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Do the dealers mind if you comp while going through their bargain bins?
Not at all and it works both ways, buyers and sellers both look at comps. Less organized dealers don’t price all their cards and the worst of them will look up comps (and quote eBay prices) when you bring them a pile to buy. I usually skip those tables and look for boxes which are already priced.
It’s funny, when I buy from online auctions I have Terapeak open the whole time and I am constantly comparing solds. I have a good idea what most individual cards are worth but doing the research offers a much clearer idea of value. But when I am scavenging at a card show or, more often, a library sale, I rarely look anything up. When items cost $5 or less, I always lean towards buy it and worst case, I will donate it down the line.
I did break this pattern last week at a library sale where there was a long line at the checkout. I found a quiet corner to organize my finds, looked at solds for just about every item and put a number of items back without buying them. It is funny how things can appear rare and unusual, or old and interesting, and instead they’re mass produced junk.
I suppose some places where we scavenge can get fickle about scanning, but I think by now most of them know that’s how they make their money.
A couple months ago I was at an industry expo in Columbus and there was a comic shop in the comic shop in the convention center. They had large bargain bins of graphic novels and I so badly wanted to scan a bunch of stuff.
I have a few graphic novels and comic books in my to be listed
pileboxes of books. Do you bag and board every individual comic that you sell, or will I be fine with bubble wrap and cardboard? The most valuable ones I have are hardcovers, but there were definitely a few thin magazine-style books as well.I know big crowds are weird right now, but I think it’ll be fun hanging out with your people. We still wear masks in big groups.
Yeah me too. My local post office still has a sign on the door to recommend that you wear your mask so its been easy to keep up with. When I’m not selling on eBay, I really enjoy live music (one big reason I still live in the high COL northeast) and I’ve found that I like wearing a mask at concerts. I can sing as loud and off-key as I want.
I am not a real social guy as far as the card community goes, but I have been monitoring social media and message boards a little bit over the last few weeks to get a feel for everything. There will be a lot of high rollers who will buy, sell and trade thousands in cards each and every day. But there will be plenty of sellers with scavengers type of boxes — all cards $1.00 each, even as low as $0.10 each. I enjoy that kind of dig so I assume that’s where I’ll spend a lot of my time. I buy enough inventory online that I don’t really need to come home with anything for the trip to be worth it, but it will be interesting to see how the deals and steals compare to searching through auction listings.
This is the week of the National Sports Collectors Convention in Atlantic City, which is about an hour’s train ride away. I am a small fish in the huge pond of the trading card world, so I won’t be selling. Dealer booths cost $2,500 and up for the weekend. I have a nice sized inventory for online sales, but it’s nothing compared to the scope of sellers who work these shows.
I have attended a few smaller shows, so I have a good idea what to expect at this show, but the scope of the National is just gigantic. There will be thousands of sellers with probably millions of cards for sale, from $0.10 junk that no one wants to expensive $10,000 and up cards and everything in between. All the five day passes sold out weeks ago, so the show will be quite the spectacle.
I don’t love big crowds, but I am going to push through my anxiety and enjoy the show for as many days as I can manage. I’m confident there will be plenty of great buying opportunities and the consignment company I use offered a 30% discount on their fees if you drop off at the show.
My consignment sales have reached the point where I have been able to cash out $500 each week for the last 6 weeks, so now is the right time to add to that pipeline and see how much more it can grow as we approach the holiday season. I removed 150 listings from my eBay store last night and will continue to pull all week. I’ve built up a nice backlog of items to build my eBay inventory back up, and it will be rewarding to work slow and steady on getting all of it listed.
I have had this plan in my head for a few months, and it’s exciting that it’s finally time to see how it goes. Change can be scary, but its also a lot of fun. I think its best to experiment with change when sales are decent than wait too long and change out of desperation.
7/17/2022 – 7/23/2022
Total items in store: 1799 (down from 1968 last week)
Items sold: 56 (43 via best offer, 5 via seller initiated offer, 26 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $2687.30 (down 12% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1902.15 (down 8% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $47.99 (up 26% from one year ago)
Time spent searching through online auction listings for new trading cards inventory: 15 hours (same as last week)
Highest price sold (net): $145.54 — Jadon Sancho Panini Obsidian Tmall red #01/22 BGS 9.5 gem mint
Lowest price sold (net): $14.66 — Nomar Mazara Onyx authenticated game-used batting gloves
There are a few pieces of ephemera listed on eBay from a Jno McClelland & Co out of Houston TX example, no address though
Also found a thread on justanswer.com (LOL) where someone was trying to price a set of antique plates made for Jno McClelland & Co. Google image search brought up one photo which shows a maker’s stamp with an address in the 400 block of Fannin St in Houston TX. There were other photos posted but the links are all dead. Maybe someone else can retrieve them. But at least you know the building was probably in Houston.
I have never sold using a variation listing but they are very popular in the trading cards niche. Especially among sellers who run low cost listings, every card from a particular set for example. What a lot of them do is put “you pick” or “pick from list” or “choose from list” in the title. example
I am sure you’re covered with eBay either way (as you should be), but this seems like an easy fix to prevent this problem from happening again.
This recent heat wave has really been something else. I haven’t been feeling motivated to create new listings, so I’ve focused most of my eBay selling energy on ending my oldest listings, repricing them and selling similar. This way, my store has still had “new” listings going up every day. Any initial pain that I might feel from dropping an item’s price from $150 to $100 dissipates once I get that $75 offer and the buyer pays.
Maybe simply lowering the prices would have also led to a sale. I’m not sure. But this has worked, so I’m going to try it again in the future. If my last few strong weeks of sales are an indication, this is a strategy worth considering. Especially on unique items older than six months. I think relisting or selling similar on those rare items every so often is important to give buyers with newly saved searches a chance to find your listings.
7/10/2022 – 7/16/2022
Total items in store: 1968 (down from 2020 last week)
Items sold: 40 (32 via best offer, 4 via seller initiated offer, 22 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $2850.81 (up 12% from one year ago)
Net sales: $2070.49 (up 17% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $64.79 (up 50% from one year ago)
Time spent searching through online auction listings for new trading cards inventory: 15 hours (down from 17 hours last week)
Highest price sold (net): $165.92 — Obo Okoronkwo set of 4 autograph printing plates
Lowest price sold (net): $11.14 — Taylor Lewan Panini Top 100 Players autograph
I have used coupons pretty regularly for the last year, both public and private. Like most of eBay’s new seller tools, they are not a guaranteed sale and shouldn’t be looked at like they are, but they can often offer a boost.
I print a packing slip with every order which includes a 20% coupon with the QR code. This leads to a sale very rarely. Maybe 1 in 100 or less. I don’t think most buyers look at the packing slip. But it helps keep me organized when I am shipping, so I will keep using it.
I have had a little more success sending the coupon directly to buyers using the dropdown menu all the way on the right-hand side in My Orders. This was particularly beneficial when eBay would offer occasional coupons and eBay bucks promos but, sadly, those have become almost non-existent. Maybe we will see them again in Q4.
My total sales this year from the 20% coupon, according to eBay’s numbers, are $777. So a little over $100 a month, and maybe some of those sales would have happened anyway. But I also think the “real” sales are slightly higher. I’m not very confident in how eBay tracks promotion sales numbers. I’ve noticed in the past that my sales numbers for markdown sales were far below what actually sold. Likely because best offers aren’t included in those numbers. But I think they should be. Related to that, I had a few times where a buyer used a 20% coupon on one item and then bought a few others using best offer. Technically, only the one item counts as a coupon sale, but I think it’s the coupon which really drives those sales.
Recently, I created a public coupon for 10% off and ran it from June 21st through the July 4th weekend. My total sales with that coupon were almost $500, or about $250 each week. This total doesn’t include best offer sales which were still the majority of my sales, and eBay’s coupons don’t stack with best offers which is frustrating. But I’m sure the 10% off enticed a few buyers to click the buy it now button. Next time I do a public coupon (probably around a holiday), I will probably go to 15% and see how it goes. I might increase my private coupon to 25% in Q4 depending on how sales are going.
A few other tips I can offer about the coupons:
1. Change the settings so buyers can use your coupon unlimited times. The buyers who use coupons really like them, and I’ve had a few buyers who have bought from me three or four times with the coupon.
2. Push the expiration date far out in the future. The coupons I send to buyers have an expiration date of December 31st. Maybe that’s a bit far, but I prefer to set it and forget it with these kinds of things.
3. Be confident about your discount and give it a chance to work. A few days or even a week won’t provide a good measure of how well your coupon is working. I also come across listings all the time with really small discounts like 5% or 7%. I know some sellers work on really small margins, but I would think (hope) that for most of us posting here, we could go down from our buy it now price by 15% or even 30% and still make a nice profit.
Coupons are not a perfect tool, but they are so easy to set up and tweak that I think any seller reading this should try them and see how they work for their store.
I am referring to the annual, or semiannual, sales that most libraries have. At least the libraries in NJ and PA. I use Booksalefinder to find the sales in my area. Small sales are often one day and one room of the library and the really large sales have tens of thousands of books meticulously organized into dozens of subcategories and often take a place in a larger building like a church or YMCA.
I try and go on the first day when the sale opens. Some sales can be a bit of a dogfight with the Amazon scanner people, but in general I am always able to find items that either don’t have a barcode or the scanner people don’t see the value in the item. There are always a lot of ex-library books, which are usually not worth much, but most of these sales function on donations from the community sorted by volunteers.
Prices are usually right in line with what we like to pay as scavengers, $2 or less for most items. I prefer the large sales to maximize my chances of finding stuff that I like, but the smaller sales can have plenty of gems, too.
Every so often, I have also found good deals on the shelves or carts that most libraries have. This perfume book that I found a few years ago was probably my best find from the carts.
I’m sure that these sales are not as plentiful everywhere but in my area, library sales are a real goldmine.
One of my favorite library sales (in fact I’ll be attending this week) has a cart with specialty priced items where they say eBay $25 buy for $10, or alibris $50 buy for $25. It’s just one cart in a room full of items, it’s usually the same items on the cart and I’ve yet to figure out how the powers that be determine what goes on the cart. I guess it’s like the glass case at the Goodwill, but it is so arbitrary.
I’ve found amazing specialty books, art books, media items, vintage items, you name it in other parts of the room at normal prices. I imagine they have one or two volunteers who said to the right person in charge “Hey some books sell online for lots of money” and they spend a few hours a week “helping” by pricing items for their cart. I guess everyone needs a purpose, but it is so strange how organizations make things more complicated for no real benefit except to massage a few people’s egos. You’re selling donated items curated by volunteers at a huge volume, just price the stuff so lots of buyers open their wallets, and there’s the profits you need until the next sale. I know there’s some overhead involved even for a library (and more for a thrift store) but no amount of looking up “values’ on eBay or alibris really helps a bottom line unless you have a real, true expert in a certain niche.
Everything in your post is so spot on. Especially the last paragraph about how popular thrifting has become, and how bad local thrifts can be good for eBay sellers like us. It definitely helps that eBay and etsy and poshmark are all accessible with a few taps on a phone screen. It wasn’t that long ago that eBay was optimizing our listings for mobile, after all! But now it’s a breeze for buyers to find those listings in the app, and also easy for thrift store management to delude themselves into the value of items without understanding why things sell for more on eBay or why an active listing says nothing about an item’s relative worth.
It’s great to see you here again. It’s also great to hear that you’re recognizing your own physical limits. I cut down on my store size as well over the last six months from a high of about 3500 listings to my current level of about 2000. I shifted a good chunk of my inventory, as well as lots of unlisted inventory, to sell on consignment. With my eBay store, I now focus on higher dollar items, quick sellers and very low COGS items.
My sales on eBay are down 15 to 20 percent from last year, but my consignment sales have more than made up the gap. It was scary to shift to a different platform besides eBay, and to give up some control in how I list, and not know for sure that any of it would work out. But now that I’ve made these changes, I can only wonder why I didn’t do this a few years ago.
It’s important to appreciate the flexibility that selling on eBay gives all of us, but also key to acknowledge that continuing to feed the pipeline can become tedious and exhausting. I often think about this when coming across (most times indirectly) the “hustle and grind” mentality that is prevalent in flipping nowadays with the rise of YouTube and content creation. Once you have systems in place to buy, list, organize and ship, selling on eBay is “easy” money, but building those systems and takes a lot of time, energy and a willingness to experiment or change when things become stale or no longer work as well within eBay’s framework. It’s so good to recognize that sometimes the best solution for any of us is to take a step back, put away the electronics and focus on our own mental health.
You had a cool week of sales. Really interesting Americana and ephemera items. Also, as @Jay said, a good reminder that paying a little extra to boost an item’s value can pay off.
Won a few auction lots via Maxsold at two different auctions. As usual most lots went for IMO outrageous amounts. I don’t usually buy CD lots but bought a lot of about 300 because there were some fairly rare CDs that should sell well.
I have looked at Maxsold auctions in my area a bunch of times (even signed up for the emails) but have never found anything interesting in my area. I don’t really check them frequently enough to say for sure, though.
I’m sitting (not literally) on a small mountain of CDs from local library sales so I’d love to know more about what you found in the pictures which made you a buyer. I’ve tried many times to be the kind of scavenger who buys large lots and picks out one or two gems, but I have learned by now that I am much more comfortable buying large quantities of individual listings at a low price, recognizing their value and selling for higher. I did have a rare CD sale last week, a $65 disc of an experimental French ensemble, so make sure to add Urban Sax (especially live albums) to your mental pile of valuable stuff.
Your trip sounds amazing. If you check the Too Good To Go subreddit, you can see some of the hauls from other cities. It appears that the app is pretty popular in California, so you should be able to find some nice deals using the app in San Francisco.
I don’t know that I’m saving that much money, and there is only three places within reasonable driving distance, but I’m sure having fun doing it.
I have a little more variety in what is available on TGTG being so close to Philly, and the savings start to add up once you find the good places and get used to their posting schedules. Last week, got a $4.99 dinner from an Asian place, and there was easily enough rice, chicken, seaweed salad and dumplings for two people. A bakery gave a nice sized quiche and a peach cobbler in a $3.99 bag. I don’t get takeout a lot, but when I do it’s always something I can’t cook myself, and it’s been nice to get a taste of that at scavenger prices.
Wow, that Rollin Karg piece is really beautiful! I love the color and design on it. It took me a few scrolls through your pictures to see the date and signature, which was helpful since I never really know where to begin with identifying art. Amazing that a piece like that would end up in a Goodwill!
My average sales price was unusually high this week, which I think was in part due to ending and repricing a lot of listings over the last few weeks. The National Sports Card Show is coming up later this month, so maybe there are more trading card buyers right now as well. Whatever the reason, this was a really nice week of sales for summer and probably the best week I’ve had in a month or two.
My favorite sale, by far, was a book which I picked up a few years ago at a local library sale. There was a whole stack of thick Aegean archaeology books by a local publisher, all published within the last 10-12 years. I figured there are enough archaeology departments out there that some graduate student or professor would want to add these to their library but look on eBay instead of spending $80 buying it from the publisher. So I put them all up for $50 each and…nothing. No offers, no messages, nothing. I had thought about donating these books back to the library a bunch of times since they are big and heavy, and shelf space is always at a premium for me.
But after I did my end, reprice and sell similar last week, this book with a lot of words I can’t pronounce in its title sold for $40. Even after expensive priority shipping, I’ve made a profit on all those heavy archaeology books — and got a little reminder that sometimes the most important part of scavenging is waiting for the right buyer to come along.
7/3/2022 – 7/9/2022
Total items in store: 2020 (down from 2043 last week)
Items sold: 40 (32 via best offer, 3 via seller initiated offer, 23 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $2950.57 (up 25% from one year ago)
Net sales: $2007.98 (up 25% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $73.76 (up 56% from one year ago)
Time spent searching through online auction listings for new trading cards inventory: 17 hours (up from 14 hours last week)
Highest price sold (net): $154.78 — Giancarlo Stanton 2010 Bowman 1/1 cyan printing plate rookie card
I had two of the Bowman rookie printing plates from Giancarlo Stanton (formerly known as Mike Stanton) sold one of these last week and then the other one this week for a few bucks more. The Yankees are having an all-time great season, so maybe Stanton cards will rise if they make their first World Series in quite a while, but I don’t know enough to predict or prognosticate, and I don’t really want to. I like to make a sale and move on.
Lowest price sold (net): $11.55 — Cooper Kupp and Darrell Henderson National Treasures jersey card ##/99
The Rams won the Super Bowl earlier this year, and as they were making their run, I went through my many boxes of unlisted cards in an attempt to list anything and everything Rams that might net me $10 or more. Cooper Kupp is their top wide receiver, and had an unexpected historic season last year. So that’s where the value in this plain jersey card comes from.
I have thought often about experimenting with auctions for these types of trading cards where my cost is minimal and their value to a prospective buyer is time-sensitive. Maybe that’s something I will try later this year as I continue to think about the best ways to spend my time and energy.
