I’m trying to buy booster fresh cards for grading purposes, more than one time I’ve thought about buying a booster box and taking the more expensive cards for grading purposes and selling all other singles off. But never I’ve been able to make the picture complete.
So basically a booster box will cost you 115 euro in a shop, about 100 euro if you can get a deal on it (possibly by buying a case) and I think shops can buy them for somewhere between 85 and 90 euros, but I’ve got no evidence on that.
I’ve used the following rates: On average you’ll pull 27 Rares, 9 Holo Rares, 4 EX + Break combined, 2 Full Arts and 36 Reverse Foils, I’m going to ignore Secret Rares here because for Evolutions there’s no point. You’ll also get 36 online codes which are worth around 15 euro if you’re lucky.
The problem I see is that literally every Common/Uncommon/Rare is being sold for 2 cents there, so that’s about 7 euro estimated for all of them combined, so that’s pretty much pointless. The Holo Rares make 9 euro if lucky, the EX + Break probably 10 euro and the Full Arts maybe 20 euro. Even Reverse Holos seem to be worth next to nothing so that’s maybe 5 euro for the 36 of them. This totals around 66 euro.
I know that in general buying singles is cheaper than buying booster boxes, but the ones buying booster boxes and selling also want to have a profit, don’t they? So how do they actually make a profit, or at least breakeven? What further interests me is that there actually are so many sellers active, so it must be working out for them, right?
I don’t see how buying evolutions boxes at this point will net you a profit selling singles from them. I think the time to strike when it comes to that strategy is right when the set gets released and people are scrambling to complete it and the cards go for premium. Also idk what kind of deals bulk buyers get but I imagine it’s pretty significant.
There is simply no way to open booster boxes and sell the singles for profit unless you get distributor pricing on boxes (which you won’t) and buy in bulk (e.g. tens of thousands of dollars spent).
There are some ways to get lucky, if you pull a SR Ultra Ball from a Sun and Moon booster box you’ll make back your money plus a bit more but on the average you will lose money opening up boxes.
The people who open boxes for singles usually do card sales as a living and are able to make the extremely large purchases that get the cost per box down to a level which justifies opening for singles sales.
It’s really not. I think distributor pricing is AT BEST $75 per box. @thecharizardauthorty could answer real prices though. If you sell for $85-90 as most new sets average, you aren’t making much. However if you buy 500 boxes that translates to around $7.5k in profit.
You would be better off working a part time job than messing with English sealed product. Ethan’s numbers are pretty accurate. Alpha Investments for example pays $77 per box, and probably order 100+ of boxes every release. He would be considered a high volume seller. There are stores that order 1000 boxes of each set.
Also when you sell at say $95 shipped on ebay, pretty fair price, after fees and shipping, you are left with a couple dollars at best. This is also before taxes or any other business costs.
In order to actual achieve a livable wage doing sealed product, you need a full operation. The margins are low, and the time it takes to process orders is simply not achievable as an individual.
I never went for retail because of the low margin, but once I started buying them I realized that bringing in new product would drive older product sales in my store.
Retail product still has its benefits.
Codes always sell out in the beginning. $15 a box is about accurate. You will get roughly $15-$20 in bulk rate product. You will usually pull decent deck trainers, reverse holos, holos in a box. I would not count more than $5-$10 in an average box. Some sets will be higher like BreakPoint. Your ultras just need to make up that difference.
If you get a box at distributor pricing and you can pull ultras to cover half of the box price, usually you broke even.
The first couple of weeks after release are usually very profitable. You always want to be in on the sales as early as possible. Pre-ordering has its pros and cons.
@ Scott
I would argue that it is achievable as an individual. I came to work today at 7 and was finished answering all questions and packaging 240+ orders from the weekend before 12. The rest of the day will be planning orders, advertising, and restocking. It definitely takes a full operation, but getting it done takes being efficient and consistent.
I see many seller’s coming into the market now, but most of them seem to be in price lowering wars, which is going to kill that end of year profit. If something is selling at a price, you do not have to lower it just because someone else did. Same goes for pricing high. If someone else has an item over-priced, dropping $1 below them does not mean it will sell. Evolutions has tanked hard, but is a great set for the future - in my opinion. Any set running the 3 starters as Mega’s is bound to be popular down the round.
Rusty you have the work ethic people always talk about!
Your point about price matching is spot on! So many new sellers are incredibly impatient and think lower price = faster sales. This occurs for non-retail as well.
Saturation is probably the largest issue for new retail product. Evolutions is a great example. So many people wanted to blindly “invest” in evolutions, not realizing that pokemon will simply print more product.
Basically having a sustainable business is very difficult, and not feasible unless you have been in the game for a long time. My local comic shop constantly treads water. WOTC tries to remedy this for MTG by only allowing physical storefronts to buy product. However, retail sealed product is low/easy entry. Therefor the threat of saturation and over competition is imminent.
That’s where I come in! From my major, we have a course called strategic management and from that we talk about 2 different strategies businesses face on the day to day. You can either be a cost leader or differentiate. In the case of reselling or selling already made products, there is no real way to differentiate yourself from your competition. So you need to be a cost leader. Just because you buy low, doesn’t mean you need to sell low, but by doing so, you might be able to weed out the weak. I know there used to be a seller on Pokegym years ago, who would sell everything lower to beat out their competitors… However he went under cause he couldn’t keep up with the demand and wasn’t sustainable. So profit margin is huge!