have such little personal interest in the actual item that they don’t want to hold it in their hot little mitts. At least once. Even those who stash their precious acquisitions away in a safe or bank box take joy in unwrapping a new arrival. Don’t they?

[Retro Treasures WV]

My father-in-law every month orders a bunch of comic books from the big monthly catalog. He makes a special 45 minute drive to his favorite comic shop to pick them up. He gets home, brings the bag of comics to a huge closet he built for just this occasion, and throws it on a pile of the rest of the bags he’s been buying for over 30 years. He does not read a single one.

 

He’s “saving them for when he has time to read” (he’s retired and STILL doesn’t have time). and “They’ll be worth a fortune one day”.

 

This kind of sight unseen collecting is NOT for me…but I’ll happily sell crap to the vault for people who are into it. LoL!

[Antique Frog]

A friend who deals part-time in stamps gave me about thirty albums of Royal Mail first-day covers to sell for him. Somewhere around 900 envelopes dating back to the 1980s. After a week trying to sort out which ones were actually worth selling I took an extreme dislike to looking at the awful designs. Totting up the face values the original owner had spent about 8,000 dollars; my friend bought them at auction for 500 dollars, and I managed to sell them on for a slight profit.

[So Cal Joe]

That sounds a lot like what COMC already does for sports cards.

https://www.comc.com/Cards/Baseball

They’ll have to be pretty selective on what they allow in, so it doesn’t turn into an oversized storage locker.

I think there is definitely a market for it.

[Antique Frog]

Something that came up on the news a couple of days back is that the British Library use a depleted-oxygen atmosphere and a robot retrieval system. The oxygen’s at 14% instead of 21%- apparently makes it impossible to light a match.

[Author]

Posts