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You found it already, but here is the correct link — for some reason I can’t edit my original post. If you used the same Terapeak search I did, then you’ll also see the original listing I purchased from back in October for $76. Funny how a few months can change the “value” so significantly.
Terapeak’s sold price of $210 is the correct one. I was running a markdown sale when the card sold, so the listing was discounted from $299 to $239, which must be why that shows up as the sold price when you click through.
Because I accepted an offer, this sale is not included in my promotion sales numbers for that particular markdown sale. I guess I can understand why, but this sale probably doesn’t happen without the markdown and it would be nice if the markdown numbers actually reflected that.
There are a couple different ways to create the kind of discount @retro-treasures-wv described. Probably the easiest is if you go into promotions manager and click on the blue dropdown and click on volume pricing, where you can set up the tiered discount to operate across either 500 items you select or by including/excluding certain categories using rules.
You can also do the same thing by creating a coupon (also through promotions manager) and set it to public. There are a bunch of different ways to discount using the coupon, like xx% off or $xx off over $50, but you can also set it up to buy 1, get 1 xx% off.
I’m sure that coupons work better with some items than others, and for some buyers and not others. I’m a big fan of the feature and I send every single buyer a 20% off coupon (you can just add it to the packing slip, it prints as a QR code) and every few months I’ll create a public coupon. I think it works well for a lot of buyers where price is the factor in them purchasing and also for items which receive a lot of watchers or offers.
CDs are one of the areas of scavenging that I know really well. I started my scavenging journey by selling the undervalued CDs I would find at the Princeton Record Exchange in Princeton, NJ, which is one of the best independent record stores in the country. I grew up in that area and I live pretty far away now, but still make the trip a few times a year for the nostalgia and to sell off any extra stuff I’ve accumulated since my last trip. They take everything you sell them which is a nice contrast to a lot of record stores which have less space and are much more selective about what they buy. I’m overdue to make another trip there soon, it’s been a few years primarily because of COVID.
I still like to buy and sell CDs when I can, but I’ve become more selective about what I list now. I really try and focus on CDs and box sets which have a track record of selling on eBay for $20 or higher in the last year. Discogs has really good historical sales data for CDs and LPs which is helpful. I suppose this is what bar code scanning does, but I’m stubborn and stuck in my ways and don’t want to scan things!
I’m not sure how expensive it is to sell on Discogs, but it might be worth looking into since I know you have a lot of media items and you don’t need to upload pictures for each listing. You just provide an estimated condition.
I can see how the different promotions that eBay now offers could encourage buyers to buy multiple CDs from your store. I had a few different regular buyers when I sold CDs and DVDs who would always buy four, five or more CDs and DVDs at a time. One was in Australia. Seeing those orders was always really exciting. But the best promotion for most CDs is usually patience — they are such long-tail items, and sometimes you’re better off waiting a year (or more) for the right buyer to come along than cutting the price 50% (or more) to get a sale. Though with the $10 and under items, I’m sure that saving a few bucks is what convinces buyers to make the purchase.
I had a very satisfying scavenging week. Nice weather, a postal holiday and a good week of sales are a great combination.
I took one day this week and spent a good chunk of it scavenging the same way that I started, by hunting for the gems at library sales and thrift stores. I have really enjoyed these trips even though they are not as profitable as spending a few hours searching eBay auctions for this week’s batch of trading card purchases. The library sale I went to this past Saturday had a lot of buyers with Amazon scanners. They are relentlessly fast. But I still filled two large boxes worth of books and media that their scanners didn’t see the value in. It felt very rewarding to find those items. Buying the cards that make up most of my inventory is a similar process, but sometimes it’s nice to go out in the world and get your hands dirty.
This has happened every time I’ve gone out to scavenge these last four weeks. I don’t remember finding this much good stuff when I made these trips pre-COVID. Maybe I wasn’t looking in the right places. I am also much more confident in the kinds of items I’m looking for now.
Regardless of why, I am accumulating a nice backlog of stuff to list for when the weather gets colder. The cards are still the priority for me and as profitable as ever, at least the types that I’m selling, and my consignment sales are also going very well. But it never hurts to diversify or have a backup plan. Especially when buy-in costs are $2 or less per item. Worst case, the local library will get a nice donation from me this time next year.
5/29/2022 – 6/4/2022
Total items in store: 2118 (down from 2152 last week)
Items sold: 55 (38 via best offer, 3 via seller initiated offer, 18 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $3672.66 (up 31% from one year ago)
Net sales: $2709.39 (up 40% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $66.78 (up 48% from one year ago)
Time spent searching through online auction listings for new trading cards inventory: 13.5 hours (down from 15 hours last week)
Highest price sold (net): $169.00 — Jameson Taillon 1/1 superfractor rookie card BGS 9.5
This card sold during the Yankees game on Friday while Taillon was pitching a no-hit game. He’s apparently been pitching amazing all season, and a big part of why the Yankees are having their best season in years. So maybe I should have waited until the world series to sell this card. But I’d rather just sell now. Who knows what the future will bring. I purchased the card last October for about $75. That’s about my average buy-in for these cards which sell for $200 and up. This card has a gem mint grade, but it’s really the 1/1 serial number and type of insert design (superfractor) which make it valuable to collectors.
The superfractor is probably the most popular non-autographed insert manufactured today and the prices for the best players reach pretty astronomical numbers. Here’s an article from 2019 about the sale of the top superfractor from that year, Wander Franco. The autographed superfractor sold for over $60,000 and the non-autographed superfractor for $10,000. It’s just a few years later but I’m sure those cards would sell for even higher prices now. Franco is already one of the best players in baseball at just 21 years old.
I had a much larger sale than this (in terms of total $$) with a buyer who purchased 20 (!!!) basketball cards from me 2 and 3 at a time Saturday and Sunday. Mostly autographs with low serial numbers with a variety of all the top young basketball players. It was the one time I wished I had eBay notifications turned on because I would have been hearing cha-ching all day long on Saturday. I just shipped that package out today and will be so relieved when it’s marked as delivered.
Lowest price sold (net): $9.54 — Art Howe 2004 buyback autograph /57
This card is an example of the creative way that some companies give new life to all the worthless 80s and 90s cards — have the player sign some of those old cards and insert them into new packs and sets. Probably more cost-effective than manufacturing new sets and inserts, too. It’s rare you see the most famous star players sign these buyback cards, since they don’t sign as much and their autographs are always held back for the expensive sets. So these types of cards are rarely worth much. But I like buying them for a few bucks each and selling them for $10 to $20.
I had a rare sale last week of a non trading cards item, a 3 disc dvd set about seashells for $40 which I bought a few years ago for about $1. That inspired me to take a trip to the same thrift store to see if they had any more cool stuff. No seashell DVDs but I came home with a box full of old books and weird DVDs and a new pair of jeans for less than $30 total. I’m sure there were more gems in this thrift store, but I focused on what I know best besides cards. These will be great items to list when the weather gets colder and I’m spending more time inside, or if I wake up one day and lose interest in selling cards. I don’t expect that to happen, but it never hurts to have a backup plan.
I couldn’t imagine paying the bills scavenging items like this, especially in New Jersey, and I’m envious of those of you who make it work.
5/22/2022 – 5/28/2022
Total items in store: 2152 (up from 2138)
Items sold: 45 (32 via best offer, 4 via seller initiated offer, 15 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $2437.96 (up 4% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1774.44 (up 6% from one year ago)
Quantity sold: 45 (down 11% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $54.18 (up 17% from one year ago)
Time spent searching through online auction listings for new inventory: 15 hours
Jay asked me about this last week, and I thought it would be useful to start tracking my time. This is my time spent scavenging since it’s how I acquire almost all of my inventory. Auctions are really prevalent in the trading cards world, since so many new sets come out every year (50+ for each sport), and my inventory is built from buying at auction from large sellers who sell at volume and reselling at BIN/best offer. This is a good time to buy since I think a lot of people’s hobby money is less than usual with the price of essentials so high.
I was really thorough about looking through every seller and possible search last week to get a good baseline for a maximum amount of time. I noticed that I rarely spend more than an hour consecutive looking through auction listings. But on busier days (Sunday/Monday/Tuesday), I can easily spend an hour during the day and an hour or more at night just looking through one or two sellers. Some of these sellers have 20,000 or more auctions or more every week, and checking these auctions thoroughly has allowed me to build a much larger inventory with more high quality items.
I would love to cut this time down to less than 10 hours per week, without missing out on the bargains that are the foundation of my inventory, and I hope tracking the time will allow me to accomplish that.
Highest price sold (net): $166.12 — Cam Reddish 2019 Panini The National VIP diamond relic card #3/3
This card was given out to the big spenders at the National card show, and you can see from the picture how intricate expensive modern cards can get. This one is held in a thick case and has a little chip of diamond embedded in the card. Prices for these types of cards vary a lot more than most modern cards, since they’re not part of a traditional set and aren’t heavily collected like autographed cards or specific rookie insert sets. It does have a nice low serial number and the card is quite striking visually. Plus these types of cards tend to only get produced for the top players and rookies.
Like (almost) every other card I sell, I bought this card at auction ($40 and change) and sold it best offer. It took a sale, a price cut and just over a year before it sold. I don’t think I would pay quite that much for this type of card today. But it was a nice $200 sale!
Lowest price sold (net): minus $5.80 — Manny Margot Topps Glove Works red autograph #/10
The buyer of this card opened a case yesterday claiming the item was not as described. The flaws they pointed out in their six pictures from different angles are noted in my scans and description, and the approximate condition in my title (NM) is roughly what grade the card would receive (an 8) if it were professionally graded. Maybe a 7 since grading is subjective, but I certainly wasn’t trying to hide the flaws in the card.
You might think this kind of thing happens to me all the time, collectors being picky and all, but this is just the second INAD case this year. It’s easy to handle when it’s a sale less than $20 like this one — refund in full and tell the buyer just keep it. I’m out five bucks and some change, but that’s a small price to pay to move on with my day.
Whats weird is we’ve received very few if no offers the past month. Not even low offers. Usually we’re getting at least one offer a day.
You might try end and sell similar on some of your oldest listings, especially those without watchers. The bulk editor makes it a real breeze to do, 200 listings at a time in a few minutes. Sell similar gives the listing a new item number and a notification for buyers who run saved searches. End and relist might do the same thing, not sure. But I’ve noticed when I do end and sell similar (usually 1000 listings at a time) that I receive a brief boost in offers, both on old and new listings. Here is a thread I created the last time that I did an end and sell similar which goes into more detail on my process and the results.
a vintage surfing poster for $200
I am not a surfer, but I love this poster. I would love to know more about how you found the poster and identified it.
I’ve been running 30% off promotion on all items in my store that are over 2 years old for about 10 days (approx. 400 items). Haven’t seen much action from it, mainly selling items that are marked down below $15 with the discount.
My experience with markdown sales is that it has a similar effect to tools like send offers with watchers — sometimes you’ll get a few sales from it, and maybe those sales would have happened without the sale price, but a sale’s a sale. I’ve also noticed that the markdowns have a stronger effect on lower dollar items where I think buyers are more inclined to be swayed by a $5 difference in price. I also use markdown sales to reevaluate price and offer settings, especially on older listings.
I have had moderate success sending offers to watchers on markdown items — something like 1 in 5 buyers accept versus 1 in 10 (or less) when sending offers to watchers normally. Typically I will send an offer 10% off from the marked down price.
Jay and others, here is a pretty good article which explains the appeal of NFTs in a little more detail. They are pretty popular in the trading cards world, and I was stumped by their popularity for quite a while. But I understand their appeal a little better now, even though I have no interest in NFTs.
https://hbr.org/2021/11/how-nfts-create-value
The more “legit” NFTs offer perks along with the ownership of a specific NFT. Access to certain events or groups or even tickets. Kind of like rewards for using a specific credit card. It’s easy to add these things since NFT ownership is all blockchain.
Here is an article with some more details about Too Good to Go. Also some criticisms which make important points about food insecure populations, but I don’t think that’s the point of the app. I will have to give the app a try the next time I’m in Philly without specific plans to eat somewhere and report back.
One of my favorite things about living near a city is the wide variety of good food available. Nothing better than finding a good hole in the wall place to have a meal…especially when I check eBay later and see that my sales paid for the meal. I had a night like that last week. Such a great feeling.
5/15/2022 – 5/21/2022
Total items in store: 2138 (down from 2144)
Items sold: 53 (39 via best offer, 3 via seller initiated offer, 26 via promoted listings)
Gross sales: $2750.96 (down 3% from one year ago)
Net sales: $2009.30 (down 1% from one year ago)
Quantity sold: 53 (up 8% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $51.90 (down 10% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $469.64 — over a dozen cards to the same buyer, here are the high price and low price cards
Every week, I’ll get a buyer who purchases 2 or 3 cards, but I haven’t had a buyer grab a big pile of cards from my store like this in at least a few months. This buyer focused on football cards of current players with an individual low serial number and unique jersey piece and often an autograph. They purchased three or four cards of players from one team (the Colts, who are expected to do well next season), but overall it was a wide variety of players and sets. Some of these cards I’d had listed for a few weeks or months and others for longer. Some were promoted listings or on sale, and others weren’t.
If you’re into cards, I see the logic behind spending a few hundred dollars on unique individual cards instead of buying one or two boxes with no guarantee of what you’ll get. This is basically how I acquire my inventory, though I use auctions to buy and BIN/BO to sell. Since this buyer purchased rare, high quality cards, all they need is one or two of the players to play well next season (or beyond) and they can make back a good chunk of the money they spent if they choose to sell.
I have my offer settings set to auto decline offers which are below 50% to 75% of my asking price, and I think that’s particularly helpful with buyers like this. If I had my auto declines set lower, this would have been a complicated negotiation and lots of back and forth. Instead, I accepted the buyer’s offers as they came in and sent them an invoice with free shipping when they were done buying. Then they paid the next day. Nice and easy.
Lowest price sold (net): $9.70 — Jarrett Culver Panini Mosaic Blue Chips white prizm #01/25
While I’d love to sell $460 worth of cards to a single buyer every week, this is a much more predictable way to build a business. I bought this card of a recent first round draft pick for about $2.50 at auction, relisted as best offer and sold it a week later for $11.50 to a buyer located in the same state as the player’s team.
This card is a good example of modern card designs. A better player, more desirable set or lower serial numbering card can sell for quite a bit more. A card which features a worse player or lacks any serial numbering might sell for a few cents, or a lot of 10 for $2. Often these very low value cards are used as “filler” (packing material) or they’re bought and sold in bins full of cards for $0.25 or $0.50 at local trading card shows. Sometimes I will go to one of those shows if there is one near me, but there are so many more deals and steals on eBay.
Still, seeing so many listings with 0 views will take getting used to! It does make the listings that attract attention stand out so maybe this will be a learning for fine-tuning my sourcing.
I’ve been listing at least five items every day for a few months now, and it’s pretty interesting to track which listings get quick watchers/sales and which don’t. It’s not always the items that I think will sell fast! Some items get a large number of watchers but no offers. More often, items that get a lot of watchers quickly do sell, as long as my pricing is reasonable.
I often wonder how much views and even watchers really matter, in the grand scheme of things, compared to knowing what’s valuable to a certain type of buyer and why. Who knows how many of the views are people as opposed to web crawlers, and how much watchers are potential buyers rather than another seller tracking your item.
One thing I can say for sure: promoted listings really affect listing impressions. I just started using promoted listings in the last few weeks, and my listing impressions are up 676% (not a typo) compared to the previous period. Sales, page views, etc are basically exactly the same, but even if those numbers were up or down 10%, sometimes that’s how things go over a few weeks or months.
I promote all listings at 2%, but I’m no kind of expert on whether that’s a good policy compared to variable rates or all the other options they offer.
Even those cd cases can be worth a good amount if they’re decent quality!
There are a lot of anime fake DVDs out there. I’ve been burned a few times with that. since some of the fakes are very good quality. But at $2 a pop, it’s always worth the gamble. That is pennies compared to what I pay for some of the more expensive cards I sell! Even the $50 cards usually cost me at least $10. But there are so many trading card auctions listings that it’s like having a 24/7 thrift store which always has good stuff if you search enough.
I really don’t need more stuff to list with all the cards, but your post has gotten me inspired to make the trip to one of my favorite local library sales this weekend. No scanners and they always have an unusual selection of DVDs plus some neat books and other weird stuff. I wish I had a thrift store like yours! There are a few thrift stores in my little small town, but they have a lot of low quality items across the board no matter when I go, and there are rarely any other customers. One is a church thrift store, but the others are private and I’m honestly not sure how they stay in business.
You got me curious, so yesterday I closely tracked the time I spent searching through auction listings. It was about an hour and a half total, maybe a few minutes more.
It took me about a half hour to look through three “smaller” sellers who had between 100-300 auctions ending last night. Then I took a break.
Later that night, it took me about an hour to look through three larger sellers who had between 500 and 2000 auctions ending. I probably spent the most time on the listings from the smallest the three sellers, since their auctions are higher quality. Their auctions all start with a $5 minimum bid and most days they have an interesting variety of unusual cards, which are my favorites to sell. The two largest sellers (probably two of the biggest card sellers on eBay) start all their listings at $0.99, but I’m not interested in bidding on 75% of the items because either the prices are too high or the cards are too low-end.
Wednesday is a pretty average day as far as number of auctions ending. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays are usually slower, and Sundays and Mondays are always busier and more time consuming. It will be interesting to keep track of this time over the next few weeks and see how the weekly totals look.
Not sure if I’ve asked this before, but how much time do you spend each week searching through card auctions online?
You know what, I don’t really know! I will try and track this time next week. I take a lot of breaks throughout the day, so it will be an interesting challenge to try and figure out that time. I am sure that just by tracking my time, I will be more conscious of how I’m spending it.
I know that a few years ago, I must have been spending 20+ hours a week just looking through listings as I was trying to build up my inventory from a few hundred listings to 1000 and up. I wasn’t as organized with how I would search and it would be a mix of saved searches and looking through different sellers. A lot of wasted time. Something of an “assembly line” for myself. But I was working dead-end jobs then and looking through these auctions was part of how I dealt with all of it. I wouldn’t have guessed it would have ever led to me doing this full-time. But here I am, and it’s a good life.
Now my search process is much more streamlined. Most weeks, I stick with looking through the weekly auctions of the same 5-10 reliable sellers. Some of these sellers have 100-200 auctions ending most nights and others will have 5000+. I can scroll through the “smaller sellers” listings in 5-10 minutes. Like a regular auction, there are a lot of listings which I’m not even interested in bidding on, and others where the bidding is past what I’m comfortable paying. So I might bid on 10 auctions out of 100 and win 1 or 2. Then rinse and repeat the next day and pay at the end of the week.
Scrolling through larger sellers can take me an hour, more if I get really obsessive about looking through every page of listings and researching specific cards in Terapeak. Some nights that is how I spend my time and I really enjoy it. Other nights, like tonight, I will scroll very quickly to look for the true steals and that’s it.
The two largest sellers I buy from usually don’t have auctions ending on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. So my eBay schedule follows that. Most Fridays or Saturdays, I create 20-25 new listings instead of my usual 5. On the other day, I spend a few hours sorting and organizing new and old inventory to figure out what I want to list and sell myself and what I will send to consignment. I take off Thursday or Friday most weeks, along with any random day/night where I want to do other things.
It is exciting to get to the point of spending less time on my eBay business than I was a few years ago and making more money. The consignment selling has been the biggest factor in my increased sales this year. Last year it was some process improvements, like getting a Dymo label printer and figuring out a better method to streamline creating new listings. I know my process will change within the next few years as I start to think about other goals. I really enjoy making those changes on the fly and seeing the results.
Also got a nice condition wartime edition of The Joy of Cooking for $2 and have that listed for $100.
That’s a steal even if had been a later edition. Art of French Cooking is always a great $2 buy as well, even most reprinted vintage editions are a pretty reliable $20 plus shipping.
Recently, a local library sale advertised a full set of Modernist Cuisine, but of course the sale was on a day where I had other plans, and I knew that wouldn’t make it to Day 2 of the sale. One of these days…
On three separate days I came into MASSIVE Anime DVD hauls. Most of these will be listed in lots so even though it’s alot of discs – the amount of listings will be much less. I have HUNDREDS of anime discs from these scores
DVDs and CDs are the other niche I know pretty well besides cards, maybe not expert level but enough that I can go into a library sale and turn $20 into $100 or more pretty reliably. I definitely know enough to know that this is a huge score. Anime sets go out of print often and can become very hard to find and desirable. Anime fans often become really invested in their show which also drives demand. I can’t wait to hear about some of your sales.
One fun item I bought at a yard sale was a pile of video games. Nothing special but all were complete in box but 2 of them. I paid $20 for 22 games. Alot of people don’t like doing video games because many are low dollar – $5 profit.
Funny that you wrote about this in the same post as the anime DVDs because it made me remember that I don’t know much about video games! In part because of what you said — anytime I look up one that seems promising, it sells for $10 or less, which doesn’t feel worth listing for me. Even though, as you said, the listings are very easy to create and discs work 95% of the time.
Maybe if I had better organized storage space, I would be more inclined to buy this stuff. I keep all my non-cards inventory on a bookcase in piles. I would have a nice clear organization system for these media items like I do with the cards. If you have any tips for what kinds of storage boxes you use for them, I’d love to know.
