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we only respond as needed. silence really is golden.
Amen to that!
One of the best things you can do as a seller is figure out the best way to keep yourself from getting stressed out about unreasonable buyers. Often this is as simple as refunding them their $18 (or whatever it is, within reason) and moving on with your day.
I can think of a few difficult buyers over the last few years who I refunded and let them keep the item. It wasn’t worth the back and forth hassle to me, and telling them to keep the item completely disarmed them — in fact, I think one of them even became a repeat customer for a while after.
Just selling sweat pants or dress shirts would be pretty dull because it’s a very limited field. But if you can set up a system where that’s fun, then its all good.
Both of these things are really key to maintaining an eBay store over a number of years versus the people who post crazy numbers for a month or two and then disappear for five years.
#1: You need a system for everything: scavenging, photos, pricing, listing, shipping, inventory
Without systems in place, the actual process of having an eBay store will become cumbersome in some way. Whether that’s overwhelming death piles, or not finding items in your inventory, or not shipping on time, or other problems. My systems are not perfect (not even close) but I don’t find any parts of the process stressful, even the weird buyers who message me with lowball offers. I just ignore ’em.
#2: The process needs to be fun for you, however you define fun
Jay, I think you and Ryanne have demonstrated this very well with the way you divided up the tasks between each of you. For example, Ryanne handling the packaging and shipping. Not everyone is a shipping nerd and that’s fine as long as you’re not working solo! I personally find the process of packaging and shipping to be very cathartic, but I sell mostly modern trading cards and other collectibles so I have my shipping process basically down to a science. I think it would be much more stressful if I had to package oddball oversized items and double box and all the things that many of you do every week.
I really enjoy searching eBay auctions for new inventory so I devote a lot of time to that, possibly equal to the amount of time I spend listing and organizing inventory for much of the last year, though I’ve been backing off lately since I already have a ton of to be listed inventory. I try to set aside specific chunks of time for taking photos, and only on certain days, since that’s the most tedious and unfulfilling part of the process for me.
As a whole, the entire process is enjoyable. It doesn’t feel like work most of the time and I think that’s one of the keys to sustaining an eBay store over the long haul.
Jay, Like a lot of us on the forums, I am not really a collector of anything. Scavenging scratches the itch for acquisition for me but I don’t feel any particular desire to keep anything. I enjoy watching sports but I’m not an ardent fan of a particular player or team which is how a lot of collectors maintain their personal collections or PCs.
So it is all for sale. Well, as fast as I can get the new inventory listed at least. Some items I price a bit higher than comparable items, but that’s strategic more than it’s any particular desire to keep them.
I’m sure that in a few years (two? five? ten?) that I will move on to a new niche and at that point maybe I’ll go through and see if there’s anything I want to keep. There are definitely some modern cards that I admire aesthetically or conceptually, and older vintage cards that are basically little pieces of history. And who knows how much higher (or lower) their values might be in a few years.
A few years ago, most of my inventory was coming from more traditional scavenging — thrift stores, library sales, flea markets — and it was always fun finding things I wanted to keep. But I’ve sold some of those keepers when there was enough profit in doing so. I think for most scavengers, everything has its price. At least for me it does.
Welcome back, Jay and Ryanne. It was great to hear about your vacation and even better to hear about the possible new helper.
I didn’t post my numbers last week with the podcast on pause, so here are two weeks worth. I hit a milestone in sales in the last week of July. There is a small caveat related to it: the last week of July was the National Sports Card Convention so my theory is a lot of card collectors/speculators who were unable to attend were on eBay. Fear of missing out and all that. Not unlike how sales were almost all last summer. With that said, my sales are even higher than they were last summer, and I’m very eager to see what happens in the fall and winter.
One of the nice things about reaching a new level of eBay sales is that I have a huge backlog of unlisted inventory, and it’s not all junk. Finding good inventory to replace what had sold was one of my biggest obstacles as I grew the store from 500 to 1000 listings and then from 1000 to 2000. It’s nice to be able to invest in nicer inventory. That’s really why my sales are up so much — I’ve been listing a lot more and most of the items are better quality.
7/25/21 – 7/31/2021
Items sold: 100 (64 by best offer, 16 by seller initiated offer)
Gross sales: $4586.01 (up 62.7% from one year ago)
Net sales: $3279.41 (up 64.3% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $469.49 — Baker Mayfield autographed cracked ice rookie
Why is this card so valuable? Mayfield is the young quarterback for the Cleveland Browns, who made the playoffs last year for the first time in 18 years. This card hit on all the elements that create value in modern cards — autograph, rookie, popular design (the cracked ice foil) and low serial number. This particular card wasn’t one that you could find in packs, instead it was released on the manufacturer Panini’s website to purchase with redemption points. The value of those points dipped dramatically last year during the early part of the pandemic, so I stocked up on points then (all eBay purchases). A lot of the most valuable cards in my store were purchased for Panini points.
Lowest price sold (net): $7.97 — Mahler Symphony No. 9 DVD
8/1/2021 – 8/7/2021
Total items in store: 3062
Items sold: 72 (55 by best offer, 2 by seller initiated offer)
Gross sales: $3925.11 (up 134% from one year ago)
Net sales: $2848.81 (up 137% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $380.85 — Ryan Tannehill NFL shield patch
Cards with a unique piece of jersey in the card, like the team’s logo or NFL logo, sell for a premium. This card happens to be a popular quarterback and a very popular set (National Treasures). It sold for my full buy it now price which is always really exciting.
Lowest price sold (net): $9.81 — Lonzo Ball white pulsar prizm
This card might have been my lowest sale price of the week (in fact my only sale under $10), but a few years ago this set (Obsidian white pulsar prizms) were the most popular cards around for a brief second.
Like a lot of Panini’s most unique offerings, these particular packs were released only on their website and sold out within a few minutes. Same as the Mayfield above, these packs were also only purchasable using redemption points, the equivalent of something like $150 per pack. (Crazy I know) All of the cards in the packs have the same shiny (white pulsar) design. No autographs, no variations, no jerseys, no serial numbers. Either your pack contains good players who are worth more than what you paid, or you’re unlucky and you get skunked.
Sometimes, after you open your packs and don’t get the new hot rookie or star player worth hundreds, you might list all the cards on eBay for auction to get whatever money you can for them. That might be $20 for two packs’ worth (6 cards) because auctions are weird and unpredictable. It’s so strange to think about how many modern card buyers regularly spend hundreds of dollars on packs or boxes hoping to get lucky, and when they don’t, turn around and sell their pulls for a fraction of the original price.
Another option I’ve seen sellers use is to include the inventory location at the end of the title. This way, it carries over if you end the listing and you don’t have to click into the item description to see your inventory location.
Antique Frog, thanks for letting me know the backstory behind the signature! I imagine that the original document, before it was cut down and authenticated, looked something like this listing.
From the standpoint of preserving a historical document, I think that authenticating and encapsulating the signature serves its purpose. It’s nice to know that this type of historical document won’t get further damaged or lost.
What is especially fascinating to me is how these items end up in circulation in the first place. I can certainly take educated guesses as to how, but I’ve never found items with this degree of historical significance (or even something on a more local/personal level) at flea markets or estate sales. But I’m basically a complete amateur in terms of finding the right sales or the right flea market stalls. I’m sure it’s largely a numbers game where as you go to more and more sales, eventually you find a few with these types of unique items and you also learn what to look for and what not to look for.
Jay, the annual National sports card convention is happening this week in Chicago, and if the reports from the first day are any indication, then the card bubble is as big as ever.
https://www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/national-notes-long-awaited-2021-show-is-off-and-running/
https://www.blowoutforums.com/showthread.php?t=1478597
The bubble will eventually burst for a lot of the investors and flippers and breakers who are new to cards and don’t know what’s worth money and what isn’t and why. Certainly that’s happened to an extent in the last few months. I suspect my sales would be down significantly this summer like everyone else, except that I’ve built up a massive cache of inventory over the last year and I have been listing furiously this summer. I was at 2300 listings in May and I’m nearly at 3100 as we approach August. Anytime you list that much, you’re bound to get a lot of sales.
The bubble may burst more later this year once PSA gets caught up on their backlog of 1 million plus cards to be graded. Or it may be next year or the year after, most likely after a top rookie draft pick is a major bust and speculators lose thousands and thousands of dollars on the player’s best rookie cards. Or it may happen years down the line.
Or maybe not at all. A lot of the same fundamentals that have driven the spike in card prices over the last year (rarity, uniqueness, aesthetics of certain sets and desirability of certain players and teams) have been present for the last 10 or 15 years. It’s all more visible now as the very high-end cards get news articles for sale prices in the millions of dollars. Those super-expensive cards are luxury items, like fancy cars or watches. Not the kinds of things that most of us scavengers own, or even want, but there is a joy in finding them out in the wild because we know there is a buyer for them somewhere.
The same goes for the kinds of cards I sell, which are mostly in the $20 to $100 range. Some of my buyers, probably the majority of them, are flippers like myself and make money buying certain cards at the right time and reselling them for a higher price down the line. At a minimum, if you know your stuff, you can fund a pretty nice collection through flipping the cards you don’t want or the good deals you find. Since boxes of cards are so expensive to open, and usually a losing proposition in terms of what you spend versus the value of the cards in the box, the resale card market on eBay (and to a lesser extent social media, other sites, etc) is really what the hobby is about nowadays, and how it has perpetuated for the last decade.
Once you get past the nihilist idea that it’s all just cardboard, it’s a fascinating and strange little world.
I second Mark’s comment, I would love to see a video of the box resizing process. I can definitely see the process becoming easier and easier the more that you do it, but because it’s something I’m unfamiliar with, it seems a lot more complicated and difficult in my mind than it likely is in reality.
Loved the new microphone, the audio sounded great this week. It is so great to hear you two buying new microphones and clothes for yourselves and those sorts of things. I love a good side of the road burger as much as the next scavenger, but you two deserve to reap the rewards of all your hard work in every way possible and that definitely includes treating yourself.
Had a fun almost catastrophe with two packages in the middle of last week.
Sold an autographed $2 bill of Hall of Fame basketball coach Ernest Schmidt. He was the longtime coach of the Pittsburg State Gorillas, a dominant team decades ago. The buyer was located in Pittsburg, Kansas, which surprised me a little more than it should have. I was kind of disappointed that this sold so quickly (less than a day) because it was the first $2 bill I had ever “owned.” Of course with the sale price ($90, all the value in the signature) I can buy a bunch more $2 bills, and isn’t that part of the fun of all this.
In the same batch of orders, I sold a $20 autograph of a minor league pitcher. This was a card I had paid maybe $3 at auction, probably last year when sports were shut down or this winter when prices decline since the new season hasn’t started yet. With just a little knowledge, you can make good money on cards by being patient and smart about when you buy.
Now the player on the card is back in the minor leagues, hoping to perform well enough to make it to the big leagues. If the player makes it to the majors, and performs well, his cards will sell more often and for higher prices. I assume that’s why this buyer purchased this specific card. The prognosticators had started writing about how this player was on the path to the major leagues, and a lot of buyers buy and sell based on those ups and downs. This phenomenon is called prospecting, and it’s been really common within the sports card world for the last ten years, since cards became about uniqueness and rarity.
This buyer was also located in Pittsburg, Kansas. Two different buyers, two different items, in a city of 20,000.
Bizarre coincidence? eBay conspiracy to sabotage my perfect seller rating? eBay is hiding my listings to every other part of the country except the midwest? You be the judge, but I love a good conspiracy so I hope it’s all of the above.
Even with packing slips printed out, I put the wrong label on one envelope before I caught on to the situation. If the packages weren’t different mail classes (one priority flat rate padded, one first class 4 ounces), I’m sure I would have mixed them up. But I caught what was going on in time, so it’s all good fun.
7/18/21 – 7/24/2021
Total items in store: 3025
Items sold: 68 (43 by best offer, 6 by seller initiated offer)
Gross sales: $2572.33 (up 5.3% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1742.38 (down 0.7% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $262.70 — 13 certified autographs all to the same buyer, the most expensive being this extremely large cut signature of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy
This buyer sent me a message asking about combined shipping if he bought multiples. Most messages are some variation of lowest price? which I never respond to, but I always reply to the messages about combined shipping even though my combined shipping terms are clearly stated in the first line of my item description. It’s worth the few seconds to me, even if the buyer only replies 1 in 5 times, because every so often the payoff is 13 items to one buyer.
I can’t figure out what this buyer’s collection is about, since his purchases didn’t have any obvious theme to them — a few actors, a few boxers, a baseball player or two, a former Supreme Court justice, and the big Victor Emanuel signature. But he said he’ll buy more from me in the future, and now that his packages were delivered, all that’s left to do is wait and see if he keeps his word. I have more autographs to list this week, so maybe I have something else that will catch his eye. I hope so. Repeat buyers make all of this a little more fun.
Lowest price sold (net): $12.09 — Roger Hane Art Times and Tragedy softcover book
This was a $30+ sale but it was an oversized book and shipping killed me. Since I sell mostly smalls, the only box I had where the book fit comfortably was a regional box B. And isn’t it always the case in situations like this that the buyer is on the other side of the country.
Fortunately, I still made a few quarters profit. This book was a leftover from my library sale days so I only paid a buck or two for it, and I’ve had most of my media listings on increasing sale prices because I want that shelf space back. Trying to fit this book in five different boxes and failing every time reminded me to be grateful that I can ship 90% of my items in 4×6 or 6×9 bubble mailers. Usually I find shipping cathartic and calming, especially adding void filler and sealing the package (which would probably make a great ASMR video if anyone is looking for alternate income streams). But searching for the right box is stressful and I have no idea how some of y’all do it every day.
Here is another good John Tyler handwriting trading card, or maybe I should say it’s the GOAT John Tyler handwriting card.
I had a buyer a few weeks ago who bought another Historic Autographs card from me, from a set a few years ago called Historic Scripts which is all baseball autographs from all sorts of players, from legends to players who only played one season or even one game.
Here is the feedback they left:
<span data-test-id=”fdbk-comment-9″ aria-label=”Thanks for this card! I was visiting with my dad and he reminded me that my great uncle Willard played for the St Louis Browns in 1924 so I thought I’d look him up on eBay. Holy smokes was i thrilled to see this card signed by "Bill Lasley" aka my Great Uncle Willard. “>Thanks for this card! I was visiting with my dad and he reminded me that my great uncle Willard played for the St Louis Browns in 1924 so I thought I’d look him up on eBay. Holy smokes was i thrilled to see this card signed by “Bill Lasley” aka my Great Uncle Willard. </span>
I only made about $5 (if that) on the card, but those messages are one of the things that keep me motivated to buy and sell and list, list, list.
Jay the trading card world has had a ton of scalping in the last year, one of the biggest factors in the card bubble for sure. Both with boxes and packs sold online only, and in stores like Walmart and Target. This is a great article about it.
https://www.sbnation.com/22445479/sports-cards-scalpers-walmart-target-nba-nfl-pokemon
Even though the seller/scalper profiled in the article is buying and selling cards just like I am, a scalper has almost a completely different mindset than a scavenger. Maybe even the polar opposite?
I was so thrilled to hear a Scavenger Life podcast from the road once again, and New York City in particular. Those episodes are always my favorites because they synthesize the scavenger way of thinking so well. For most, vacation is a thing you have to save up for and scrounge together time off for and maybe you don’t even get paid for that time. But for a scavenger, we can make back some of that money by keeping our eyes peeled at thrift stores or flea markets or finding “trash” on the street or printers on Craigslist. Plus we can have our eBay store running in the background as well. I haven’t had a vacation in some time, but I can see a not-too-distant future with the means and more importantly the time to travel more, and it’s one of the things that keep me going week after week.
This was a very busy week of sales for me. The high priced item (not really one item but 8 items to the same buyer) was among 27 (!!) items that sold on Saturday. No single item above $75 but it all added up, nearly $750 net after shipping and fees, and just under $450 after cost of goods sold. Most days aren’t nearly that busy but it’s nice to have a big pop once in a while. I listed probably 100 new items late last week, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I had so many items sell immediately after. So if anyone needs a little anecdotal incentive to list more, even if sales are slow, consider this your friendly encouragement!
Also, I scavenged a Dymo 4xl thermal printer from Staples a few weeks back, paid $20.48 after coupons and Staples rewards bucks and a gift card. I picked up a few rolls of official Dymo brand labels from random eBay sellers and finally got it all set up the middle of last week. Just this past weekend, the dymo probably saved me a half hour of cutting and taping, and I also found it much easier to keep labels and packing slips organized. Thanks to so many of you for the encouragement to pick up a thermal printer. I am often slow to change my processes, but I felt confident because of the consensus about the Dymo, and I would recommend a thermal printer to almost any seller who sells 10 or more items a week on eBay or other platforms. It truly pays for itself with all the time saved from cutting and taping, and the Dymo in particular is a very fast printer and the Dymo brand labels are great quality, very sticky and the perforations separate perfectly every time.
7/11/21 – 7/17/2021
Total items in store: 2868
Items sold: 77 (34 by best offer, 26 by seller initiated offer)
Gross sales: $3049.61 (up 18.8% from one year ago)
Net sales: $2165.64 (up 25.8% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $174.88 — 8 $25 autograph booklets from the Historic Autographs company all to the same buyer (link is to 1 of the 8)
Historic Autographs is a smaller card manufacturer out of Pennsylvania. They don’t have any official licenses, so they don’t have current players in their sets, and their designs and sets can be very hit or miss, like their recent 1969 set which I think is comically ugly and their Written Word sets where a lot of the cards contain a piece of handwriting (from an old document) rather than an autograph. I guess I can see the appeal but they’re not for me.
However, I really like some of their booklet sets which combine a certified autograph with a (usually heavily damaged) card of the player from the 1930s or 1940s. I think they’re kitschy and unique. I might have made a little more profit if I held onto these longer and waited for an individual buyer for each one, but I like selling multiples to one buyer. I threw in a lagniappe autograph, a little free bonus, in the hopes that will entice this buyer will come back and buy more from me. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.
Lowest price sold (net): $6.98 — Bobby Hull printing plate
This buyer buys 1 or 2 printing plates from me every month or two, never totaling more than $20 or $30, and they pay $10 to ship to Canada every time. I find it interesting how they return again and again but never spend much. They must have a pretty strict collecting budget. It’s cool that they spend a part of it on my inventory.
The pandemic was such a unique time for cards since it brought in a lot more wallets into the hobby, with much more demand than supply. The new buyers fit into three main groups:
1. people who may have collected as kids and got nostalgic (especially during the period when all sports were shut down)
2. those who make money on sports (gamblers and fantasy sports players)
3. the notorious Youtube flippers and hustlers (not our type of people but there is a huge demand for this kind of content)
The demand for sealed packs and boxes of cards was so significant that Target suspended sales of cards because of fights and hoarding, since there was money to be made flipping the sealed boxes on eBay. It sounds crazy until you read about why.
Almost everything related to cards saw huge growth in the last year. I have seen Reddit posts about people finding packs of cards for sale at Barnes and Noble, or Dollar Tree, in addition to Target and Walmart. Card supplies (such as the cases to protect individual cards) have been hard to find to the point where prices for new cases have almost doubled and used cases sell for pretty good prices. The big grading companies saw such an increase in submissions that their waiting periods increased from a month to 3+ months, and one of the biggest companies (PSA) actually stopped accepting submissions for grading for a few months. Supposedly PSA graded a million cards last year, or close to it.
And the largest card selling consignment company, COMC, fell so far behind in shipping out their eBay orders that they received thousands of negative feedback. The link in the precious sentence is to COMC’s negative feedback, which goes on for pages and demonstrates how big of a pond we’re all swimming in. It’s a great lesson not to out stress over one individual feedback, there are sellers out there receiving lots of negatives and they’re fine.
Already some of the demand has decreased, especially speculative money spent on individual players who disappointed on the field or on the court. Like anything else, cards are not easy money. A lot of the new card buyers over the last year will lose money on what they bought, especially those who sent cards in for grading without doing the research.
But even if 20% of the new card buyers and sellers stick around, that’s a lot of growth. Thanks to all of the innovations in cards the last 20 years, the card market was already robust for years before the pandemic. It’s just less of a secret now. And card companies continue to innovate: this was the first year where there were nice new sets for Formula 1 racing, UFC fighting, golf, and women’s basketball with autographs and inserts and colorful, shiny designs. Despite price tags that would make us scavengers blush (hundreds of dollars for a sealed box), all of these sets had buyers and sellers and significant resale demand for individual cards.
And that doesn’t surprise me at all. There are so many different ways that cards can appeal to someone now, whether it’s the case breaks or the nostalgia of opening packs or making money through buying and selling individual cards, and the cards themselves are often miniature pieces of art. So I think this is normal times for card collecting. Maybe with more volatile prices than usual, but that’s not something that really affects me since I am always striving to buy inventory at low prices.
My advice to scavengers is that if you find cards at an estate sale, or thrift store, here are a few key guidelines to keep in mind:
1. year of the cards: years to avoid are late 1970s to early 1990s– before 1970s (especially 1950s and earlier) can be worth good money (depends on condition) and late 1990s to present is the modern era of cards where specific types of cards (autographs, individually serial numbered cards, specific inserts) are highly valued by collectors
2. players featured on the cards: “name” players obviously have a larger collector base than less well known players, but “fan favorites” or particular teams also have really passionate collectors. again, it mostly depends on the type of card — older cards are heavily dependent on condition and modern cards are valued for type of card more than anything.
3. how are the cards protected? any good collector has their best cards individually sleeved. sleeves are necessarily an indicator of value on its own, but unprotected cards more often than not are from the “junk era” of cards, the 80s and 90s, where cards were printed in much higher numbers than cards from the 1960s and earlier but without the innovations which make specific modern cards so valuable.
I’ve really appreciated all of the openness and honesty around mental health in the recent episodes. I love scavenging, but it can be lonely being a scavenger, and the honesty in the podcast and on the forums reminds me that I’m part of a community and a way of thinking. It’s been inspiring me a lot lately.
In one of my posts in early June, I mentioned a goal of wanting to reach 3000 listings by the end of the summer. I was nervous to type it and put myself out there. I didn’t think I could or would get there, like most of us listing is not my favorite part eBay even though we are just hoarders if we don’t list or ship.
But I’ve been extremely productive recently, especially with a number of rainy days, so I might make it to 3000 listings (no jinx) a full month earlier than I planned, by the end of July. It feels great. The bubble has definitely burst for a lot of the less knowledgeable card sellers, but my sales have remained steady enough to cover the bills and new inventory and then some. Just wanted to share some hope in the slow season.
7/4/21 – 7/10/2021
Total items in store: 2858
Items sold: 52 (27 from best offer, 8 from seller initiated offer)
Gross sales: $2536.61 (up 103.6% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1754.86 (up 102.1% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $149.87 — RJ Hampton autographed patch rookie card
For reference, Hampton is a talented but very unproven basketball player and this is one of his nicer autographed patch cards from one of the more expensive sets. You could, if you were inclined, buy a card with just his autograph from a lesser set for $10 or less. Or there are some of his cards that are even fancier and more expensive. So this should give you a good sense of how the modern card market works. There is a tremendous speculative frenzy around the popular players and sets every year in every sport.
I purchased this card a few months ago at auction (like almost everything I list) and then it sat in death piles until the day I listed it. It sold that same day, which is always a nice surprise. Between the time I bought the card and sold it, Hampton was traded to an underachieving team and should get a real chance to prove his worth next season. Maybe he’ll be amazing and the card will spike in value, in which case I hope my buyer makes a great profit on the card, too. But I always prefer to take the sale now. As long as I’m selling, there will always be more opportunities to buy.
Lowest price sold (net): $7.00 — Frank Robinson sketch card
This card is from the ultra-expensive Topps Transcendent set, which is a wild set that is sold almost exclusively to case breakers. I don’t deal in case breaks because I am a scavenger but they are a huge part of the contemporary card world. Essentially you buy a spot or multiple spots (often the spots are differentiated around a particular team or player) in a case (multiple boxes, usually 8 to 12) of a specific set of cards. Then the breaker opens the cards on camera and mails out the cards for each spot. For cheaper and less popular sets, each spot is relatively inexpensive ($20 or less) but for more expensive or brand new sets (like Topps Transcendent) each spot can cost hundreds of dollars. Spots also get more expensive depending on the popularity of a particular team or player.
Sometimes you get lucky and receive an amazing card, an autograph or artist’s sketch or beautiful piece of jersey. But more often your team doesn’t hit, or doesn’t hit anything good, so you receive nothing or a card like the one I sold that’s not worth much. If you want, you can immediately resell it through an eBay auction, usually through the same breaker who sold you the spot, so you never touch the card. Then someone like me buys it up when the bid goes for $3 or less, hoping to resell it for $10 a few months down the line. But you and the breaker don’t really care because you’re already thinking about the next break.
Is all of that a little bit sad? Maybe it is. It’s a shame because there is some real craftsmanship behind cards like this — this is a print of an artist’s sketch in a metal frame, and Frank Robinson (like all of the players in the set) is a baseball legend, not some random backup outfielder. Despite being limited to just 100 copies, the card’s not hard to find because of the nature of how it’s obtained (almost exclusively through breaks). So there are 11 other active listings for the same exact card, and the only reason mine sold was because it was the lowest priced one. Now that my sales are high enough to invest in better inventory, I prefer to buy and sell cards that are more unique, and have one or two other copies on eBay at any given time. This way I’m not constantly competing with other sellers on price. That might work for many sellers (and it’s very common with card sellers in particular) but I don’t enjoy it.
Jay, Here is a link to one of my listings: link
Very simple text based template that I came up with myself. I have revised it over the last few years to make it as short as possible and ensure it displays nicely on mobile.
The only things I change in the description are two lines in the middle: This listing is for ____ and the line after that which provides slightly more detail about the item and condition. Sometimes I use that line to add some info beyond what is in the title, if I think it is something a buyer might search for or if I want to make something very clear about the item condition.
It takes me a minute per listing, if that, to change those few lines. It takes me slightly longer to inspect each card for condition and to research the price. So I usually finish 15 to 20 listings in an hour. Everything else in my description carries over from one listing to the next.
A lot of the bigger sellers in the sports card categories have very long listing templates like this: link
A lot of these sellers work on consignment and have thousands of auctions ending every night, so even a few minutes to add a little information to the description is not worth it for them.
I like my template and process because it covers all the info I care about as a buyer, and it allows me to take a second look at each listing to make sure I don’t miss anything obvious. It is easier to have a template like this when 90% or more of my packages are less than one pound. If I had items in 100 different categories, it would be more difficult, although I think there are ways to craft a template that works across multiple categories.
Before I started focusing more heavily on trading cards and autographs, I bought and sold a lot of media listings (books, CDs and DVDs primarily) and my template was very similar: link
