Since i recently made some money, im looking to find cards to resell. What would be the best strategy to get started?
buy high sell low
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Purchase cards. List them on sites like eBay, Mercari, or TCGPlayer.
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What this guy said^
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With how optimized everything is, finding “easy flips” ain’t so easy no more.
It’s all about high risk, high reward these days. Scared money don’t make money.
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Finding raw vintage gradable (or just mint) cards is extremely time consuming. I spend many hours each day and often find nothing.
There are a couple ideas that I think are worth trying though.
- Try local, less competition and you can see them in person first
- If local is not an option, try making small test orders to various tcgplayer stores and see what kind of condition they send you. I did this the last sale they had and bought 1 card from 50 different stores. 2 stores sent me gem quality raws. I then went back and bought them out of all they had left and it was all mint (this is trial and error and is hard)
- eBay lots, but there’s a million flippers with eyes on these. Many have no job and nothing else to do so it’s tough to win here
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Also trollandtoads buylist is the single easiest way to quickly process cards. I’ve been sending them stuff that is slow selling weekly for years to use credit on stuff that’s easy to move
Buy booster boxes or cases of modern sets at MSRP or lower then sell once they go up due to being out of print or hyped by some YouTuber with a dislocated jaw.
Safe and boring but gets the job done if making a profit is your main goal. You don’t have to try and source raw cards, determine if they’ll grade high and rush to capitalize on hype before prices inevitably tank.
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- get a job
- buy cards for yourself
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Keep spamming facebook groups saying you’ll buy at 70% market value. Eventually someone will bite and you can then go and sell em at 100% market value
bosh
To piggyback what others have said. IMO, your best bet in this current market is to focus more on buying collections and ebay/mercari/etc lots. There is margin to be had on processing/listing/selling NM-HP raw cards this way. It’s a “going back to basics” approach to TCG selling/flipping, that alot of the big fish started off doing but is fairly a bankabke way to make margins on things.
Granted, its unsexy and definitely time consuming, but that point alone is what makes it a still viable option in this current ultra optimized market.
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Reselling in this market can be tough if you don’t have a lot of capital.
Let’s say that you have $100. If you make 20% margin after fees and shipping, you’ve made $20. How many hours were you searching for cards, buying, listing, communicating with buyers, packaging, etc. to make $20? You might have made more money by working extra shifts at your new job.
Knowing a little bit about your life, I will agree with @pfm here. Continue working your job, put money away for important life events, and buy cards for yourself. Reselling will always be available down the line when you are more established.
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For once i might actually take your advice. I still have a lot of cards to sell, and with my new job, i could make some serious money.
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Don’t do it. Too many people in the game. Not worth it.
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I dont actively sell cards but of the cards i have sold in the last few years, pretty much everything is worth significantly more now, compared to when i sold it (funny how that happens, everything i decided to keep is either the same price or less than i bought it for lol)
It seems that its better to spend a lot of time establishing yourself, collecting, building knowledge, experience and inventory. Sourcing things slightly below market to flip at market, especially when u have no foundation, is incredibly difficult and not worth it imo. Spend time sourcing good items you like and let time grow your margins for you. You need to build momentum over time. The point of the first part is to say, without that time and patience, i ended up letting go of several solid items for a fraction of what they sell for now, and was unable to continuously source those items for below market.
This is my opinion based on my experience but take it with a grain of salt bc as i said, im not really a business or much a seller
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Ive consistently put this off because time spent building my career has returned way more than pouring hours into looking at front/back pics ever could.
If my back was against the wall, id start by buying bulk vintage lots and listing them in organized sets. Imo the organized sets (whether its artist lots, species, or types) attract more buyers by playing into the “I didnt know I needed that” impulse because it’s less work and more attractive for buyers than a single card.
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best time to make money easy is right now. Japanese market has resellers selling for big losses.
Easy money right now. Forget trophy cards, forget vintage hunting, forget english ,forget grading. You waste time hunting 100’s of hours looking for singles and end up making less than $1 an hour doing those things…
Just buy everything under $30 sealed in japan at the moment. If you buy in huge quantity, you can buy under $25 sealed easy.
This may change anytime, so now means NOW. Not later
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