Just like any marketplace, the are good sellers and bad sellers. Just look for red flags like a too-good-to-be-true price or bad review score. If you’re doing some level of due diligence you’ll most likely be fine.
Just made my first purchase through cardmarket. I didn’t realize I’d have to pay buy transferring money to the cardmarket bank account itself, rather than just input my credit card number, that was a strange feeling.
Total cost with shipping was 18.55 pounds so if it goes wrong or never shows up from Italy it’s not a gigantic loss.
If it doesn’t show up you are protected by cardmarket and they will issue a full refund, you don’t have to worry about it 
Isn’t that the case only with tracked shipments? Non tracked are a loss you take if it doesn’t arrive
small update no one asked for - the cards just arrived today from Italy 
I didn’t have to pay any more customs, they were just outside my door in a way-too-big envelope when I went out for groceries
I’m not sure if I saved much money using this site vs hunting around ebay considering the shipping costs, but I will use it to buy the nickel bulk cards I like for artist collections if I can get them from a single seller, or if I come across really good deals
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As non tracked mail and buying cheap cards and at least as a Finnish buyer Italy has one of the highest shipping costs on cardmarket, for example Cyprus has very cheap shipping and you can buy tons of cards without them getting a lot more expensive. Germany and Netherlands have good shipping costs too but you can only buy 4 cards from the same seller without the site forcing you to switch to tracked options
That’s good to know! I’ll see about making some purchases from French and German sellers too, but it always looks like the cheapest cards are in Italy.
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Italy has partly a bit bad reputation, there are masses of great sellers naturally but i’ve had somewhat bad experiences too from sellers there so might be better to ask photos of cards before buying. The odds of lost shipment also have been higher from italy but most of the times everything has been okay, but the high shipping costs is something that usualltäy is not worth it for me
Italy has a pretty bad rep for their postal service so there may be a higher chance of stuff going missing while it’s still in the Italian domestic postal service.
I only send stuff tracked to Italy regardless of the cost as I’m not prepared to take the risk. I’ve also had Italian buyers contact me before about taking extra precautions with packaging due to posties not taking care with packages. There was one a few weeks ago where I had to wrap a Gamecube game in layers of plastic before packaging it as they told me their postie always launches packages over their gate into a pool of water.
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The mental image of that postie yeeting the Gamecube really made me laugh.
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+1 to bad experiences with sending to Italy. Far higher loss/issue ratio compared to Germany and France I’ve had over the past five years. Tracking is a must.
That’s too bad, it seems like the large majority of sellers and the least expensive cards are located in Italy
Sorry to dig up the dead.
The shipping is insanely expensive now since Brexit. Be mindful because you’ll easily end up paying over eBay prices once you factor in shipping on a lot of cards.
You’ll easily see charges of ~15 Euro on a lot of purchases if you aren’t careful.
i will chime in and say that EASILY the best option for Japanese cards in the UK is to… buy them from Japan.
Set up a proxy address and purchase from reputable card stores. It will save you money and stress. Also time once you figure it out!