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I had a pretty decent hit rate with scavenging last week, always a rewarding feeling since a good chunk of my reselling business is searching through pages and pages and pages of auction to find the good stuff, and then I only win a small percentage of those items. Ironically, my card reselling business has really grown this year as I’ve expanded my scope to cards that I personally find somewhat boring, like base cards and base rookies of star players. Currently I’m buying Cooper Flagg, the star player for Duke Blue Devils, heavily since we are right before March Madness. These are a very quick churn — buy now, ship to consignment and sell individually at auction in the next month. Some of the cards will only go for $5 and $6 at auction. But others go for $10 or $15. It’s a numbers game, and the math works out with consignment since all I handle is pricing. I have sold 1,900 cards or more through my consignment port for four consecutive months, and I hope to make it five straight this month. Figuring out Goldilocks pricing has been a key for me. Consignment makes flipping dead easy, so the good deals get snapped up in minutes, sometimes seconds. My most common flip remains buying cards for less than $3 and selling for $5 to $10, but moving beyond that has been key to growing my reselling business this past year.
In all the cards this week, I did find some other cool items for the eBay store. My favorite was this 1941 Brooklyn Dodgers scorecard signed by Billy Herman for $15. Love Brooklyn Dodgers stuff, and this piece really has some character and shows its ages.
On the more modern end of the spectrum, we have this Christian Pulisic signed magazine for $18 from my favorite consignment seller who is extremely generous with combined shipping and has the friendliest CSR’s who are definitely real people and not AI…I think. The authentication label is shifted around in the photos and the case is chipped, so I might need to get this one recased. But Pulisic auto’s regularly do $100 and up, so I have plenty of margin here to figure something out.
Buy of the week was a pile of game used baseballs with paperwork from Steiner, all in the $10 and $15 range. Nothing fancy, but should be easy $10 to $20 profit margins depending on how interesting the individual games were, since that’s the driver of value with items like this.
What did you find this week?
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@Craig it’s so awesome how your business seems so under control. I hope to get there. Also very cool how your products are uniform and small.
This week I had a couple of days where I thought I should not go thrifting and went anyway, only to not really be rewarded. Another day I did better. I found a matching $3.99 new Pottery Barn pillow for our couch, a $150+ glass Waterford vase for $20, 4 Baccarat cocktail glasses. I feel like what I picked up is solid. I’m trying to be thoughtful, leave more things behind, and I’m taking time to look some things up and check out the margins.
I did find a piece of peacock art for $40 – a splurge. I definitely questioned myself – I couldn’t tell if it’s a watercolor original or signed print, it’s quite large and has glass (why did I do that?), and that is really more than I like to spend. I hope it pays off. I haven’t opened it up to check it out yet.
It seems like there are a ton of estate sales cropping up – probably because Spring real estate season approaches – but I have been good at staying away from those in general.
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Christine, I’m glad that I seem like I have my business under control! I’ve certainly learned a lot about managing my inventory and inventory space over the last year. One of the things I enjoy most about reselling is how it’s a constant learning process. If you want to learn a niche badly enough and you’re willing to put in the time, you can become an expert on almost anything. And you never know what you’re going to find and where you’ll find it!
But understanding (and accepting) my own tendencies has led to the biggest growth for my business, by far. Pricing is the biggest factor, and figuring out how to use different platforms to their fullest potential is huge as well. But there are some other factors which have helped make me a little bit more profit, or keep a little more money in my pocket. For me personally, I’ve realized that it doesn’t matter how valuable something is if I’m not going to list it for months and months and I don’t have the space for large long-tail items. Figuring out these small marginal advantages is a constant learning process, and it helps make the inevitable slow weeks a little more tolerable.
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@christiner Thinking about it, it seems that if the signature’s in the white border it’s a print. Watercolourists tend to get paint on the paper outside the edges of the image, so the painting either gets trimmed or mounted under card so that the edges are hidden.
Some years back I bought a large signed print of a bird. It was created by an artist who had a reputation for producing slightly-odd portraits of wild British birds; his website listed the signed prints for sale at around 300 dollars.
I think I paid a couple of British pounds for it- can’t remember if it was framed or not, but I decided to have it reframed. That cost in the region of a hundred dollars.
Sent it to an auction house in Nottingham- no bids. Sent it to an auction house in Lichfield, where it sold for five pounds. Didn’t get any money, but at least they sent me a statement through the post, and not a request for payment of fees!
So I learnt a couple of things. Never take an artist at their own estimation. Never get anything reframed.
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