- This topic has 4 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 5 months, 2 weeks ago by
.
-
Posts
-
-
Thanks to checking the daily auctions of one particular west coast sports card consignment seller on eBay, I’ve quickly amassed a nice collection of minor league baseball memorabilia from the 1950s and earlier. My favorite pickup this week was this 1945 Pacific Coast League yearbook with this 1928 Pacific Coast League record book a close second place. Both items cost me about $5 each with combined shipping. I hope to make some baseball historian very happy when I get all these items listed.
I kept my COGS at around $15 on this full-sized signed Randy Ready game used bat which is where I’d like to keep it since the floor on a lot of random players signed bats is around the $50 range. Because these types of items tend to get listed in batches, I won two more signed bats the next day — former Detroit Tigers pitcher Denny McLain for $20 and current Chicago Cub Nico Hoerner for $35.
I had an order with exactly 40 items (eBay’s max for one invoice) from another seller with some really interesting items. This Jimmy Carter “hardcover collector’s edition book” is obviously an Easton Press and should lead to an easy $20 profit sometime in the next few months assuming there’s no damage. For a few bucks, it’s an easy buy. This Steve Irwin bush shirt card from 2002 Dart Flip Cards has sold listings from $20 to $50 and up, but I know cards well enough to know the right buyer will click buy it now if I price in the $50 range and just wait.
My favorite find of the week was two big boxes of cards for about $20 after combined shipping, so ten bucks a box. This is the fun kind of scavenging because it’s a mystery, like old school mystery box type of listing. I don’t have any idea whether the cards will be any good or not from the (2) pictures, one of which is a $0.25 Wade Boggs card from the nineties. Who knows what else is in the boxes? Those cards could be any cards at all. They could even be cards!
But there are two signs this might be a steal. The first is that I know this seller’s listings, and a handful of times every week, listings slip through the cracks with obvious mistakes. I think what happens with consignment companies is that they grow to a point of hiring employees and becoming a huge multi-million dollar gross revenue operation, and they are pumping out thousands of listings but start making mistakes like any business do. Sometimes your new hire for listing auctions isn’t trained enough to know how to do every type of listing. Sometimes an employee doesn’t ask how to list something and just creates the new listing even if it’s poorly. Maybe they mean to go back to it but never do. Possibly they’re trying to hit listing quotas. Mistakes get made. And that’s where I come in with my business.
The second tell is the second picture, with all the cards in the boxes. There are some wider (thick) cards in there, which is usually a sign of memorabilia cards or some other kind of special feature cards. If there are just 15 autographs and jersey cards in the two boxes, I will break even. There might be some interesting valuable 90s inserts with individual serial numbers as well, just based on the years in the title of the listing. Or it could be a lot of junk cards from 1993. More about these boxes in next week’s thread.
What did you find this week?
-
Oooh, I’ve been looking forward to this post since Saturday. I had one of my dream yard sales!
It was one of those sales that typically my wife would tell me to keep driving. It was one little rack of clothes, and one little table inside a garage with one guy sitting behind it. As always, I already made the effort of getting to the sale so what is one more minute to go on in and take a quick peek.
well firstly, I got a $100 pc game controller (battletech style) for $5. Then a Star Trek board game, a vintage toy recorder, some valuable hats.
Then I turned around and saw a vintage Metallica t shirt…and another…and another! I got 8 shirts in total – 6 are 90’s Metallica – for $1 each.I listed the Metallica shirts high since they are XL. They ranged from $200-500. I expect to make about $1500 off the 8 shirts.
go to my store and search Metallica and you can see them all as I wasted NO time getting these beauts listed.
-
I found a tin of pre-1947 British silver coins at a thrift shop. They were priced at 10 pence each, so I took the tin up to the counter and asked how much for the whole tin. We ended up counting them- 390-odd coins- so I offered the lady £45. I was about to pay when the store manager comes out and says “Do you want the rest of them?”, goes back in the storehouse and comes back with another tin-full and says “You can have the whole lot for £50”.
Once I took the copper coins and the few post-1946 coins out I ended up with 4.2 kilos of coins. These are 50% silver (post-1920 coins were debased), so 2 kilos at around $1,600.
Whoever assembled the hoard knew about the silver, because there were three very worn pure silver coins in a plastic bag. There was also a 1979 quarter dollar and three crowns in plastic bank folders celebrating Royal events. I tried giving those crowns back, but they didn’t want them.
-
-
I’ve being trying to collate the ones in better condition, in hopes of selling them as collector’s coins. A lot of the earlier 1920s coins are in poor condition- apparently whatever metal they mixed with the silver didn’t wear very well. Sellers seem to offer these by weight, e.g. 500 grams of sixpences for £440.
Apparently it’s illegal to melt any UK coins in the UK- they have to be taken to France to be melted down, as it’s legal there. Other country’s coins can be melted.
-
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.