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Are your sales down from last year because you’ve moved so much inventory that consignment company? Or just lower sales. Curious if the card market is feeling any pressure from a slowing economy.
My inventory is 1/3 of the size it was a year ago, so it’s amazing my sales aren’t down a lot more! But it’s not (only) luck or the types of items I sell, it’s some process changes as well. I’ve gotten a lot better about listing things which I think will sell quickly (<30 days) and for a decent price. In the last month or two, I’ve also gotten much more aggressive about selling by sending 20% or 25% offers to watchers, or repricing listings $10 or $20 lower. Never any regret in selling now vs waiting longer, especially when I’m still making a profit.
On the one card message board I use, there is a new thread almost every week about how the market is tanking and the end is near. While prices are down for many types of cards (like graded ultra-modern base rookie cards of average players), the card world has more buyers and sellers than ever thanks to online breaking and how easy it is to flip cards whether it’s through eBay, a social media platform or a consignor. It has been interesting to see the growth the last couple years, particularly in more niche sports like wrestling, soccer and women’s basketball. Five years ago those sports might get one or two new sets a year. Now, these sports have many different types of sets from expensive to inexpensive.
So many card consignors rely on $0.99 auctions to move this week’s cards in advance of next week’s new sets, and as long as that’s the case, there will be plenty of great buying opportunities. I have been accumulating other stuff to sell here and there. It never hurts to diversify or at least keep an open mind to it.
I’m feeling optimistic about my eBay business this week. I’ve been aggressive in the last few weeks about repricing older items which has led to a nice number of sales of previously stale items. I’ve also seen a lot of evidence in the last few months that I’m getting a better sense for listing new items which sell quickly. It’s hard to believe we’re down to the last two months of 2022 but my confidence is growing for next year and beyond.
One of the best things about selling online is coming up with ideas for improvements or changes, executing them on the fly and seeing results. Most people’s lives and workdays are bogged down by inertia. But with eBay, you can experiment and try new ways to sell or engage with prospective buyers and see results very quickly.
10/23/2022 – 10/29/2022
Total items in store: 1157 (down from 1142 last week)
Items sold: 38 (1 via best offer, 5 via seller initiated offer, 15 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $2287.69 (down 27% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1554.89 (down 30% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $60.20 (up 38% from one year ago)
Time spent searching through online auction listings for new trading cards inventory: 20 hours (up from 18 hours last week)
Highest price sold (net): $111.28 — Devin Vassell 2020 Panini Prizm Draft black gold prizm rookie card #1/5 PSA 10
I was happy with this sale, but here’s an interesting insight into the modern card market: if this card were the same player (Devin Vassell)’s rookie year (2020 season) parallel (black gold prizm individual serial number #/5) but from the Panini Prizm regular set (with players in pro uniforms) instead of the Draft (college set), it would be worth thousands. Regardless of grade or if it was graded at all. There are two Terapeak sales of Vassell’s black gold prizm from the regular Prizm set in the last year, one for $1875 in a PSA 8 and one ungraded for $4000. But the draft cards are worth much less. This will change in the future depending on how Vassell’s career pans out and, to an extent, how the card market shifts and changes.
These distinctions sometimes seem very silly and arbitrary, even to me. But then I think about how the card market has worked for years, and it all makes sense again.
Lowest price sold (net): $13.75— Roger Federer 2007 Ace authentic jersey
Purchased about 20 copies of this card about three months ago for $6-$7 each from a seller who posts auctions with large lots of the same card from specific sets most weeks. Even sold a lot of 10 for $87.32 last night. Not sure if they are a wholesaler or work for the manufacturer or why they have so many copies of this (and other similar) cards.
Whatever the seller’s deal is, they are leaving money on the table by selling ten copies (or more) of the same card in one auction because one individual card is an easy sell for $15 to $20, often within 24 hours of posting the listing. Best tennis player of this generation (if not all time) and there are not a lot of tennis sets, let alone ones with pieces of jersey in them.
Every time I sell of these cards, I use that as a reason to scan front and back photos of the next crop of cards I will list, including another copy of the Federer card. It will be a sad day when I’m down to my last Federer card since these cards have provided a lot of structure to my weeks over the last few months.
Thanks for posting the thread @Sharyn. It is really helpful to go over the routine of these numbers every week, it helps me really think about what is selling and why. Hope you two are not too busy J&R.
10/16/2022 – 10/22/2022
Total items in store: 1142 (down from 1146 last week)
Items sold: 35 (7 via best offer, 4 via seller initiated offer, 19 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $1613.20 (down 57% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1103.63 (down 59% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $46.09 (down 8% from one year ago)
Time spent searching through online auction listings for new trading cards inventory: 18 hours (up from 15 hours last week)
Highest price sold (net): $91.43 — Cameron Johnson 2019-20 Panini Revolution galactic RC BGS 9.5
This card is a good example of what more expensive modern insert cards look like. The graded case can sometimes be an indicator of value (if it’s BGS, PSA or SGC and a high grade for that type of card) but the rookie card (RC) logo and the type of card (in this case, a rare galactic shiny insert from the Panini Revolution set) are also important. With modern trading cards, a very shiny or intricate design can often indicate rarity or value. Look for a serial number too, with lower numbers often more valuable.
Lowest price sold (net): $3.28— Nkemdiche twins signed Ole Miss football
This was a bad buy from a couple years ago, and I kept lowering the price until it sold. Final sale price was $17 + $10 shipping but, to put the bad buy cherry on top, the only box I had which fit the item plus any padding was a regional box. In hindsight, it might have been cheaper to pay by weight instead of region, but I’m just glad to get this one out of here.
It’s great to see so many of your newly listed items selling. No surprise, almost everything you posted here is unique and interesting, and your listings have all the key details a buyer would need.
Your story about the pinstripe painting tool is a good reminder: buy the thing when you’re confident in its value, even if it comes with other junk. It can be easy to talk myself into frustration by focusing on what something should cost or how a seller should conduct a sale. But when I skip all that, and just focus on listing, it’s amazing how often something sells quickly and in the range of what I thought the item was originally worth.
Thanks for the heads up on Jose Trujillo’s painting auctions! Some of them have really ended at bargain prices. But if I find one that’s my taste, I will want to keep it. Both because I like his style and it’s cool to see a creative person supporting their art by selling it themselves through eBay.
Sales were very bread and butter this week, however I picked this because was one of the items I think was helped along either by my 4% promoted listing or Pinterest. It sold super quickly. Someone paid full price. On Terapeak there are 8 solds in the last year, all lower than this. There are also 5/8 actives at the same or lower price, some with free shipping.
I have also been upping my promoted listings percentage recently, between 5% and 7%, and seen some good results from it. Even when there are comparable items for cheaper.
When I first clicked on your link, it redirected me to another listing, as eBay’s searches do now on some/all completed listings. No clue if the “similar” listing is the cheapest of that type of item available, but I would be very confident to bet that the seller uses promoted listings!
You are logical and it makes your life easier
I think these might also be $5 cards so not much to lose?I learned a lot about logic, for eBay and life in general, from a certain podcast. 🙂
I’ve let the buyer keep the item a few times when it was a $30 and up sale as well. The most expensive return I can remember was maybe a year or two ago, a card for $60ish to Canada where the buyer wasn’t happy with condition. I had a duplicate of the same card, so I sent them that one and, after arguing with myself for a bit, told the buyer just keep the original. It was at least a $100 loss (if not more) between cost of the sold items and shipping to Canada twice, but buyer was thrilled and I was careful with my budget for a week and then moved on with my life. It would have been such a headache to deal with return shipping from Canada.
When I only deal with returns a few times a year, it’s easiest to do whatever I can to make the buyer go away. Ego be damned. I plan to keep this policy consistent for as long as I can, regardless of what I sell in the future. But I’m sure there might be a certain $$ amount or type of items where I would want the buyer to return it. If this ever happens, you’ll all be the first to know. Returns can be so frustrating!
I have free returns and I pay shipping on return shipping as well. I also sell about 40 items mostly in trading cards which is a niche full of picky collectors and grade chasers, which are buyers looking to buy the perfect ungraded card to submit and can be a bit unscrupulous.
I still only deal with maybe 3-4 returns a year. The last few years, I just offered the buyer a refund AND they keep the item. The buyers have always been thrilled (one or two of them even became a repeat customer for a few months) and I’m happy to just be done with it.
I am curious how many returns you clothing sellers deal with. I would think it could be as high as 1 in 15, but I imagine people would say that about trading cards as well and it hasn’t been the case for me at all.
As a buyer, the eBay money back guarantee has saved me more than a few times, often with low feedback sellers. I would hate to lose it.
Anyone else see an unusual amount of eBay offers and purchases yesterday? I’ve gotten so used to receiving 1-3 offers a day that a day with 10 really sticks out. But I’ve also been making a conscious effort to reprice and sell similar with inventory that is 3+ months old, so maybe that is a factor as well.
Also, I’ve read elsewhere–but don’t have personal experience–that you might be able to get eBay to remove feedback if the complaint is about shipping but you shipped on time or if they discuss the details of a case they opened.
It’s worth a try to contact ebay seller help to either have the feedback or defect removed. It’s mostly automated at this point, just explain the relevant details about the item and it’s entirely possible you will get the feedback removed. My few experiences with this have all been positive — the negative feedback was removed within a day at most.
I sold a new, sealed DVD, shipped Media Mail per buyer choice (they paid) they day after they paid.
I used to sell media items regularly and still sell a few here and there. I don’t even offer media mail as a shipping option exactly to avoid the situation you described. I’ve found that buyers who might request media mail are often picky about price, shipping and/or condition. Most regular CDs and DVDs can go first class mail for 8 ounces or less anyway, and with larger/heavier sets I am picky about what I list to where it needs to be over a certain price point before I consider it.
To me the small price savings with using media mail isn’t worth the extra possible headaches. Ironically the shipping speed with media mail is typically fast compared to the estimate and especially compared to 5+ years ago.
I did do a 30% off and free shipping promo on my coats and winter heavy items that resulted in zero sales.
I look at promos and coupons and sending offers a lot like how I look at auctions — sometimes they work out well, but there are too many variables to rely on them. You need a specific buyer to find your listing within a specific short time frame (your auction period or markdown period) and have the money in the bank to purchase your item right now. Unless the discounts are so steep that flippers might get interested, it’s a pretty inefficient way to sell.
Still, we can give ourselves a little edge here and there. When I run promotions or coupons, I run them for a long time (2 weeks or more) and I do a big batch of sell similar on old listings before or during the promo. When I run a batch of auctions, I set the minimum bid at the lowest price I’m willing to accept and I try to list similar items in the same auction batch scheduled a few minutes apart. This leads to a future extra sales here and there.
But a lot of the time, we just have to wait for the right buyer.
I didn’t get to list like I wanted this week. I did spend several hours working on organizing my ebay space. It is something that must be done that will pay off in accelerated growth later on. I also had many family and home improvement commitments to get done with my very limited time & energy.
I had very similar commitments to you this past week and I think these are the best weeks to mess around with stuff like sell similar on old listings and markdown sales. Last week I tried a public coupon 15% off on all listings just to see if it would do much. It’s been about a week since I created the coupon and I’ve had about $250 in sales from buyers using the coupon code. I’m going to increase my promoted listings rate on some older listings this week to see if that has any impact.
I’m hopeful that ebay will run some nice ebay bucks promos for Black Friday this year. Not likely considering they haven’t used that program much in the last few years, but maybe we’ll get lucky.
It can be so easy when sales are slow and offers are not coming in to look at external factors. But I know that my eBay sales have been slow lately because I haven’t been listing consistently in the last month — maybe every other day, at best.
With that in my mind, I created some new listings this weekend and then did sell similar with about 100 items last night. I also lowered the BIN prices on these listings by $10 to $20 and lowered my minimum offer settings by a similar amount. I’ll take $10 or $20 less on a $50+ item if it means it will sell this week instead of four months from now, and as I’ve spent more time looking at my older listings, I’ve realized that my past offer settings were often too high, and on many items I had received an offer weeks or months ago that I would’ve accepted if it hadn’t been auto declined. So I’m trying to change that habit going forward.
10/9/2022 – 10/15/2022
Total items in store: 1146 (down from 1158 last week)
Items sold: 23 (12 via best offer, 5 via seller initiated offer, 9 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $1337.62 (down 69% from one year ago)
Net sales: $943.10 (down 69% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $58.16 (down 13% from one year ago)
Time spent searching through online auction listings for new trading cards inventory: 15 hours (down from 16 hours last week)
Highest price sold (net): $273.27 — Justin Herbert 2020 Panini Certified Graffiti mirror green #2/5 — this card is valuable because it has a low serial number (#2/5) and it’s a rookie year card of the star young quarterback for the Chargers, Justin Herbert
Lowest price sold (net): $11.33— Kyle Wright 2017 Panini Elite autograph ##/100 — Kyle Wright is one of the best young pitchers for the Atlanta Braves, who have a large collector base. Though the Braves season just ended in with 3 playoff losses to the Phillies, Wright pitched amazing in Game 2 and I sold this card and another to the same buyer who had purchased other Braves cards from me in the last few months.
How much do you need to net in a month to pay all your bills and have enough to enjoy?
@Jay I have no kids or other big expenses (house, etc) so even living in the expensive northeast I am comfortable as long as I net $4000 a month. Most of my excess the last few years (especially the last year) has gone into reinvesting into inventory which is why the consignment sales have grown so much for me. That has been a bit of luck but I figured that if I took the risk to do this full-time that I would find some new edge or a step forward in order to grow my business.I realize that most would take a safer approach but I wanted to go big from the start. I figured if it didn’t work out, I could sell most or all of my inventory and recoup my losses and if it did work well, I would have more options sooner. I would like to move out of the northeast and maybe do some traveling and explore some creative interests. Those things obviously wouldn’t be possible if I was working a regular 9 to 5 job or dead end job like I did all the time before I started doing eBay full time. I was always so tired then and still only had a two or three figure bank account pretty much all the time.
I operate in a really interesting niche because the modern trading cards are so expensive, especially unopened boxes, that I think a lot of people buying and selling cards are card rich and asset poor if you get what I mean. I would still put myself in that group as well even though I have more money in the bank than I’ve ever had before. I plan to really focusing on growing that bank account over the next year or two, and if it means that my eBay store ends up much smaller and more focused until I have a bigger place or am more settled down somewhere, I can live with that.
Wow, that’s a really interesting find. Wholesale rate on generic jerseys and autographs is $0.75 to $1.00, so like most thrift store stuff the prices are somewhat high, especially since those cards are too new to be vintage but too old to have much value compared to the newer, fancier sets. Cards with a low individual serial number, like xx/100 or lower, might still be valuable even for obscure players. There are still true collectors lurking around and for some of them have been chasing a specific (usually low printed) card of “their player” for years and years.
Surprised they wouldn’t get rid of the whole thing for $150 and even more surprised that something like that would end up in a thrift store in the first place.
