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I was fortunate to have an extremely good week of sales last week. It was fueled in part by an end and relist batch which I timed to coincide with last week’s eBay bucks promo. I had a particularly strong sales day last Friday, three days after the end and relist batch. Details about my end and relist process, and some data, in the linked thread.
9/12/2021 – 9/18/2021
Total items in store: 3358
Items sold: 69
Gross sales: $3604.51 (up 66% from one year ago)
Net sales: $2492.00 (up 66% from one year ago)
Lowest price sold (net): $9.17 — Clyde Beck autograph — Beck is an obscure Chicago Cubs infielder from the 1920s, and this card was sold to one of my repeat buyers who buys a few Chicago Cubs autographs from me every few months, usually after a 10% to 15% offer. I need to make a super VIP coupon for 25% or more off to send to buyers like this.
Highest price sold (net): $291.17 — Mason Greenwood Panini white sparkle prizm
Why such an expensive card?
1. Greenwood is one of the best soccer (football) players in the world and he plays for one of the most popular clubs in England, Manchester United (Man U).
2. Panini’s white sparkle cards are only sold on their website through in sealed packs which you purchase via their points program.
The sale of sealed packs and boxes has changed dramatically over the last year as speculators and “hustle” flippers have descended on cards. Sealed boxes sold directly on manufacturer’s websites sell out basically right away now, even as box prices have increased dramatically. For a while even the cheap “retail” boxes sold at stores like Walmart and Target would sell out quickly as well, despite the fact that those boxes and packs are much less likely than more expensive “hobby” boxes to contain the desirable cards (autographs, rare inserts and rookies, etc). This price increase has trickled into Panini’s Rewards Points program as well.
Prices for Panini points have more than doubled since last year, and every week when Panini adds new items to their Rewards site to purchase via points, the site is flooded with more traffic than it can handle. It’s not all real people though, it’s mostly bots, and everything (even the items that are overpriced) sells out in minutes. It’s become a happy/sad weekly ritual where I refresh furiously at the time of the new drop, add the items I want to my cart within a few seconds…then click to the checkout screen to add my credit card info and see that those items are already sold out. No human could click that fast. It’s bots, and it would frustrate me if I was the type to let this wonderful scavenging life frustrate me.
Once every few weeks I am lucky enough to purchase a card or two. Usually it’s when Panini changes the time that they drop the new Rewards items, or something is more valuable than it appears on the surface. Can’t bot knowledge, not yet anyway.
From what I can tell, the bot dorks only about making their initial investment back and a few bucks profit as fast as possible. There is no concept of long-tail and little to no interest in doing research on anything. That’s how I purchased this Greenwood card initially.
I was shut out from purchasing any white sparkle packs on the day of release, but kept a search open in the weeks after, and found a sneaker flipper who had 5 packs listed at auction for maybe the initial cost plus an extra $30 profit. At minimum bid price, the sneakerhead might have even lost $5 on their pack listing, depending on what they paid to get the packs shipped from Panini to their stupid bot house and what they would pay shipping the packs to the lucky buyer.
Most of these types of modern, limited edition sealed pack auctions get a handful of bidders and 10+ bids. This one ended in the middle of the day and I was the high bidder at minimum bid price.
I was very surprised when the sneaker flipper bot nerd shipped the packs to me with adequate protection so they weren’t all banged up in the mail. It took them over two weeks to ship the darned things, which is probably horrifying to most of you reading this, but honestly I was thrilled that they managed to ship the packs at all.
I considered reselling the sealed packs. But my initial buy-in price for the packs was so low, especially considering the short history of premium soccer cards. Soccer, along with a few other niche sports like WNBA and F1 racing, saw a nice bump in prices over the last year as they started to receive the same premium card treatment (and high sealed box prices) that baseball, football, basketball and hockey cards have seen for the last 20 years.
With that in mind, I figured it would be very hard to lose any money if I opened my packs and maybe I’d get lucky and hit one of the best players’ cards. And that’s what happened!
Now the Greenwood white sparkle card is on its way to Australia, where the buyer is one of the biggest card breakers around. I’m sure he’ll sell the card for more next week or next year or in ten years since Greenwood is a mere 19 years old with a long career ahead. I know enough to buy and sell hundreds of cards every week, but I don’t really know enough to know whether Greenwood is the next star or a flash in the pan. So I always prefer to sell now, especially when the prices creep above $100 for one card that didn’t cost me that much.
I love sales like this, but I also really enjoy that I will sell many more white sparkle cards of lesser players for $15 or $25 or $40 over the next few months and years. Those are my favorite and most reliable sales even though the $100+ sales add up much faster. Regardless of high or low sales price, who knows where these cards will end up if all the best card packs end up in the hands of all the horrible bot monsters. I will keep doing what I can to make sure we never find out what that awful nightmare will be like.
@lukastreasuretrove — That radio is really beautiful! Such a joy to know that it’s going to a home where it will have a new life almost 100 years after manufacture.
I love books and cooking so I have a semi-educated guess that the cookbook you sold was Larousse Gastronomique? Going strictly based off the date with my guess, if it was 1960s I probably would have guessed Art of French Cooking…
I’d love to know what other types of books were in the lot. There are so many old books that are obsolete or in terrible condition that it’s always a thrill to find books that are well cared for and valuable to the right collector. It is very satisfying to find new homes for these books where they can be appreciated just as much as the original owner loved them.
@timo (and others who are interested in these types of experiments):
I did an end and relist coinciding with the eBay bucks promo and my results are posted in this thread.
The result is that I have more enthusiasm for end and relist now. It’s obviously not as important as consistently listing new items, pricing them well and titling your items well, but it is a strategy worth experimenting with every so often.
Sold another 5 from the end and relist batch yesterday, plus 2 more which gained a watcher after the relist and the buyer accepted my offer of 15% off.
To recap my process and thoughts:
I ended and relisted all of the items in my store without watchers (about 1400 listings in a store of 3300 items) to coincide with the first day of the 5% eBay bucks promo. Using the bulk editor, and multiple tabs to make sure no listings were lost, the whole process took me about a half hour.6 of the relisted items sold via buy it now/best offer on the first day, and 5 more sold yesterday. Also 2 more sold yesterday via send offers to watchers.
As @popeyespostcards has discussed, there is a point of diminishing returns with the end and relist strategy. You can’t do this every month and expect it will always increase sales. But trying this once or twice a quarter, timed to coincide with an eBay bucks promo or particularly busy weekend, seems like a good strategy.
Update: 6 items from my end and relist batch sold today. These were old inventory which had 0 watchers and had been listed for a few months or longer without a sale.
The entire end and relist process for 1400 items (all items in my inventory without watchers) took me about a half hour from start to finish. Even 6 sales makes that time well spent, and I’ll update again tomorrow and later this week so there is a little more data.
If you’ve never tried the end and relist process on your store, give it a try.
@retro-treasures-wv — So good to see you posting on the forums again. hope you continue to heal and good health for the rest of the family as well.
9/5/2021 – 9/11/2021
Total items in store: 3316
Items sold: 62
Gross sales: $2933.29 (up 35% from one year ago)
Net sales: $2164.20 (up 46% from one year ago)
Lowest price sold (net): $8.93 — Isaiah McKenzie autographed rookie card
I only shifted to completely focusing on my niche, sports cards and autographs, in the last few years. Previously, I had a few different niches and wasted a lot of time unproductively scavenging at thrift stores or other places where I would most come home disappointed.
Focusing more on this niche completely changed that. One of the main reasons why is that I can scavenge without leaving the house now, but mostly I learned more about what sells and why. Superstar cards and hot rookies are always popular, and almost always very expensive (to the point of ridiculousness), but there is a market for lesser players cards as well. Certain players become very popular with their local fan base even if they’re not the best or flashiest player.
Isaiah McKenzie is one of those types, a football player for the Buffalo Bills who is described on Wikipedia as a “utility player” and has a penchant for long touchdown runs and kick returns. Last year he had a game with a few highlight reel touchdowns. After seeing that box score, I did some research and learned he was an underdog story with rookie cards in only a handful of sets. So I bought up a bunch of McKenzie autographs for $2 to $4 each. Every once in a while, one will sell for $10 to $20 and I will replace it with another from my stash.
There are a number of other players like this with few cards and a cult collector base. I wasn’t finding and selling cards like these a few years ago, even though I knew the niche more than 99.5% of people. But there is always more you can learn.
Highest price sold (net): $379.64 — Saquon Barkley cracked ice autograph rookie
I can fairly easily explain why this card is so expensive. The player in question is the young and popular running back for the New York Giants, Saquon Barkley. It’s his autograph rookie card (especially desired by collectors) and these cards (limited to just 10) were sold on Panini’s Rewards site for one day and sold out within minutes. There were no other copies of this card listed when mine sold. There are hundreds of new sets printed every year, but the top cards can disappear into collections quickly and take years to show up again, if they ever do.
If you want one of Saquon Barkley’s autographed rookies, regardless of quality, you’re gonna spend $100 minimum. I can see the logic behind spending a few hundred more and getting one of his best. If Barkley lives up to his potential, the card will be worth more in the future. It’s one of the most popular Panini designs, in part because it’s limited and in part because modern card collectors gravitate to shiny things like cats do. A lot of the desirability in specific modern cards (beyond the basic attributes like player, set and type of card) are in the ways the cards sparkle and shine.
$20 sales are the bread and butter of my eBay business, and probably yours too, but it takes a lot of $20 sales to equal one sale like this. Now if the buyer would just pick up the package, which USPS has attempted to deliver twice already!!!
I actually didn’t realize the package hadn’t been delivered yet until writing this post. A few years ago, I used to worry every time I sold an item over $100 and check the tracking numbers all the time. Now, I deal with a problem when I hear from a buyer (very rarely, maybe once every 2-3 weeks and I sell 50+ items a week) and my solution is always the same: whatever gets me out of the conversation fastest. If that means the occasional refund, fine. This may cost me a few bucks sometimes but it also makes for happy customers: knock on wood, I’m over 8500 feedback with no negatives and no neutrals.
From when something sells to shipping issues to who buyers your stuff, there are so many things out of our hands with an eBay store and it is so, so easy to waste time worrying about any or all of them. It’s so much more useful to focus on improving some part of your process that you do control: where and how you scavenge, or how you take pictures, or your listing flow, or organizing your inventory. You may not see immediate profits from making changes in those areas, but if you are patient and taking a longer term view, they will lead to profit down the road.
I went through the deletion of subcategories in Sports Cards a few months ago. It was an illogical change solving a problem that didn’t exist. The previous system had subcategories for each individual sports and worked great. The new system which has two main subcategories (Sports Card Singles and Sports Card Lots) is much less intuitive. But eBay loves their item specifics.
I do have some good news, about half of my listings auto-populated with those new required item specifics. In sports cards, only two item specifics were required, so filling in the other 1500 listings with those two item specifics only took a few hours total. The bulk editor was very helpful in speeding up that process and there is also a separate widget in seller hub where you can quickly view and edit the listings which have item specifics that to be updated.
I don’t know how much sourcing you do on eBay through purchases of individual postcards and lots, but the few months before and after the subcategory change were a great buying opportunity. A lot of listings slipped through the cracks as sellers were slow to update to the new required item specifics on old and new listings, and my theory is that eBay’s search algorithm was not kind to those slow adopters. I didn’t see a reduction in sales at all, but I was also listing heavily at that time.
Amazing find! The prices for sealed packs and boxes from the 2005-2015 have gone up quite a bit the last few years, primarily because current packs and boxes are significantly more expensive and hard to find. Also because the hot rookies from 10-15 years ago have become star and even legendary players.
The real value in the sealed packs is not only the potential for hot rookies but also the possibility of desirable parallels (a variation of the regular card, typically with a different color and limited serial number anywhere from 1/1 to xx/1000) or inserts (like the patches you mentioned, as well as autographs). The odds are not in your favor opening one pack or even one box, but sometimes you’ll get lucky and find a rare card inside! However the player is just as important as the type of card. Less popular “common” players often sell for just a few bucks even if it’s an extremely rare parallel or unique autograph.
2014 Topps Update cards are especially desired not only for Jacob DeGrom rookies but also the Dodgers star outfielder Mookie Betts. Two of the best current players, both on hugely popular teams (New York and Los Angeles) and both were unheralded rookies who improved greatly, so these cards were some of their earliest cards. So you really found a great box. Other years and sets don’t have nearly as much appeal or value, though almost any sealed Topps, Panini, and Upper Deck packs from 2005 to present are worth purchasing for $5 or less.
So you’re basically doing 40% off sales? Do you just raise the price high and then give a discount so its a normal price? Or are you actually selling 40% less than your competitors?
I don’t raise the price before doing the markdown sale or sending offers to buyers. But I’m also careful about what I put on sale.
One of the biggest advantages of markdown manager is that you can quickly filter in so many ways – eBay category, store category, days on site, price, etc. So it’s really fast to find the items you are comfortable putting on sale, while leaving the rest of your inventory at its normal price.
The last year or so, as I’ve expanded my inventory, I’ve tried to focus on unique items (the cards, and even the books and other media leftover from my old niche) where there are zero, one or two similar listings on eBay at any given time. So with those, it’s all about waiting for the right buyer who’s willing to pay the price I want. I don’t typically put those items on sale at all, and if I send offers to buyers, maybe it’s 10% or 15% at most.
But on items older than a year, or items below $25, or items that I know aren’t as unique, I’ll happily go 25% or 30% on the markdown sale and then send an offer to buyer for another 10% off. I’d rather make the sale and clear the space than hold the item for months or even years waiting for $5 more.
I like markdown manager for its simplicity – it’s very quick and easy (about 15 minutes) to create a sale of 500 items and let it run. Also, my experience has been that a markdown sale of 20 to 30 percent combined with sending an an additional 10 percent offer to buyer has a very high sell through rate. Maybe something like 1 in 3 or 1 in 4?
My current markdown sale ends on the 15th, so when I create my next one, I’ll crunch the numbers more closely and report back with my findings. I love threads like this. I think any seller who’s doing eBay full-time should play around with these different buyer engagement methods. What works best in one niche may not work as well in another niche. But it’s helpful to have all these options available to attract buyers.
@martyholthaus (and anyone else who likes to sell media)
One of the best places to pick up media for low prices are library sales. I use this site to find the sales close to me. Most libraries just want to clear space so everything is priced very low. It’s true scavenging, tables and piles and boxes of books and media and anything else that might get donated to a library. Some sales are really well organized and others not so much. Pre-covid these sales were getting more and more overrun by Amazon sellers, easy to spot with their handheld scanners. But a lot of the sales in New Jersey have been good about enforcing social distancing and masks which cuts down on the Amazon dorks and makes the whole experience a lot more pleasant.
This was my old niche before I went heavy into cards, so if anyone is interested I would love to discuss it more. Since streaming services add and drop content all the time, media will remain a profitable niche until some new technology makes it obsolete, especially for rare and hard to find stuff. Like anything else, you have to do your research. It’s easy to find something rare but harder to find something rare that will actually sell.
@popeyespostcards — do you employ any other methods besides end/relist to try and engage buyers?
The two that I use somewhat regularly are:
1. markdown manager — I run a 20 to 30 percent off sale on 500 items once or twice a month, which usually nets a few hundred dollars per sale
2. sending offers to buyers — I’ve got about a 1 in 10 success rate with sending an offer to a buyer leading to a sale (either they accept the offer, or send a reasonable counteroffer), and the offers I send are typically 10 to 20 percent off
I’m curious how these numbers compare to you, and others, and also if you or anyone else has used the coded coupon feature. I think all of these tools, if used properly, can help increase sales. Of course, as you mentioned, listing new items is far and away the #1 tool.
@antique-frog — there is a great documentary about the art forger Mark Landis called Art and Craft which I thought was incredibly well done
There is also a huge number of fake rare and $$$$ expensive modern cards, most from the beginning of the era from 20-25 years ago when companies were just starting to create innovations like foil stamping, die cutting and serial numbering which are so prized by modern card collectors. The most valuable basketball cards from the late 1990s are especially likely to be fake since there is a massive demand for them in Asia, primarily China and Japan. Many of these fakes are so well done that even professional graders don’t catch them. It is astounding to see the level of knowledge and analysis that collector detectives use to show exactly how and why these cards were faked.
It’s so great to hear that you’re improving, Retro. I am one of many who you don’t know but I’ve been thinking about you and your family these past few weeks. I’m really looking forward to reading about your updates over the coming weeks and months as you reopen your store.
