Staying profitable on TCG Player?

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Hello everyone, I’m new to reselling/selling pokemon cards. As a kid I’ve always wanted to sell cards and be able to make some money off of something I loved and with landing a decent job and saving up some capital, I’m finally at the point where I want to make this happen. I’m set on it.

I’ve been buying materials, sorting my childhood collection, I bought a bulk lot so far, set up my TCG Player shop and listed a few cards last night. I’ve previously figured out my whole process to pack and ship a card and its cost, But my problem?? I only took into account shipping ONE card at a time.

I CAN profitably ship one card at a time with a floor price of $.10 for each card using a #10 envelope, but my problem occurs when (hypothetically) someone wants to order 50 cards for $5 and get free shipping on top of that so then I would have to pay $4.70+ on postage alone not even taking into account having to use bubble mailers which are about .05 more expensive than #10’s. I’m stumped.

So I guess what I’m asking is; If there are any high volume, low margin sellers out there, how do you package large quantities of low value cards and paying for sufficient postage (weight, size) while still staying profitable?

Thanks to anyone that replies with feedback and answers. I look forward to becoming closer to solving my issue and making a lifelong interest of mine a hobby.

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Ironically I target sellers like your store to get free shipping when spending $5+. I refuse to pay $2 total for a 10 cent card.
The short answer, you make a decent margin when someone orders 4 or fewer cards, because you can ship in an envelope without extra postage.
You will lose on some of the orders that stay around the $5-$10 range with more than 4 cards.
Overall, you have to hope the orders of 1-4 cards and 100+ cards outweigh the losses on the 5-99 card orders.

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Wait a min, this is MY domain…This is how I started out!!!

BUT unfortunately you really can’t do much about this. However, selling bulk lots would be the best way to do this. If you have a lot of low cost cards, I reccomend that you go on ebay and have them pay shipping. It’s a lot easier for me to sell lots that way (especially when a lot of people are looking for deals)

for those bigger cards however, you can list them on TCGPlayer and if they buy like 2-4 cards for example, I use a envelope, anything over 6 cards (or about 25 total), I use a bubble mailer, which greatly reduces my cost. If your selling cards that are 10 cents, it’s a bit troublesome, but with $1-5 cards (ex’s, V’s, TG’s, IR’s, etc), It’s decent to use bubble mailers for TCGplayer. There are a lot of ways to get cheap bubble mailers too, which can also help.

I used to struggle with low end items, but I usually started out with buying ex/v lots for good prices, then as I made a bigger profit went on discord buy/sell servers and bought fa/Ir bulk lots. Start on Ebay and TCGPlayer and as you get larger move to personal marketplaces like Discord servers. Make sure to also put notifications on the things your trying to buy and if there’s a chance to make a good profit, take it!

If you have enough capital (and IR, AR’s or cheap SAR’s), I reccomend grading with fanatics CGC for $10 and reselling them on ebay or discord servers. With buying I would reccomend buy posts on discord servers with a percentage on how much you want to pay (75-80% is a good margin): I like to use Lowpopping, but there are a lot more servers that you can discover!

the most important part however? BE PAITENT! Bulk lots and low end cards don’t appeal to a lot of people, but there is a audience! It might take weeks, but you’ll be able to offload your lot and buy more items!

Happy Selling (this took way too long to write)

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I would not recommend selling bulk if your goal is to make money. There are so many better options in Pokemon.

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I agree with @Dyl. Take their advice and try market manipulation for a change. Really easy to do, just start your own brand and have little ethics.

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Selling bulk Pokemon to make money

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Me when I write a whole essay on my experiences (keep in mind this is how I started out) only to @dyl to say dont and @lyleberr to get more likes than me

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image

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You would be doing yourself an enormous favor if you stopped caring about things like this.

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It was LITTERALLY a joke lol

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Literally* if you want to update your autocorrect.

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That was genuinely trying to help you on both accounts. I have noticed for months without saying that you seems to have literally autocorrect to litterally in your comments. Maybe I should have dmed you the correction, so I’ll do that now.

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Mb, It sounded blunt. I can’t believe this, I´ve been doing that my entire life

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I’ve heard you mention “number of likes” more than once, so it seemed like you cared about it. Either way, the number of likes means nothing

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I can be very blunt and ik it can rub people the wrong way. I accept responsibility for that

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I appreciate the reply man. I don’t expect to get rich quick, only to build an initial foundation for myself to start branching out and scale up. Lots of people out there are saying it’s “not worth it” and it sounds to me like an opportunity most people aren’t taking advantage of.

Hearing from people like you and others that ACTUALLY do it/have done it currently inspire me to take another step each day towards my goals.

About this, why CGC? I understand it would be cheaper and I guess more suitable for people with low capital, but with CGC prices being significantly lower than PSA, wouldn’t it make sense to just grade with PSA if I can afford it? I see people not even buy graded unless they’re from PSA.

Last thing, do you simply grade anything NM with decent centering to the eye or do you take any extra precautions before sending?

Thanks again for the initial reply and thank you in advance if you decide to answer my questions. I greatly appreciate all the information.

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I guess it depends on how “bulk” the bulk in question is. Some people consider low price IRs bulk, and then there is the non Holo common bulk that is a waste of ink

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With bulk item’s like you have, PSA would be 25/card, which would severely limit your opportunities to sell and make a profit. However, with CGC being $10/card, depending on the card you can really make a profit off of it.

Something I learned from E4: Just because you CAN grade it dosen’t mean you SHOULD grade it.

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$18.99 per card without factoring in shipping and collectors club membership (which is paid for by the free promo cards)

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They still might not have enough, and even then the priority is to reduce cost.

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