Hi all. I just joined after being a long time lurker.
My question revolves around estimated value when doing a PSA submission. By no means am I trying to pull a fast one on them and send in a trophy card at the $15 tier, but I’m not quite sure where to put some cards.
I’ve been building a box of cards to submit for the pat 5 years and am finally getting around to sending them in. There are plenty of cards that would jump tiers if they hit a 10. Should I just value them as if they would be 9s since it seems premature to assume a card would hit a 10. I know that the grader has the ability assess the value and upgrade the tier but I don’t necessarily want to tick a grader off by giving them more work to do.
I don’t think there’s a clear answer to this, but here are some important things to consider.
The declared value is the maximum PSA will pay out in the rare but possible event of them damaging your card during grading. If you declare low, especially on a card that you have a lot of money into, it could hurt you.
PSA will upcharge you if the card has a higher graded valuation than the submission category allows for, but they’ll never downcharge you if you picked a higher tier than warranted. So if you want to save money, it’s best to let PSA do the work of sorting out where the cards fit tier-wise, and only after they’ve been graded. If you pay for a higher tier and the card grades lower than your expectations, you’ve arguably wasted money.
PSA isn’t 100% on upcharges and will often let things slide if they’re on the edge or don’t have recent public sales data.
Graders don’t know what tier cards are submitted at and aren’t involved in upcharging, these are handled by ““Pricing Results Specialists”” after the grades for the submission have been completed. So don’t worry about your tier choices impacting grader mood and by extension your grades.
Personally, I stick most of my cards in the bulk tier and let PSA figure out pricing once they’re graded. But most of my bulk cards are max $1000 in PSA 10 and I wouldn’t be ruined financially if one of them was damaged and I got a low payout. Anything more valuable than that goes in a higher tier with a more significant declared value.
Thanks! I’ve heard a lot of good things especially since the transfer to the new platform
The last point was definitely helpful. I was under the assumption that the grader took care of most of the clerical work as well.
The vast majority of the cards I’ll send through this time around fit in the $15 or $20 tier so my only real concern would be a sub $500 card jumping to to the $75 tier.
I have always put the approximate price I paid for a card rather than the actual value. My last sub had 2 scream psyducks valued at $5 each. The risk is that you put yourself in an bit of a vulnerable position should they damage your cards while grading. Although from my perspective, its also a risk to send out a package marked as $20,000.
Being from Canada, this is also the declared value for customers purposes. While I’ve never (and shouldn’t) have to pay customs on my own cards, I’d rather not have to deal with a situation where they are trying to charge me like $5k on my own order.
But yeah, as @fourthstartcg said, if PSA is going to do selective upcharges on my behalf, it just makes more sense to submit at the lowest teir and let them figure it out (unless you want the faster turnaround). Assuming everything goes smoothly, the declared value doesn’t end up mattering much