I’m about to start a small Ebay store for collectables. I’ve sold a few cards in the past. Mostly Pokemon, MTG, and Yu-Gi-Oh products. I have one question for anyone that has a large amount of listings. How do you keep up with the prices? I’ve seen stores with 1000’s of listings. Lets say you have a card set for $30, and it goes to $120 in a week. Do people literally check listings like once a week or something to see market changes? I assume there is a way to “not get got” because some people literally have 10,000 listings. I also assume nobody is going through 10,000 listings every single month. Anyone have an idea? Thanks!
Hypothetical example.
A cards “market price” is $30 so you list at $50 OBO which presumably would result in some amount of profit for you. A week later it is $130. You would have sold somewhere in the meantime at exactly the instant it was worth $50. You didn’t get got. You sold the card for a profit at a price you set. The market met then exceeded that value but it is what it is. If you only want to sell at a set premium to “market value”, then yes that is a fairly labor intensive process. You can edit listings in bulk and add a flat percent or a set dollar amount to 500 listings at once.
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@gottaketchumall You know, I never stopped to think about it that way. You wouldn’t really be losing your butt based on your hypothetical. I remember having 15 cards on my Ebay, and checking this once weekly. It’s a pain, but may be worth it until I have a certain amount of products on my Ebay. Thanks a lot.
Edit: Great store by the way. Lots of cool things on there.
Pretty much what gotta said. I’ll add that if I have multiples of a card I only list one at a time. After one sells I decide if I want to price it the same or increase the price. Also, going for “market price” is a sucker’s game for many items. I have a shadowless psa 9 Charizard listed right now. There are at least 10 different users who have offered me 2k for it. They all think 2k is “market price” as that’s all they’re willing to offer. The problem with that, I can get 2k from anyone. Obviously, there’s no need for me to sell at that price unless I needed the money. So if you have items that are constantly selling/high demand, do not list for “market price” you can get “market price” any day.
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You have to know what cards have potential to have a sizeable increase and what ones don’t. You’re random caterpie is probably safe to list at any time. You’re sealed WOTC stuff could spike suddenly. I have cards I want to sell separated in two categories. Cards that I think won’t have much of any growth, I list these first and don’t worry about them. And cards I think could potentially have great growth, I list these last and hold them for much longer. Those ones get all my attention.
The best time to sell is never.
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You won’t know which cards is going to go to $120. So you list at $30 (market price or high end of the market price) and then sell it for $30 when the surge of demand comes in. That’s the risk you take with a quick resell type of business. You’ll make your 10%-50% profit on the item but won’t get to take advantage of the 1,000%+ returns. The only people who get to take advantage of that are the people who can invest a lot of capital into items and then sit on them for longer time periods. Overtime, the quick flip/retailer businesses eventually run out of inventory of those items and then the remaining supply is simply locked up by the long-term speculators and the only way those speculators unload their items is with a higher price paid by the purchaser.
For people running the quick flip/retailer model they aren’t interested in holding the items they sell for the long-term. It is simply a means to make a living in the short-term or to raise capital to make other long-term purchases.
I think Z&G did a good video talking about how much he made on his flipping business (grading raw cards for quick resell) and really shows the value of being able to lock up your capital for the long-term. He probably would have made significantly more by grading the cards and then holding them but of course…the only way he could churn through that amount of cards to begin with was by selling off the previous PSA cards he had graded.
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@pikachuisbestpokemon That’s his best video. And exactly why I’m holding out as long as possible. I’m going to open a store too at one point but one of you guys said exactly what i would do. Which is the selling lower potential items first holding great potential cards longest
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He appears to be an ok person, but I’d be very weary about listening to him beyond entertainment purposes. He constantly pushes conspiracies and a lot of people in the community have a bad taste in their mouth for him for other reasons. Not trying to get into it or throw this thread off the rails. Just warning ya. I’ve constantly reached out to him to ask why he takes like three non holo cards that graded PSA 8 and act like the three cards prove PSA is pop controlling.
Start selling sooner than later. I huge reason I’m selling lower end cards is to build positive seller feedback, reputation, personal experience, and reach for when I want to sell my bigger stuff.
Being more established will help you greatly when you want to sell big stuff.
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Z&G didn’t do that. He simply showed it. Prior to that video about “PSA being dead”, people buying PSA cards were already doing the whole “is it a strong 10 or weak 10” analysis. That shows you that people were already aware of the fact that there were PSA 10 cards that had obvious flaws on them. Z&G simply showed that PSA had increased their grading standards compared to in the past. The people that are mad are the ones that have old cert PSA cards that now need to show that the card is actually a “10”. Just go on ebay as well and you can see listings where people are openly saying that they have a psa “10” card and then go on to point out the flaws on the card. The weak 10 cards end up selling for less now.
It is what it is at this point. Not a conspiracy theory.
Yup, that’s a good strategy. You need to play both the short-term game and the long-term game IMO. You can probably flip the modern product relatively easily to make profit and then invest the profit into whatever your long-term positions are going to be. You also need to come to terms that some items you flip in the short-term could end up being worth significantly more in the future.
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I need to spend about 2-3 more grand into my own collection then I’m turning the corner into selling extras I’ll start picking up. But it will take me time to do all this so maybe 3-6 months from now. I personally care more about building my own collection over making some side money. I definitely know I could spend that same 3k and buy things I don’t need with good potential. I already missed a ton i knew would be good but by focusing on my own collection first I managed to dodge just about all these new price increases before they happened and now my collection is worth 3 times what I paid. It’s getting out of hand haha but I’m happy with the decisions I make and that’s what makes me sleep better at night 
Edit: @pikachuisbestpokemon Yup I already know that things I’ll end up selling will go up but I can strategize it as best I can to not miss out on selling big hitters too early. And this also ties back into my other response above. If my own collection is about where I want it to be that’s all that matters even if I sell a card for $10 that goes up to $1000 it wouldn’t matter because I’ve already accomplished my main goals
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I have to disagree with you. Taking four PSA cards isn’t really showing anything. And there have been strong tens and weak tens since the beginning. If it’s not a conspiracy nothing is. People struggle to separate the media personality from the individual. He’s pushing conspiracies about them controlling the Pop reports with a sample size of like five cards.