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Wow, they didn’t even have phone in the title. Great score.
Yeah, it’s wild how many auctions I find from these large sellers now that I am deliberately searching through every single one of their listings and doing the research on items I’m not familiar with. Things can fall through the cracks very easily. I feel bad for the consignors, but then I remember that it’s very likely anyone who sells through consignment is sending 100+ items to probstein or whichever consignment seller they use. So one item listed wrong is all part of the numbers game. It’s likely that another item or items will see a surprise bidding war and the consignor will net about the same, or more, as they would have if they listed everything themselves. It’s not for me, I like the cycle of buying and selling and shipping too much, but I can see the appeal.
I am at the store size, at least for now, where I have a few days every week with maybe 1 sale at most, and no offers. It can be a bit disorienting at times but a few $100+ sales can really prop up those weekly numbers, never mind a $300+ sale like I had this week. But I have to remind myself that this isn’t all a matter of luck or variance or the eBay gods smiling down at me or cursing me to poverty. A lot of hard work went into building my store to where it is today. I have developed a good sense for $20 items that will sell fairly quickly and $200 items that will sell close to full price, and that is what keeps my numbers where they were this week.
2/5/2023 to 2/11/2023
Total items in store: 416 BIN/BO, 0 auction, 416 total
Items sold: 20 (13 via best offer, 5 via seller initiated offer, 16 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $1506.40 (down 54% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1034.81 (down 56% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $75.32 (up 67% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $295.46— Trey Lance 2021 Panini Select cosmic prizm rookie card
These cosmic prizm packs were only available on Panini’s website for about an hour a few weeks ago. You could purchase them using Panini Rewards Points, which have their own value as a pseudo-currency, and as you might guess I’ve built up a large cache of these points over the last few years. These packs “cost” the equivalent of about $100. Inside the packs are four beautiful cosmic prizms, one from each “level” of the 300 card set. The sealed packs sell for $300 pretty reliably, but I thought, let’s take a chance and open it up. I was lucky to pull a few nice players, the best being this rookie card of the 49ers young quarterback Trey Lance. He hasn’t played much due to injuries, but he was a 1st round draft pick and the 49ers are a very talented team on offense, so his nicer cards still sell for high prices. I might regret this sale around a year from now if the 49ers have a successful season next year with Lance as the QB, but I’m fine getting off the hype train now.
Lowest price sold (net): $14.97— Roger Federer 2007 Ace authentic tennis jersey card
The cool thing about having a small store is you don’t have to have sales below $10 if you don’t want them. I try to only list $20 and up items at this point. I continued to work my way through a cache of about 20 of these Federer jersey cards with one more sale. Sell one, scan another, click sell similar and change the pictures, wait til someone sends an offer of $15 or above, and repeat the cycle. If only things could always be so simple. It’s a nice way to sell.
Thanks, I wouldn’t have been able to make this transformation without years of learning from the podcast and this community. It’s such a tremendous source of support and I learn so much from all of you. I have been thinking a lot the last few months about sell through rates and trying to create new eBay listings which are priced to sell quickly. It’s always rewarding when a new listing sells within a day or two.
It’s funny what you wrote about the value of time. I’ve gotten a huge lesson in that over the last few months as one of my family members (my grandfather) has been in poor health. If I were juggling eBay with another job or two as I did for years, I wouldn’t have much time to be there and would constantly be stressed and overwhelmed by any new information or updates on his condition. Even a 1000+ listing eBay store can be very time-consuming if it’s your main source of income or if you’re one person handling everything or most of it, and I was up to 3000+ listings at my pandemic peak.
But the extra income stream from COMC has provided me with a lot more time, some of which I’ve used to show up for my family. It’s given me a lot of solace and peace in a difficult time and often showing up is a huge part of helping out. I have a lot of family members who work a lot or have responsibilities (childcare, elder caretaking) which mean they aren’t able to be present as often and when they are, a lot of that stress and fatigue comes to the surface. I feel those things sometimes because I live a few hours’ drive from most of my family, and all the driving is tiring, but it’s gratifying to see the benefits of an eBay business show up in other areas of life.
Ah! I misread. That is nice to make a steady stream of $3k a month by sending in cards to that site. Is it scalable? Can you just buy more and more and send them all in?
A lot of the income stream I’ve developed from using COMC was from the backlog I accumulated over the last few years of buying and selling on eBay. For the first half of last year, I was sending in at least one medium flat rate box every week. There were only so many cards I could list on eBay, but it was easy to keep buying, especially since card prices are so volatile and so many large eBay sellers rely on auctions and inefficient lot listings to keep inventory moving. Plus I don’t have kids or any other big expenses and I’m frugal in basically every other area of my life. I still a few monster boxes (3000+) of random cards but it’s a lot less than I had.
Some of the cards I send in to COMC sell in hours or even minutes, others take weeks or months until the right buyer or event comes along, others I need to keep slashing the price or they will sit forever. Pricing can get competitive when another seller has a copy of the same card, but not every seller has the mentality of race to the bottom. Some COMC sellers have really wacky high prices which I don’t understand, but not everyone is as focused on selling as scavengers are.
COMC cross-posts a lot of cards to eBay, so some of the money from my COMC sales is actually from eBay buyers! I pay $1 submission fee to COMC (more on certain types of cards) when each card posts to my account, so that’s how they make their money. Plus a cut of every sale. I didn’t get consistently profitable with COMC until late last year but now it’s really going well. A lot of the cards that I sent in early last year, I wouldn’t send in today, but it was all a learning experience. I can run sales on COMC’s site as well. So sometimes there are good buying opportunities, then I either reprice the cards on COMC or I get them shipped to me and sell on eBay. It’s kind of amazing how this has transformed my business in so many different ways — buying less, buying using COMC credit instead of money from my bank account, a much more curated eBay store, less clutter. But it’s been a year of solid work to get to this point. It takes a while for a plan to come together.
Right now, my plan through this summer is to send a box to COMC maybe every other week (mostly new eBay purchases, but now I’m really picky about only buying the best deals), keep repricing what’s already in my port and buy on the site when I find the occasional good deal. I have sold at least 500 cards a month from my COMC port every month since last February, so I know this works and I have enough inventory to last me a while even if I stop buying or if I decide to run a big sale for any number of reasons.
It is interesting to think about the different opportunities that open up once you scale up. Definitely reminds me of what happened for you and Ryanne once you added Airbnb to your income stream and then once you added a second rental. The National card show is in Chicago this year, and I will go just to get a 30% discount on COMC submission fees. If I bring 1000 cards, that will be $300 less in fees by dropping them off! I went to the national last year when it was in Atlantic City, it was huge and overwhelming and a little too loud and busy for me. And honestly I prefer to buy from behind a computer screen. But this will be an excuse to explore a new city which should be a lot of fun. I could probably put my eBay store on vacation for the length of the trip and even cover the costs by running a sale on COMC.
It has been a busy life week but eBay has been very slow for us. We’ll see how numbers are tomorrow.
If there is one thing I have learned from reading these forums the last few years, it is that “busy life week” and “slow eBay week” appear in the same sentence quite a lot. Of course, that flexibility is one of the biggest perks to our lives. I have a lot of family who are very blue-collar and just work, work, work, and they are always very tired.
Just a trickle now and prices are still high but I think it’s going to pick up. Lots of buyers remorse from investors thinking starting an Airbnb would be easy. (Hint: its not and no rental is guaranteed income)
I’m skeptical of US housing prices ever becoming affordable for anyone below upper-middle class in my lifetime, more likely that large landlords keep buying up properties and offering less for more, but I really hope I am wrong.
I dont know if you’ve spoken about the consignment. Who are you selling for? Whats the cut?
Oh, this isn’t selling for anyone else on consignment, its just selling through the other site (COMC) that I started using last year. up to a consistent $750 a week in profit the last month and a half. pretty exciting to think about the opportunities that money will create if I can keep it up for another year or two!
i know some people here sell for others on consignment and it’s huge in the trading card world, almost all the sellers that I buy from are consignment sellers. Rarely say never about the future, but I don’t think I’d ever want to sell on consignment for someone else. even a friend or family member. too much potential for complications and one or both of us to end up unhappy.
Someday I will find a neighbor like yours. I’ve never had the pleasure of living next to or near anyone who cared about anything weird or niche. It sounds fun but likely some conversations are incredibly tedious.
I remember late night 1990s commercials for Bradford Mint coins and Bradford Exchange plates. Not nearly as entertaining as Don West shilling junk baseball cards though!
Wow that Holt Howard board sold quick! I bet by this time next week, it will have a prominent place on the wall of someone’s carefully curated kitchen.
Great posts @retro-treasures-wv. Always enjoy it when the sell similar trick works. Skeptics take note!
Bulk lego prices are wild to me. But considering the price of new sets, and rarity of some of the out of print stuff, I can understand it.
The Youtube algorithm makes it a little more tolerable not having the podcast to get me through marathon listing sessions.
My numbers were propped up last week from a batch of 500 trading card auctions, and past trends continued in terms of how many listings sold (around 10%) and how the items sold (vast majority with only one bid). I can’t imagine doing these every week like a lot of big sellers in this niche do, but I hope I can continue doing them at least once a month. I cycle the unsold auctions back into the store over the course of a week (sell similar 10 each day) and I’ll hold back some for next month’s auctions. After that, if they still don’t sell, I’ll send them for consignment.
It’s a lot of shipping for a couple of days and I am really careful about setting my minimum bid price at the lowest amount I’m willing to accept. I set my minimum bids at about half my buy it now price. It’s always surprising to see items sell after months of no offers. But I believe that there are plenty of eBay users who only, or mostly, buy through auctions and are always hunting for bargains.
I ran a smaller batch of auctions, mostly football cards, to end the day after the Super Bowl. After those end, I’ll take a break from the auction game for a few weeks to build up my BIN/BO inventory again. It’s interesting having less than 500 items in my eBay store because some days nothing sells and no offers come in. I’m used to a constant churn of buy, list, sell, ship, repeat. But I’ve replaced that with consignment trading card sales, where I only handle the pricing. Anything I’ve lost in eBay week to week sales has more than been replaced by those consignment sales. Nice having two platforms to work with. Exciting to think about what other changes and innovations there might be in my future.
1/29/2023 to 2/4/2023
Total items in store: 367 BIN/BO, 60 auction, 427 total
Items sold: 60 (9 via best offer, 4 via seller initiated offer, 6 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $2805.24 (down 3% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1888.85 (down 6% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $46.75 (down 26% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $137.68— Deion Sanders, Roger Staubach and Tony Dorsett Donruss Classics Dallas Cowboys jersey card #1/1
Lowest price sold (net): $7.81— John Brzenk arm wrestling trading card 2013 Upper Deck Goodwin Champions
If you have any tips for scavenging wife’s rich aunts, feel free to share.
You do such a nice job with the photography of your items, you highlight the items condition so well. I like the Apple II manual you listed this week, amazing to find that still sealed after all these years.
I picked up 20-odd tobacco tins from the junk market, with someone’s carefully-curated collection of small wood screws in them.
Was your interest in the tins, the screws, or both? And which has more value? Once or twice, I’ve purchased a small collection of early 20th century tobacco cards and they were shipped in the original tin. Always wondered the story behind how those end up amongst a consignment seller’s thousands of listings when they would be much more at home on a flea market table…
Goodwillfinds.com huh? You may have found the deal of the year on that site, considering the deals there are often the opposite of bargains. That’s a nice looking piece of pottery in really good shape considering how many opportunities it had to get damaged before it got to you.
If your auction doesn’t sell, try scheduling the listing to start/end on a Sunday/Monday night. These are the most active nights for auctions ending among the big trading card consignment sellers and there must be some logic why everyone has the most auctions ending on those nights. Thursday is probably the third most popular night.
I have been doing monthly auctions for the last three or four months, and every month I think about messing around with promoting some auctions or making subtitles or shipping discounts or complicated volume pricing. Then I just create the auctions, add best offer with a minimum slightly above my BIN price, and move on. Quick and easy. But it might make sense to experiment with some of these new features and see. What works for me will sometimes be very different from what works for you. But the only way we really get to find out what works best for our store is to try these different features. We’re fortunate to be selling on eBay at this time when we have so many different options to sell items faster, or at a discount, or to reach buyers in different ways.
Someday, I am gonna have my own home with fancy plates, and by fancy I mean kitschy, and when I go plate shopping, the first place I am going to look is your eBay store. You always sell the coolest plates and kitchen stuff!
I don’t think I’d ever be the kind of person who buys or uses napkin rings, let alone $200 (!!!) napkin rings. But those napkin rings are pretty cool looking. I’m glad you got your full price after three years of waiting. It can be so tempting with valuable longtail items to take a lowball offer, especially with items which are larger than a bread box (or a napkin ring).
