I am curious to know what experiences people have had selling their cards on PSA’s vault. Here is a summary of my experience:
Pros: (when things work)
Super easy to sell for multiple reasons - (a) the moment items hit the vault, PSA makes proactive offers that you can choose to accept, and a lot of those make good financial sense - if accepted, payout is instant. (b) If PSA offer is not attractive, (and yes, there are plenty of low ball, bottom of the barrel offers as well), one can list it on eBay instead)
No need to “ship to authenticator” or worry about shipping/handling/order fulfillment
If orders are sent for grading, PSA makes offers right after grade reveal and before the cards even get loaded up to the vault - again, hypothetically, this is a great feature for sellers
In general, super quick payout through Stripe
Overall, fee structure is far more attractive than selling directly on eBay through your own store … so payout for sellers is much better
Cons (when things don’t work smoothly):
Customer support is beyond atrocious - it is EXTREMELY POOR. There is no phone support. Only option is to email Vault. The PSA customer service phone number does not work for Vault issues, and they just pass the buck. If emailed, the turnaround time is beyond atrocious, if you are lucky to get a response at all. This is a HUGE improvement area.
False advertising for Vault Submissions by PSA - recently, I went to a show that was advertised by PSA for dropping off vault shipments for a 3 day event in Virginia. I show up on Day 3 only to be told by the booth staff (“Edwin”) that they stopped taking Vault drop-offs after day 1. This is just pure false advertising on PSA’s part, and technically Vault is not even part of the PSA operations.
False Promises on Loading Times - for my first drop-off, I was told by “Alex” that all cards would be loaded into the vault within 8-10 business days. The reality - it took 25 business days, and I had to email repeatedly to get things moving.
Uncertain payout for offers accepted right after grade reveal - If you do accept PSA’s offers right after grade reveal, payout is extremely slow, if it happens at all. I am still waiting after accepting 14 offers on October 9, as all are still in the “Processing Payout” stage as of October 21, and all the other cards from this order were already loaded on to the vault. Normally, payout is instant if you accept PSA’s offer.
System glitches (with no qualified support) - I accepted an offer for a card I listed on eBay from my Vault account. Someone made an offer for $1530 and I accepted. Well, eBay shows the listing as “sold”. However, there is no record of the sale in my “sold” folder withing “My Collection”. The card is sitting in my Vault in limbo - I can’t relist it and sell it again, and there was no payout to begin with. Of course, Vault email support on the issue has been absolutely atrocious by a “Gina”. That is all you get …..
So in summary, when things work as they are supposed to it is great. However, there are huge areas for improvement in terms of customer support/service, turnaround times, expectation setting and transparency.
I have a huge problem with not having positive control over my own stuff. So I can’t see myself ever utilizing the PSA Vault. You’d have to put a tremendous amount of faith into the integrity of PSA’s staff and those with access to these cards. I’m not willing to. I barely have faith in them enough during my actual card grading submissions.
Even for my highest end cards ($5,000 and up raw) I’d probably hand deliver for a same day grading thing.
I can’t deny it may have its purpose and benefits, but I don’t believe I’m the demographic that these pros apply to either.
I agree there is definitely a balance here between control versus convenience. I suppose for ultra high-end ($5k+ raw), even getting something graded requires a leap of faith, even if you hand deliver. That being said, being on this platform helped me generate very close to 6 figures in sales in October alone so far in about 15 days (in USD, not yen!), and saved me from needing to package, buy insurance, ship many packages and then still worry about UPS/Fedex screwing up for each transaction. Also, I think my buyers save on ridiculous eBay fees, and taxes for intra-vault transfers. When people in CA pay 10% in sales taxes, a $1000 card can save them $100 if they keep it in the vault. My largest single sale was over $6K.
Definitely there are pros and cons, even for high-end stuff.
I have only had good experiences using the vault. The two big reasons I use it have been mentioned: no sales tax on purchases and easy of selling from it. I have saved a decent amount of money by sending some purchases to the vault (I just wish shipping for items held there less than 90 days was cheaper). Sales have never been easier than through the vault. After shipping, insurance and ebay fees I net more if I sell through the vault than on my own. The biggest perk so far is the PSA offers through the vault. I have sold more cards through this than any other online way. They give such a good number most of the time that it is hard to say no.
I use it for buying but I do find my submissions (currently only eBay buys) take a little longer to get into the system than compared to say Fanatics Vault on average (they are certainly less transparent about when things are received and processing etc), and there have been one or two hiccups. But support has always been very responsive for me, and I’ve never lost or had anything damaged with them. Overall good experience as a buyer.
a major con is that they still put cgc graded cards in that nonsense “non sport trading cards” category (back when it was the ebay vault u could fix this yourself but its not possible afaik with the psa vault)
#5 was finally resolved after over two weeks. There was no explanation as to why it happened. But I can list it again. My guess is buyer retracted their offer.
#4 I am still waiting for payment to process. 14 offers accepted on Oct 9 from PSA right after grade reveal. All 14 are still in “processing payment” stage 20 days after accepting. Customer service, if you can call that, it abhorrent. No updated from PSA at all and all 14 are still in limbo - not in vault, and not paid for.
I came back to the hobby recently after 4 years. I do recall the Ebay Vault but I didn’t try it back then and now it’s the PSA Vault instead. I wanted to try out the vault as they took standardized images of the cards and I have great expectations of future features that only PSA could bring to the table.
I made my submission on the Oct 18th, dropped off all my cards (2 submissions in a single box, since each submission was limited to 50 cards) on the same day and they were delivered to New Castle, DE on Oct 21st.
I got an email today saying that 6 cards have been processed and are officially in the vault. So that took about 7 business days (6 if you exclude the day it was marked delivered since it was in the latter half of the day). The remaining 50+ cards have had their image taken but not officially labeled vaulted but that’s enough for me to be sure that they’ve received my cards.
My biggest concern with this is that the vault submission didn’t show up in their system, nor did my tracking number show up in the “Find My Package” feature on the Orders page. I assume this may be because this service was originally Ebay Vault until last year, though I haven’t heard anything about how PSA planned to further integrate this into their system or how to improve the process.
On another note, my PSA and Ebay accounts used to have different emails. After some quick investigation, I found that PSA recommends making your emails the same as when you buy a card on Ebay, they just send it to the PSA account with the same email. If a PSA account doesn’t exist with that email, you can make an account with that email after buying, log in, and the card you bought will show up just fine.
I do want my cards using my old PSA account though so I changed my Ebay email address to match it. After some time later, I bought 2 cards on Ebay and had it sent to the vault. One landed in the account with the current address, the other landed in the account with the old address.
I emailed them asking them to consolidate it and how to prevent this from happening again, though there’s not much that I can see that I can configure from the buyer’s end, but I’ll see how that inquiry goes.
ebay vault was so much better even tho it existed when prices were in a bit of a rut coz u can basically churn thru cards that u bought for 400 and sell em for like 500 all day long coz u are paying no fees which u wouldnt be able to do today
Yeah, I’ve found this transparency issue a bit annoying too and has made me slightly more reluctant to ship to PSA vault over Fanatics for non-eBay PC purchases (maybe irrational?). I still like the service and I’ve never had a problem with anything getting lost, but the minor hiccups around intake do sometimes give me pause. To anyone from PSA Vault watching - improving this would be great!
(back when it was the ebay vault u could fix this yourself but its not possible afaik with the psa vault)