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These are the kinds of posts I love to read on here, something I wouldn’t know anything about at all but so unique and cool to see. Are any of your crate labels particularly valuable, or are they mostly consistent $5-$10 items to the right buyer?
I’d never heard of that thrift chain before, but turns out they have a few in my area.
I stopped by this thrift, 2nd Ave thrift stores, this week. No 5 foot baseball players panels, but a nice clean and organized thrift store with decent prices and (seemingly) happy employees. I would recommend. They have different color tags and run sales on certain days.
I had to look up the Charlie Harper game because of the comment by @ChristineR , and I also love his style. Board games are one area in thrifts that I always check, because I know certain contemporary and vintage games (and even their parts) can be worth a lot, but I have yet to find anything as memorable.
Also a big fan of Brother printers. My laser is still running strong after 5+ years. Great quality products.
One of the trading card sellers whose weekly auctions I browse had a listing for this framed Springsteen poster which showed up in my PO Box yesterday because surprise, surprise, I was the high bidder. Truly, you can’t even get something professionally framed for the high bid price. Based on sold listings, this poster would be an easy $50 to $100 profit even without the frame, but one of my closest friends is a die-hard Springsteen fan so I might “donate” it to his home office walls which I assume to be depressingly bare as he’s more of a cheapskate than a scavenger.
I know you started sending thousands? of cards to that consignment company.
I hit 12,000 items in my consignment port maybe a month ago. A lot of that was from sending them boxes almost every week earlier this year. My most recent submission, in September, was maybe 1500 cards, basically the majority of my purchases in July and August. It helps that some/most of my COMC cards get cross-posted to eBay, with a price increase that I don’t benefit from to cover COMC’s eBay fees. I get at least a few sales to my COMC account every day from random eBay buyers, occasionally 10+.
–How much are you averaging a week/month in sales there?
I know you love numbers so here are my consignment sales for the year. Remarkably consistent numbers once I got the hang of things. I am excited to see how high the numbers go over the next few months. COMC runs a Black Friday promo every year which sees a lot of buying and selling activity and I plan on running a strong sale. There is a lot of overpricing on the platform, and “75% off” sales which bring prices down to a more normal level. So someone like me who prices normally and then runs discounts does quite well.
COMC’s processing fees are high (50 cents up to $5 to add the card to my account, plus a small percentage when it sells) so I always try and keep a few hundred in my account to cover the next submission that’s in the processing queue. Because of that, it took me until around June to make a consistent profit. Much like how it goes building up an eBay store. But since mid-summer I’ve been able to request at least a $500 check every week with occasional $1000 checks, all on top of my regular eBay sales. It’s not what I envisioned a year ago when I started doing eBay full-time, but it’s basically my version of having an employee and it’s helped me a lot.
- January 2022: 388 items sold for $2546.70
- February 2022: 526 items for $4019.04
- March 2022: 596 items for $5683.09
- April 2022: 788 items for $7539.30
- May 2022: 870 items for $6949.67
- June 2022: 803 items for $6937.08
- July 2022: 661 items for $5477.18
- August 2022: 698 items for $6751.24
- September 2022: 641 items for $6475.94
- October 2022 (so far): 347 items for $3177.28
–Your time is spent looking for inventory, but how much do you list on eBay now that you have that consignment route?
I am still consistently selling 25-40 listings on eBay each week from BIN/best offer listings, and I list just enough to replace those sold listings. Usually I shoot for 2-3 items a dayand 10-15 if I really want to knock out a bunch of listings. I have templates for everything and it’s all price research and change a few things. I’m sure I will spend more time on new listings once the weather gets truly ugly. I’d like to clear out a few boxes worth of low-value items, probably by selling in bulk at a steep discount. But sometimes the extra space can be more valuable than maximizing profit.
I have become much more selective about what I list on ebay. I’ve been thinking a lot more about sell-through rate with my newly listed items. It’s more fun to list when all your new listings are ones which you think will sell quickly, or have a nice high price, or are unique and interesting items. I always had a hard time getting myself motivated to list $10 or $20 items which were also long-tail. Probably because I’ve never had a ton of inventory space and also like you, I worked a lot of $10 and under low-paying hard-work jobs. Those low dollar items bring me back to those long days and everything feels like a slog. So I don’t really list items like that anymore. Especially now that I can send them to consignment and have someone else handle all the “dirty work” and I just price everything.
–Can you see a time when all you do is have fun buying and sending it all to consignment? Or is eBay still a valuable use of your time?
I am sure there are trading card dealers who make their living just buying and selling on consignment because when I underprice a card on there, it sells in minutes and sometimes seconds. And my port is tiny compared to the biggest sellers. But the platform has a lot of flaws. For one thing, you don’t create the listing, the company (really their algorithm) creates it. All you do is price. So sometimes the title isn’t optimized to reach the perfect buyer. This creates opportunities to purchase on COMC, have the items shipped to me and then list on eBay with a better title. I get a nice box from them every few weeks. It’s a little extra work (more stuff to list) versus cashing a check but their cash out fee is 10% so it’s often worth it.
COMC only allows for single trading card listings. So no groups of cards, no sets, no sports-adjacent stuff like signed memorabilia. It’s a great platform for $1 to $20 sales and it’s interesting where they drew the line on what to sell and what to exclude. In a way, their rules for what they sell have helped me rethink what my eBay store could be.
For the last few years, my inventory has been 90% trading cards and 10% other stuff, mostly obscure music CDs and DVDs and books since that’s the other area I have some knowledge in. I’ve been buying up those items over the last year when I find them at local thrifts and library sales, and occasionally from the online auctions I browse, but I haven’t been in a huge rush to list them as my focus has been on building up my consignment port. There will be plenty of time this winter, and next year, as I continue to figure out the right balance for me between the different platforms and how I want to spend my time.
I would like to take at least a full month off eBay next year to travel and pursue some creative interests. I think the consignment sales would allow me the opportunity to do that without a lot of changes to my day to day life, and if I find a compelling reason, maybe I liquidate everything in my consignment port or eBay store. It’s not as if there won’t be more things to buy and sell, after all. It’s exciting to see the possibilities that selling online can create. It’s far beyond what I would have imagined 10 years ago when I started selling a few obscure CDs that I found for $5 or less at my local record store.
I hit 10,000 feedback in the middle of the night last week. I got a screenshot of my feedback page when it was at 9,999 but I fell asleep before it hit the big 10,000 and by the time I woke up, I was at 10,002. I sort of got nostalgic for the days where eBay would make a kitschy big deal out of little feedback numbers and other trivial occurrences.
But there is truly no better time to buy and sell online. My eBay inventory is one-third the size it was a year ago, but old and new things still sell every week. I have a lot of new inventory to get listed as the weather gets cold. Not quite 10,000 things, but we’ll get there eventually.
10/2/2022 – 10/8/2022
Total items in store: 1158 (down from 1164 last week)
Items sold: 32 (24 via best offer, 7 via seller initiated offer, 6 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $1803.36 (down 24% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1328.35 (down 15% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $56.35 (up 36% from one year ago)
Time spent searching through online auction listings for new trading cards inventory: 16 hours (up from 15 hours last week)
Highest price sold (net): $130.88 — Bryce Harper 2012 Topps Update gold sparkle shortprint rookie card
Lowest price sold (net): $7.85— Alec Bohm Topps gold rookie card ##/2021
Both of these cards were in the same $600 order. Both players on the Philadelphia Phillies and sold to a buyer in my local area. It’s funny to think about how much different this transaction would have been 10 or 20 years ago.
I found out while researching that some signed ones are worth hundreds. Fascinating.
Just be careful when you’re scavenging to avoid the evil norwegian trolls!
I’d be the first to say if eBay goofed up, but I have to admit this feels like a straight upgrade just on speed alone.
I agree. I’ve been surprised to see mostly negative feedback here and other forums. Now that the load time for item specifics has been fixed, the new listing tool is so much cleaner and faster.
One minor complaint: Item specifics being in a single column really makes the page look bloated. I almost never touch item specifics since 99% of my listings come from existing solds. Optionally hiding that section unless there’s some required field missing or going back to double columns would clean up the page a great deal.
I would love to see a consolidation of item specifics in the next seller’s update to only the required item specifics. There are some niches, like clothing or other hard goods, where I think item specifics are really helpful to narrow down search results. There are a lot of other niches like unique collectibles where I think most buyers will use the search bar to find what they want and do not use item specifics much, if at all. I used to fill out a number of recommended item specifics for every single listing, but I’ve stopped doing this over the last few months and it hasn’t affected my sales at all.
It was cold and wet in the Northeast this weekend, so I spent a lot of time on organization and thought a lot about how to best spend my time over the next few months. My consignment trading card sales have been very consistent over the last few months which has allowed me to keep feeding the pipeline both for eBay and my consignment port. I have a huge number of items to list for eBay and it’s a great mix of high quality (meaning high list prices) and very inexpensive (so even a $15 sale will be a nice profit).
It will be exciting to see how many of these items I can get listed over the next few months and how quickly these listings will sell. I built my store inventory like most of you, on long-tail low cost and low priced items, and I have a soft spot for these types of listings especially when I can see the value in things when others don’t. But it’s fun to see items sell within a few days or weeks, too.
9/25/2022 – 10/1/2022
Total items in store: 1164 (up from 1023 last week)
Items sold: 32 (18 via best offer, 7 via seller initiated offer, 8 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $2005.73 (down 10% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1430.44 (down 8% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $62.68 (up 60% from one year ago)
Time spent searching through online auction listings for new trading cards inventory: 15 hours (up from 12 hours last week)
Highest price sold (net): $260.21 — Josh Hart 2017-18 Panini Donruss Optic Rookie Kings black prizm 1/1
Lowest price sold (net): $14.53— Gino Odjick Pinnacle Tough Times autograph ##/299
I have noticed that the new listing tool has been running a lot faster the last few days. No huge lags when you change an item specific. If those problems are truly fixed, that’s an exciting development.
I had about 575 auctions ending last Sunday and Monday, so most of my numbers from this week are from those sales. I added best offer to all of my auctions and sold a few that way, so it was about 100 sales total from the auctions. This seems to be pretty common with auctions, at least in my experience — if you set your minimum bid to the lowest price you’d accept, then you’ll do real well to you sell more than 20% of your auctions. It’s simply a numbers game about who’s looking for auctions that week. I wouldn’t recommend setting your minimum bid to $0.99 or whatever eBay recommends. You’re more likely to get less bidding activity than you expect rather than a bidding war.
If I wasn’t confident about that before running these auctions, I am now that I’ve started relisting the unsold auctions. Already a few have sold for higher than the minimum bid price in last week’s auctions. It’s a reminder to know what your items are worth and, even when things are slow, be patient. Send offers to watchers, run auctions or markdown sales if you want. But sometimes your buyer won’t find your item until next week or next month because they’re not looking for it yet.
9/18/2022 – 9/24/2022
Total items in store: 1023 (down from 1363 last week)
Items sold: 92 (18 via best offer, 0 via seller initiated offer, 10 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $2946.27 (down 8% from one year ago, $2018.57 from auctions and $927.70 from fixed price)
Net sales: $1945.12 (down 17% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $32.02 (down 36% from one year ago)
Time spent searching through online auction listings for new trading cards inventory: 12 hours (up from 5 hours last week)
Highest price sold (net): $126.76 — Tony Conigliaro 2010 Historic Autographs In memory cut autograph
Conigliaro was a Boston Red Sox outfielder in the 1960s, and Massachusetts native, and both his baseball career and life were cut tragically short by health problems. I can see why someone would spend $100 to add one of his autographs to their collection. I wonder what the value of something like this will be in 20 or 40 years as personal connections to these players are basically gone. Of course, who knows where technology will be in that time, and how it might allow us to “reanimate” the dead!
Lowest price sold (net): $7.51— Austin Listi autograph game-used batting gloves
The lowest minimum bid I set on my auctions was $10, so I had a lot of sales which were $10 plus shipping — 23 of them to be exact. I wonder how many more of these $10 minimum bid items would have sold if the opening bid was $5. I like to experiment, but that’s probably too far even for me. It takes a lot of $5 sales to add up to any real kind of money.
Here is a link to the Auction Professor article if anyone is curious:
How to Offset Declining Sales on eBay with a Sell Similar Strategy
I experimented with end and sell similar a few times last year, here is my most recent post on it if anyone wants some hard numbers.
My theory, based in my own experiments with the strategy, is that a subset of eBay users only, or mostly, check newly listed items in their searches and saved searches. So end and sell similar would be the best way to get these potential buyers to interact with your listing.
I have only every tried end and sell similar once every few months, but it might be worth trying once a month during the upcoming busy season. The new bulk editor makes the whole process very quick. End 200 items at a time, go into unsold listings, sell similar with all 200, and repeat as many times as necessary. I like to sort by price so I can change prices in bulk if I want to.
I won a few really unique items this week from one of the eBay seller whose auctions I check every week. Usually most of the sellers I buy from focus on trading card listings, but they are consignment sellers so they will sell whatever their customers send them. Sometimes that includes some unique items.
First was this LeBron James Nike recruitment book. I won the auction at $52, so it wasn’t cheap, but this seems to be a really unique item with the potential to go for big bucks to the right collector. I’m not in a huge rush to get it listed but I’m excited to have it.
Second was this signed Portland Winterhawks minor league hockey jersey for a total of about $15 including the shipping. I buy a lot of items from the same sellers every week, and combine shipping over the whole week, usually ending up paying the rate of a large flat rate box. I don’t deal in jerseys much, but there were a few players signatures that I recognized, and the final hammer price was much lower than my max bid.
Finally, this Emmitt Smith glass plaque with a piece of his game worn shoes in it for $11.01. The high shipping rate on the auction ($25) scared off a lot of bidders, plus this Absolute Glass set was a very niche “trading card” set which will probably be longtail even though Emmitt Smith was one of the best running backs of all-time. There is a similar Emmitt plaque from this set listed at $90 and that’s about where I will price this one when I get it listed.
but at 50 cents to $1 a book it was a no brainer even if I just re-read them myself. I figure $300-400 profit with no research at all and should have a quick STR.
This is the price range where I almost always pull the trigger with no research and figure it all out later. But the key is to get this kind of stuff listed at a price where it will sell, hopefully quickly, because there are always more 50 cents to $1 items out there.
This was an unusual lot as the seller seemed to have been involved with a few small labels and had a lot of obscure progressive rock, jazz and world music.
What an incredible score! I’ve found a lot of CD buyers are overseas, and since CDs are so light and your COGS is so low, I’d recommend turning off global shipping for these listings. When I was more focused on CD selling, I would get buyers from Europe, Asia and Australia all the time. They are thrilled to find a seller who ships directly to them (instead of having to pay extra for global shipping) and often pay full price plus I had a few regular buyers who would purchase multiples in one order. If you sell anything worth insuring, ShipCover is great about insuring overseas packages as well.
I’m finding more and more that people are pulling the best stuff to sell on the internet and just trying to dump their big furniture and worthless junk at yard sales. The best sale out of a dozen or so was one where the family was selling donated items to raise money for some sort of church mission. They had no emotional or monetary connection to the items so they were willing to sell for what used to be normal yard sale prices.
I’ve found this to be the case as well. When you find sales from an organization that’s large enough to require a number of volunteers to set up and run, like a library sale or church/temple/Elks lodge rummage sale, they are operating on volume sales and usually don’t nickel and dime every item like many chain thrift stores (and even some independent ones) do. There may be more competition but there are more gems to find, and one person with an irrational idea about what things are “worth” doesn’t influence pricing quite so much.
But there are still a few people in my area who I see driving around every trash day loading up the flatbed of their pickup with whatever they can find at the curb. So that type of scavenger is still out there. I would bet there are a few scavengers in my area who mostly, or exclusively, do yard sales and thrift stores, too. It seems like a real grind to me where you always have to be early or you miss the best stuff, but maybe that works for some people.
