I thought maybe the stores that sell cases online (found many on google) would ship them so they’d arrive to the customer on release date, kinda like a pre-release of a video game.
Doesn’t work that way…
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Then you have to work out what you want from all this. Is this just your hobby or do you want to compete in a saturated market without any barriers to entry?
What you’d spend on “a few cases” would be better spent on building an investment portfolio (not cardboard, stocks) if you were willing to do the research.
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Ah ok, thank you. Gonna go with one at $520 shipped.
My goal is to break even or come close. Not 100% hobby but def not investment. I play either way but just want to open tons of packs and move lots of cards.
I would recommend NOT going ahead with buying at retail to break open and resell attempting for profit. You are probably going to have a bad time. It has thin enough margins as it is when buying sub $480 per case through distributors like most reasonable sized sellers do… Though $520 shipped to you is impressively cheap for a retail buy.
Edit to add: If you are sticking with just one case though, I guess it will be a valuable learning experience. Obviously you can’t really possibly lose it all and worst case downside just selling the stuff to T&T or something you can probably only lose a few hundred bucks max. Just hope you are buying the 1 for $520 and not like 10 for $5200 or something.
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Yes, you probably won’t turn a profit on your first box. Older boxes have a higher chance of this occurring, of course this is dependent on the luck of your pulls.
Realistically you can’t do anything perfect or even well right out of the gate. I didn’t expect or even think about “turning a profit” when I bought packs back in the day. However, the experience from those packs helped me down the road. The focus should be about experience, and understanding the hobby.
I would add, this is probably the most competitive time to attempt this venture. New sets are heavily saturated, and I don’t see this changing in the near future. But good luck, and hope you enjoy the experience!
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Honestly I don’t understand how anyone is making good money cracking this stuff open anymore, unless you have loyal customers overpaying for presales on ultras and paying high on your commons. I think this is a great learning opportunity, where I don’t expect you to break even, which is what happened to me, and then I didn’t try it again.
However I must go back to the whole pricing thing, I can’t believe high volume sellers are paying so much on the boxes. Facebook has drop sellers offering at sub $500 for single cases, and with good timing, with recent saturation, I believe I there were opportunities to get evolutions cases at $485. This seems like a pretty big problem to me.
I think with market research you can try some different things. Like I remember buying Mega Rayquaza Ex Decks soon after release, when I saw what the singles went for on ebay. I cracked open 2 cases, because I could sell 2 M Ray from each deck for $20 each, and $4-5 each on the 3 regular rayquaza ex in the decks, which must have cost $17.50 or less shipped for 12. When I saw the Magikarp Pikachu Release, I knew it would do well, so I bought 10 of them at $40 a unit and pieced out 4 of them for 20-25 per promo, 15 for sleeves, 10 per deck box, kept the boxes for storage, and opened packs for fun to sell Ex cards. Surprisingly I struggled to sell the sealed boxes for $50 for months, noone wanted it, and then I gave up, and next year, they got to 100-120.
While Japanese Market can be more difficult, people don’t know how cheap the stuff can be, like the Rayquaza Mega packs, with 6 boosters and a sealed blaziken ex for $7 before shipping. sold blazikens at $5 and opened tons of packs, and had ridiculous fun with outrageous pulls, I had one Mega pack with a Full art Shaymin, a primal, a mega, a SR switch, and a regular ex. So I don’t know what other people have to say about it, but I think these special Japanese products can be fun, and you can even make a profit.
@pieterpie The market is very new to a lot of people. I hear buzzwords all the time from new collectors, “distributor, invest” who really are uncertain. Realistically, any investment, conservative or speculative, takes knowledge & experience. This is why you pay a financial adviser to do that for you, because the average joe simply doesn’t have the time.
There will probably be a breakpoint in the near future for new product. Last year there was a lot of opportunity with new sealed product, and people are still acting off of that perception of the market. Much has changed since.
If you had to pinpoint one issue, I think it would be individuals who are entitled to business/distributor prices. The reality of an individual buying that “cheap” means your items are in larger supply and worth less. It is a classic catch 22. Not sure how long the market will adjust to that reality. It may take the few years for people to notice boxes are still readily available.
The “cheaper, cheaper, cheaper” mentality means everyone owns one, and it isn’t that rare. Balance is very important in a market for everyone involved. I don’t think this is doom or gloom, but there will be a different pattern emerging in the next year or so.
Pieterpie you should hire Smpratte to invest for you lol
High volume sellers need to open new product so that people come to them. If they don’t they’ll just go to their competition and then they lose traffic to their store. People are still picking up stuff from older sets so that traffic is vital.
High volume sellers are still happy to make 20% on sealed boxes as well. It’s not like MtG or Yu-Gi-Oh! where vendors get stuck with product that doesn’t move and then depreciates, Pokemon always sells. Maybe we will finally see this happen in the next year or two in such an oversaturated market, Pokemon might no longer be the “safe” TCG.
It’s just the cost of doing business at this point. I feel a lot of sellers need to alter their business model to lock in pre-orders, I’m really suprised more sites don’t advertise on box opening channels.
Like I said before, it is all about knowing your market and knowing the ways to make profit within it. I have my ways of making profit that I like – but it depends what you like to make money on.
Everyone likes selling PSA graded cards, so I forsee in the future a saturation on certain cards because when the supply is high, demand is low… Simple economics. Find what interests you and what you think will make the best return. The best stock investors also never know what stocks will go up or fall.