I was thinking about how to flip pokemon cards, and I thought back to how people flipped cards by grading them. Is it still viable?
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Starting off with no mint cards laying around, No.
Could make more money flipping burgers.
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Yeah, im still searching for strategies thatll give me good margins.
Can just collect and enjoy Pokémon and not make it about money ???
I think you are overthinking it
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Will second that youre probably better off just getting a job and working some extra hours. Card flipping these days is highly competitive and highly optimized. Its incredibly difficult to just start doing it from scratch, especially in a way thats gonna outpace the work- reward ratio of a minimum wage job
Its actually cheaper and way less time/ work/ risk to just buy cards already graded in the current market. Youd probably need a different angle, that is highly saturated atm
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Make money some other way for now and then just start buying up every reasonably priced PSA 9 1st Ed. Base Set Dragonair on the market, and then wait.
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I agree with the others, the time of easy scavenging and flipping is over since the market is both highly efficient and saturated.
If you’re doing it for fun and to learn about grading there’s nothing wrong though: I would suggest to buy cards for your collection and simply selling the duplicate or the exceptional PSA10 that you could encounter. Consider that “bonus money” if it happens and not a job.
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It’s a lot of time/effort to do now in the post-Covid market and much easier said than done. Not only are prices down on a lot of cards, but the market dynamics are a lot different now too. Many people have tried to make a card selling/flipping business during and after Covid, sort of like all the drop shipping stuff that showed up for other things. However, the people who are having the most success now are the ones who have been in this for a long time now (i.e. pre-Covid/Logan Paul collectors).
So the barrier to making a successful business at flipping or finding good cards to grade is generally a lot higher now. Chances are if it’s a valuable card that could grade high, someone will try and grade it for a profit before they would sell it raw since the premium on certain grades can be huge.
Then you also have to deal with logistics. Getting the card in the mail in good shape, sending it to PSA in good shape, getting it back from PSA in good shape. And then actually making a sale and not getting scammed or something else (lost in the mail, CC fraud, etc). This is why people will pay a big price for PSA 9 or 10s, but this all takes a good amount of time/effort to pull off.
So I would personally recommend collecting as a hobby and maybe try the business side later on. If you’re in it long enough, you can try selling for a profit to collect or buy something else. It’s taken me nearly 5 years to reach a point where I could sell/flip a lot of stuff for a profit, and I have high $10000s tied up in my collection at this point.
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I will tell you what all the top most successful capital-limited flippers do whether or not they realize it.
The question you have to ask is “can someone with more money replicate my strategy 10x-100x over?”
For example. When the Yu Nagaba Eevees we’re released, everyone knew they were great candidates for grading and flipping. You could have went in and bought a set for $150 on release, pay another $150 to grade them. Pray they all get 10s.
Let’s say you got sequential 10s and you sold them at $382 → PSA 10 Pokemon Card Japanese Yu Nagaba Eevee Complete 9 set Limited Promo | eBay. ~$50 in ebay fees.
~$30 profit, assuming you get straight 10s, the buyer is good and your shipping cost from PSA is only $15. You are probably paying yourself less than $10 per hour. The problem is that everyone knew the Yu Nagaba had the right level of uniqueness to be flippable, so you are competing with people with way more money, access to cheaper copies and grading at scale.
In contrast, right before the Yu Nagaba Eevees came out, I sold a few Pikachus for around $100 USD. I paid $5 each raw. After grading and fees maybe $50-60 profit per card.
The advantage I had at the time (prices have since dropped) is that a person with infinite money couldn’t go back in time and buy them at scale and replicate what I did. Raw copies are $30 today and I already had it graded in hand when the price spiked up.
Again, the #1 secret is to do something that can’t be replicated at scale.
The #2 secret is to get a decent job and use the income you generate to build your own collection. In my experience that’s the best way to accidentally make a good investment in some card.
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In situations like this, I always ask myself: what can I potentially do better than someone who is already in the market?
There are already numerous retailers who specialize in what you are describing. What added value would you provide to make me choose to shop with you instead of an established retailer?
If, for example, you have an incredible amount of money or an extremely good distribution network, it might make sense to enter the market.
However, if you simply want a piece of the cake and have no competitive advantage, I would argue that the market is so saturated that the time investment wouldn’t be worthwhile for you, as prices are already highly competitive.
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The market has never been more competitive and optimized. There are countless people today burning 1,000 calories to earn $20. Having a job you enjoy and using disposable income is just a better balance for the average person.
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Just collect, relax, and enjoy it.
I feel like inevitably your collecting goals will change over time. When that happens, sell what you no longer want and use those funds to buy more of what you do.
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I can vouch that it is possible to start up a flipping side hustle, but it takes a ton of prior knowledge and experience to pull it off, plus starting capital.
The problem as others have stated is that it is super super competitive and there is a serious learning curve. Even with 10+ years of experience, I have made multiple mistakes over the last year and a half and learned my lesson. Eventually I learned how to understand which cards to look for, and how much I could pay for certain cards to meet my profit goal of 30-50%.
The other big problem is balancing the amount of time you spend searching to get it to a level that is financially worth it. When I am actively buying, I aim to spend no more than 30 mins a day looking for cards, but the first few months as I learned what to look for, I definitely spent more time searching for cards than I probably should have.
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Another scenario to consider. You buy a bunch of NM cards online, send to PSA to grade, and they all hit 10s. But in that 2 month time frame, the market went down 25% due to the current economy (layoffs across the country are ramping up big time).
Would losing money on those cards destroy your financial situation or your joy for Pokémon? I’d bet yes for both.
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alot of these types of cards are just better to sell raw on release and just let other ppl grade them (special delivery pika was a great example, think they were going for like $150+ raw and alot of them would get 8s,9s right outta the pack), unless you are playing the first to market psa 10 game which is difficult.
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Crazy amount of people here telling you to not grade and flip because someone with more money than you can do the same thing.
To answer your question, yes you absolutely can make money buying raw cards grading, and selling them back into the market.
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The issue nowadays is margins are so thin, you have to be very efficient and deal in decent quantity or it doesn’t become worth it. The people who are successful are ultra efficient at sourcing, packaging (to send to PSA) and listing. They also have the capital behind them to be grading multiple hundreds of cards a month. If you can do all of those things quickly, you can sacrifice margin and still come out with a decent hourly rate.
Unfortunately the only way to get good at those things is to just… do them. So I’d say get stuck in, but only if you enjoy it! Its going to be a long time as you build up capital and refine your processes before your hourly is close to even working a second job. If you don’t enjoy it, there is no point.
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It’s less that and more is the time and effort worth it for a chance at turning a small profit?
Some people in this thread have already laid out how much work and luck is needed just to turn a ~$30 profit. In a lot of scenarios, you might even be in the red because you’re at the whims of volatile external factors such as graders, market swings and global economic conditions.
Not really the kind of encouragement I’d want to give a high school kid imo
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The thing is, Vertemes is still very young and does not have a lot of experience (and starting capital). So the advice that most of the people are giving him - focusing on his day job and collecting the cards he likes to organically grow his collection - is very valid.
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They dont call me the “baby of the e4 server” for nuthin​:sob:
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