1 Year of Selling Sports Cards: Selling (Part 2)

Following Part 1 (buying), this episode breaks down the sell-side of my first year—$98K on eBay—and the exact lessons that moved the needle: how to seed early feedback, how to structure PWE vs. bubble mailer shipping (and when to use non-machinable stamps), the true cost of fees & promoted listings, and a negotiation framework so you stop caving under pressure. We also cover budgets to avoid forced sales, when wax/singles make sense (rarely), and why multi-market selling unlocks faster exits.

You’ll learn

• A clean new-store launch checklist (so the algorithm finds you)
• Shipping by value: PWE under ~$20; bubble + guards over ~$20
• Fee math and when your target price needs ~20% headroom
• Boundaries & focus to raise ASP and reduce time drain
• A negotiation template (anchor, comps, “happy number,” walk-away)
• Budgeting to keep control of timing (no panic auctions)
• Wax vs. singles: patience, demand windows, and why most plays underperform
• Prospecting as a portfolio + buy/sell journaling
• Which marketplace fits which card (and why)

Key Takeaways

• Feedback first → visibility → sales velocity
• Right shipping method = higher margins + fewer headaches
• Model fees before listing; price to a happy number and stick to it
• Budgets protect you from selling at the wrong time
• Sell where the buyer already is (channel-card fit)

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:13

Hello everyone and welcome to Slapnomics episode 30. Last episode on Slabnomics, we talked about the one-year journey that I've had for buying and selling sports cards. I went over the buying in focus for that one. Today we're going to get to the fun part, which is when that cash register rings and when you made that sale. So we're going to talk specifically about selling and what I've learned in the past year. Now, if you haven't listened to Slabnomics before, welcome. What my mission is is to help sports cards enthusiasts make better financial decisions. So with that being said, I'm going to start with my journey over the past year, talk about how I got into the selling portion, mistakes that I made, things that I learned. I will start even with how to set up eBay stores and stuff like that. I won't take too much time on it, I promise. So with that being said, in the past year, I sold$98,000 of sports cards on the eBay platform. How did I first get that set up? Because before that time I did not have an eBay store at all. Well, you can find some challenges early on, first in what supplies you're going to need. Second, how you're going to actually ship things out and what that looks like. And third, how to actually get those sales to start rolling in. So, first of all, setting the store up on eBay itself is pretty intuitive. They guide you through the things that you need to put in there. There are some more advanced things that they encourage you to do, like put a welcome video. That took me a lot longer to get up there. But by and large, you should be able to get to the point where you have your store up. Now, once you do that and you have all these products to list, you'll find that the listing process itself is also very easy and very guided. So it'll show you the fields that you need to input, you'll work your way around that, you'll learn which ones are needed and which ones are optional. And you'll get to the ability to be able to host your listings. Now, once you have a few up though, you're probably going to have difficulty actually selling things. And this is because the eBay algorithm doesn't know who you are and the people that are going to like buying from you yet. You're just one store out there in the midst of thousands and thousands doing the same thing. So what you're going to need to do in order to get past that, I'm going to give you a tip that I discovered by myself. And that is have your friends buy your first few orders. For my first dozen orders, I put them up on the store. I reached out to friends, I told them what I was doing, and I said, please buy this and I will refund you the full purchase for it. You're going to be eating the cost of the shipping on that and the cost of whatever that little card is that you put in there. Just put in pretty much a worthless card. You're eating a dollar in shipping. It's worth it, I promise. After you get those in, just follow up with your friends. Hey, please leave a review for me. Talk about how good the shipping was. Talk about how the accurate, how accurate the description was, anything else that you want to focus on for making the name brand of your store. The second important thing is how you're actually going to ship things out. Now, I found after a lot of trial and error that there are two different ways that you can send sports cards. There's going to be over$20 and under$20. Now, under$20, you can send what's called a PWE or a plain white envelope. This is a very, very small cost. So you can sell cards that are anywhere from two on up when it comes to the dollar amount this way, and you'll eke out a little bit of a profit. As you get going on this, you're going to find that scaling it is a challenge. So maybe like me, you'll end up moving up in your cards. Maybe you'll find better ways to be able to do bulk like this. I'm not sure. But I found that the time invested in it made it that I needed to keep upping the dollar amount of my cards so that spending 15 minutes or spending five minutes on the shipping wasn't something that killed my entire ROI. But in order to send those things, you pretty much need a stack of top loaders, painter's tape in order to close the top of it, and then those PWE envelopes. Now, one of the challenges that you first might come through is that you get envelopes that look that get to the buyer and look like they've been run over by a truck. And this is because it goes through the sorting machine before it gets sent out to whatever location it's supposed to be sent out to. So that can cause some damage to the envelope itself. I never found that there was much card damage. Maybe one time out of probably 250 that I sent, a buyer complained that the card didn't look great. So that can be a cost of doing business. Or if you do want to spend a little bit more on shipping, what I found is you can get non-machinable stamps and you can put those onto your envelopes instead of using the eBay postage. A disadvantage of that is that you're not going to be able to use the eBay label. You're not going to use updated tracking through their system. You're going to actually hand write out your envelope and then slap a special stamp that you get from USPS on it. The cost is a little bit more, it's a little bit more manual, and you don't have the tracking. So what you really could do if you want to have the tracking and go through the system, but also make sure that things don't end up looking like it got run over by a truck, you could go through the USPS label that you get through eBay and slap a non-machinable sticker on it. But then your shipping costs are going to be more. Now, if you're going to ship things that are over$20, I would use a bubble mailer. Get those on Amazon, get them in bulk. The size that I used was six by four. And then depending on how you're going to ship your cards, you could either get guards, these plastic pieces that go on each side, and you can tape those around the card, slide it into an envelope, and you're pretty much ready to go on that stage. So that's how I got started out in sending eBay cards. Now, I don't know if your experience was like that, if you started like that talking to you guys that have been selling for some time, or if you went a different path, but that's how I started going because I thought I was going to make a whole bunch of money just going out, buying collections, grading stuff, and then also selling out the book that I didn't want to grade. So you learn really quickly, and this is a lesson for selling, that your time is going to be your most precious asset. Now, at first, what I thought was my time is what I have the most of. So a lot of people aren't going to be doing this full time like I am. That means that they might not be able to take advantage of opportunities that arise because they won't have the ability to go through 20,000 cards one by one and find the gems. So they might be cutting corners. Well, what I've found is one, it's very, very unlikely you're going to find diamonds in the rough that way. And two, it's really about trying to find ways that you can replicate things and not try and just get lucky. So as I was saying before, about the early stages of my process on selling on eBay, it was really about how do I scale the business up and make sure that each time I'm getting a certain amount of profit. Because the first thing that you really get hit in the face with is fees on eBay. 13%, if you want to add promoted listings fees, which basically move your listings up in the search rankings on eBay, then you're going to have to spend a percentage on that as well every time something sells. So between that and the shipping costs, you might be staring down the barrel of a 30% cost of your selling. And that can be prohibitive when you're buying all of your inventory. So the first key lesson being make sure that your time is getting sufficient ROI is an easy one to say, but a really hard one to practice. Because at the end of the day, how do we find where the ROI is going to be on our time? There aren't publicly available lists that say if you do this one strategy of cards, then you're going to get this ROI, or do this other strategy and you'll get this. It's mostly trial and error that you start figuring out what activities are going to be worthwhile or not. Finding guideposts in order to limit all of the things that you're going to do is something I found really helpful. So that leads me into the second thing that I want to talk about, which is how to find boundaries. Because one of the mistakes I would say that I made was just going after so many different things at one time. I went down too many rabbit holes because that's who I am. I would start looking at this one thing. Oh man, I'm really interested in this certain set, say 1971 Topps baseball set. Really interested in these cards. I think it's an awesome, clean design. There's a lot of stars in that set. So I'm going to get to know that set really well and I'm going to find opportunities on eBay where I think I can go buy those cards. And so you start doing that for a while. And then after a while, that leads you into maybe something else. So say I really like that Nolan Ryan card in the 71. Well, now I'm going to start looking at his rookie in the 68, or maybe I want his first standalone in the 69. So I start looking at those things and I start getting more into those sets. And then pretty soon I've ADHD forgotten my 1971 stuff, and I've moved on to these other different ones. So you start touching a lot of things, but you never really master a lot of things. And mastering sets or mastering cards and demand and understanding where it comes from is how you're able to find those opportunities to buy and then sell down the line. So find something that you see as an opportunity and do a lot of research before you start simply buying because you're not going to be able to sell as well as you think you are. When you're buying, you start doing mental math of I'm going to buy this for$50 and I'm going to be able to sell it for$70. And maybe you think to yourself, of course, I don't think I'm going to be able to do that in a week, but that's$70, maybe I'll wait on in a month. And now I have this$20. And you've already kind of put that$20 profit in your pocket because you think, I think this player whose card that is is going to go off more than people think. I think it's undervalued in the market itself. So people will catch up to that. And after a month, they'll buy it. Well, there's a couple different things that can happen. First, that player's performance can go down. Second, even if that player isn't playing, their goodwill in the market can go down. Maybe they get into the news for the wrong thing, or just other players kind of soak up demand. So a lot of times you end up saddled with all of these cards that you bought, and these$20,$30,$50 cards keep adding up and they just sit around in your inventory. Because to be realistic with you guys, you don't sell everything that you buy. And you sure as hell don't do it quickly. So unless you have some sort of channel that you have assured sales for, it's really going to be a lot more difficult to sell than buy. So that's why in my first episode that I released a week ago, I talked about how buying strong is really the key differentiator for this. But also understanding that I invested$50 into this piece, I took out that liquidity, put it into this piece that's holding it. And that might become less, that might become a little bit more, but I'm going to have to also think about all the different costs that are associated with it. So that was a lot of words. But most of that is to say be careful about when you're buying something. Because if I buy something for$50 and I know that I'm going to have to pay 15% of fees on whatever I sell it for, that means I'm it's going to have to go up 20% in the market just for me to realize any small inkling of profit. So really important lesson that I learned there. You don't want to get saddled with a whole bunch of junk that's just sitting around waiting for it to make you right. So how do we combat that impulse to just buy everything that we think is undervalued just to prove us right? Because I think that's a bias that many of us have. Well, first, sleep on things. I'm the biggest proponent of just sleeping on a sale, putting it out there, hitting someone up on Instagram when you see something that you're going to buy, but also when you're going to sell, make sure that you really do want to sell that card at that point and why. So that might sound a little bit pie in the sky, as if, well, is it really up to me to be able to sell that card? Well, I think if you're buying the right cards that are in demand, then it really is up to you. I'll share a story of a recent communication that I had with a prospective buyer, and maybe that'll help you guys understand a little bit more what I mean. So I had a card up on eBay, was uh 2017 Select Mbappe Copper out of 49. Now that's Mbappe's rookie. To me, it's one of his best rookies, although a lot of people will go look at 2017 Topps Chrome. Mbappe, of course, is a major player as far as active players go. He's definitely in the top echelon. So having that card and being a very rare one and one of his rookies means that I have to really decide what the right time is to let that card go because I purchased that card and I was able to crack it and grade it. So I was able to realize about a 2x value just by the grading process. So now it's, well, I could instantaneously realize the paper profit of that and sell it. Or is this the kind of card that I think is going to appreciate into my selling window that I'm looking at? So I sat out for a long time. As the market continued to go up, Mbappe's card started popping off in the last month or two, and I put it up on eBay just to start fishing. So I put it up for$5,500. You people reach out to me very quickly on that card, which is always a good sign. So they reached out, we were having some conversations. Couple of them lowballed me with an offer. One came in with a very decent offer of$4,200. So keep in mind that I still don't know if I want to sell this thing, and I'm happy to kind of sit on it and wait and see how things continue to go. So we start conversing back and forth. I say, well, I really was looking to get five on it. It's always nice to anchor to a nice round number because sometimes people will mentally come up to that number because they like round numbers too. We all do. I'd really like to get that 5k. The card ladder value, by the way, was 5,500, which is exactly where I had it on eBay. So so asking$100 deal is certainly a decent enough price point as a seller. I think you can justify that and you can defend that. Although, to be honest, you don't need to justify your prices to anyone. If you don't want to sell it unless it reaches this crazy price, keep it at that crazy price. But just understand that's going to take a lot longer to sell because you have to wait for the market to catch up with you. Anyways, he starts at 4-2. I say, what about five? He says, Well, I'd rather do 4.4. If this sounds familiar, you've probably been in this game a while. And I say, look, 4.8 is my number. And he goes, How about 4'6? And I just go, 4'8. And he thinks about it for a little bit, I think six, eight hours. And then he comes back and he says, okay, you got a deal on the 4.8. So now the reason that I want to tell this story in this podcast about lessons learned from a year buying and selling is that there were many things that went into this that I probably wouldn't have done even two to three months in. First off, if you put things for a higher price point on eBay, especially for higher ticket cards, it's not necessarily because you're trying to get people to buy on eBay. For me, and I've seen this with a lot of sellers, it's actually because you want to start conversations around that, which may allow you to sell that card in another channel. So putting it at five, five means that if someone buys it for that on eBay, cool. But if someone wants to buy it in another way, then we might be able to do a deal that is more beneficial to me in terms of me not having to pay those eBay fees. The negotiation part is the second thing that I want to highlight. When I first started out, I would just simply give people what I thought was a fair number right off the bat. And I think this is a cool thing to do. I wish that the hobby was in a place where we could do this, but I think human nature wants to be able to bargain on these things. I found that it's a much more positive experience for everyone and a better result as a seller, starting a little bit high. Don't go crazy. Okay. Don't put it at 3x because then no one's going to talk to you. But put it 20% over comps, 15% over comps, somewhere in there if it's a desirable card. And people will start coming to talk to you. And from there, you can start bargaining down. But at the end of the day, this is my second key point that I'm going to give you. At the end of the day, you should have the number that you want to be happy with on that card. And you should not deviate from that number. Because when it comes down to it, you can look back on that and you can say, that was the number that I wanted to get. It was fair and I got it. And if that number is backed up by data, by anticipation, just by understanding how the market is and where the market might be going, then people will come to that number. I come to that number as a buyer all the time. And I totally understand where people are, but it's a lot of testing, a lot of gauging, a lot of building that skill of being able to negotiate well. So we talked about something that I did well. Let's talk about some of the mistakes that I made to be able to learn those lessons to get to that point. So I went through a lot of different mistakes on the buy side, which led to me having mistakes on the sell side. One of those biggest ones that I would want to bring up is that if you force yourself into liquidity issues, you're going to sell low. Meaning if you overextend yourself on the buy side, you're not going to be able to wait long enough to realize the gains that you should on the sale side. So how do we talk about that practically? Give yourself a budget for sports cards. I don't care if this is your full-time job and you're a millionaire, or if this is a part-time gig and you work part-time jobs to get by, to make ends meet, and everything in between. You should have a budget and you should stick to that budget. Because what that empowers you to do is to wait for the sale as long as you need to. There have been many times where I've had a really good investment thesis about why I wanted to buy a card. I bought the card and then I was only able to wait for maybe a month, even though it was going to take a few months for that investment thesis to get sussed out because maybe I had gotten too excited and I'd overextended and bought too much in that month, and maybe some crazy bills came up, you know, car troubles. We have European cars. Those things pop up and all of a sudden you're in a cash crunch and you have to liquidate. And you have to liquidate at a time where you don't think it's the best time for you to liquidate and in a means by which it might be too fast. When you say to yourself, I'm really under the gun here, I got to put everything up on auction, just take what I can get. That's where people get their good buying opportunities. So if I bought a card in the baseball off season and I'm gonna wait until the in season starts to cook up and we start to get into March and everyone's getting more excited about baseball, but then something came up and I'm gonna have to sell it in December. Well, I'm gonna take a loss because it's still the off season and that time period hasn't switched to where people are more excited and the demand is higher. And that's what I was waiting for, right? So now I'm not only going to probably get a little worse of a price because I'm selling it at auction in a low demand season, but I'm also eating the fees and the shipping cost. So letting the time ROI fully build itself is going to be pivotal for avoiding selling mistakes. Another mistake in terms of things that don't work. Well, is also tied to patience, and that is buying and selling wax. Buying and selling wax can be one of the most profitable ROIs in the hobby. It's very simple why that is. If the demand goes up or even stays consistent for long periods of time, your supply is going to continue going down, and that's going to cause the price to keep going up to keep that supply and demand in equilibrium. But there's a few reasons that makes wax buying really tough. First, you don't know how well received that product might be. And that can cause prices to instantly crater because today they usually print a lot of product. So your baseline is going to be that the product must be pretty well received in order for that supply and demand metric to continue working in your favor over the long term. What happens more often is that it's not very well received and prices instantly go down. So you can safeguard yourself by buying very high profile brands like Prism, Tops Chrome, but even those on a year-to-year basis, sometimes they're good, sometimes they're not. Depends on the rookie class of most of the time, right? Second, on a human level, it's really hard not to bust wax. We love doing it, right? I like busting wax as much as the next guy. So I find that my supply starts going down myself over a long period of time. And the third thing for this, this applies to a lot of things, but specifically for wax, the time is going to be more than most investment. There's not going to be a lot of reasons why demand is going to spike at certain time periods for certain things. So it's really hard to forecast those for wax. Sometimes you can. I've tried to do that a little bit, but it can be really hard to get timing right. Ask anybody in Wall Street, and they know that's the case. The time value of money and the fact that it's going to be sunk into that for an indeterminate amount of time makes wax more of a very long-term buy and hold. If you know this product is going to be gangbusters, if you think there's solid metrics behind why it's going to continue to be in demand in 20, 30 years, you got to sock that wax away and you've got to write it up on your accounting sheet as a long-term thing you're not going to think about for five, 10 years. That's just the reality of the thing. And now that leads me into more of a short-term thing because versus wax, the other thing that people mostly bring up is singles, because busting wax is a bad investment. Said that on my last podcast about buying. I'm also going to say it here. You might get lucky once in a while. You're going to see all of the things that Topps and Panini put out about busting wax. And this guy got this out of this blaster box at Walmart and it's a$10,000 card. Those are marketing ploys to make you go into Target and buy a bunch of stuff that makes Topps and Panini money. So buying singles in the short term, is this usually going to be a good investment? No. You know why? Because most players are going to go down. They're going to go down in your attention because other players are going to pop up and take your attention. They're usually going to go down in performance or expectation or hype because most players just level off. They do their job, they do well, they continue to grow little bit by little, but they all continue to grow little bit by little bit. Not everybody is going to be a GOAT. And then you have second-tier players who are elite, but their markets usually plateau or even go down a little bit. So I would say 98, 99% of players are just going to go down over time. So if you thought I was going to get on this podcast and tell you that selling is super easy, sorry guys, that's not the case. But I'm going to be real with y'all. It's hard. So if that's the case, how can people make money? Well, sometimes you can make money on prospecting. If you think that the market isn't really seeing the upside of this young player and you want to throw some darts at this, you can go for it. But you have to understand that you're going to have to get that timing right really quickly. You're going to have to have a really good feel for not only if that player does well, but if they're in the right position for their market to expand. Are they likable? Are they the right archetype for people to want to invest in them instead of others? But yes, you can absolutely make money prospecting and you should do it in the same way that you would do in the stock market if you're trying to buy penny stocks or smaller companies. You should buy a broad range of these guys and you should have a portfolio of prospect. I know that sounds like a lot of work, but if you do that and you also keep track of what your notes were around that player, I'm going to buy this parallel of this player in this year of this set. I think he is going to do X, Y, and Z, which is going to change his market perception. And that's going to result in this boost in his market. Start doing that so that you can track and see where you went right and where you went wrong. Because even if you get most of the things right, maybe there was something you weren't thinking about. And that comes to light in six months. And all of a sudden, you don't remember like, was I making the play for this or for that? You have all these things going on in personal life. So you're not usually going to be able to think so clearly about why you made that decision. So doing that over time is going to give you the perspective of where you usually go right, where you usually go wrong. And then you start cutting off those go wrong habits and you start cultivating where you see things that happen the right way. And then you start getting a sense more and more of how things are going to play out for real, not just what the hypothesis was. Sometimes we get lost in our hypotheses and we keep waiting for them to come true. And you can find out pretty quick, I think, if you were right or not. So highly encourage keeping a buying or trading journal and keeping why you're doing the things that you're doing so that you can continue being better and better about the scouting of sports cards in the buying process and the selling of it. So prospecting is definitely one way. A second way, I think, is understanding what the macro conditions are and how they're going to change in the future. Now, I've talked about this to death, so I'm not going to go into soccer too much for you guys. But when you have a small market and you know that there's a big inflection point coming where a lot of people are going to pop into this market, you know that the demand side is going to get much, much higher than it's ever been. But what you don't know is where that demand is going to trickle into. So being able to figure out where that might be and why, having that hypothesis again, just like the prospecting, but this time you can look at those other markets and understand what people are going to really want. Understanding your buyers is a really strong way to become a better seller. Because at the end of the day, if you've made a really good purchase at a really good price and now you've want to capitalize on this play and move on to another thing, you want to liquidate your profits, realize the gain, well, you're going to have to find prospective buyers. So a few tips on being able to find those prospective buyers. Number one, make sure to constantly build your reputation. That means even if you don't end up doing deals with people that you're buying from, make sure to be a good person, make sure to be kind. You can be firm, but be kind, be professional, be polite. Keep doing those things. You will keep adding more people to your network who you bought from and who thus trust you. And those people can become prospective buyers from you. Also, make sure to plug yourself in to many different marketplaces. Just like on the buy side, I'm not going to be able to buy everything from eBay, right? There's also card shows. There's other marketplaces like Alt Golden Fanatics, and there's just people in local areas, uh, Facebook Marketplace. You never know what you're going to find out there in that Wild West. So having all these buying channels also needs to be as important on the sell side because some cards are going to perform much better on certain marketplaces. This is something that I'm trying to develop as a tool, as a resource for you guys very soon. Which marketplaces are best for which cards? It's going to take a lot of data analysis, but we will get that. Slabnomics.com is where all of that is going to be hosted. So take a break right now. Go to slabnomics.com, put your email in, go to your email, confirm that you want to be on the list. And let me tell you, this is going to be the most fundamental resource for making better financial decisions in sports cards collecting and investing. Everything you need is going to be there within one year, it's going to be that pivotal. So having those different selling channels, understanding what does better where, and understanding what days are going to be better to sell into are all things that can increase in a linear fashion, little by little, how your sales start stacking up. And those dollars and cents stack up and compound. So to get back to the personal journey part of it for me, I told you guys I started on selling a lot on eBay. Then you start doing some private deals. But at the end of the day, what I am finding more and more is being able to log why I'm buying something and also know the type of person, prospective buyer that I'm going to sell that to and why I'm going to be able to sell that to them in a way that benefits me. Mostly, I think that's going to have a lot to do with seeing demand rise and understanding what pockets that demand is going to be focused into. Understand those pockets because it's not everywhere. Rarity for rarity's sake, I will repeat, is one of the worst decisions that you can make as a buyer and as a prospective seller. Because if you get that one of one card from some no name 2016 and you get a really good deal on it by whatever metric you value that, I'm sorry, but the reason you got a good deal on it is because there isn't a market to sell that into. Sometimes we think we get a good deal just because it's lower than it was before. But what if that's because the demand is lower? What if it's because that card is so illiquid that no one knows what to price it at and no one really wants it for any specific purpose? Because at the end of the day, you sell to a collector, an investor, or a flipper. So knowing what those people want means that you have a finger on the pulse of demand. And when you're buying, you're going to be able to tap into that demand later at a time that you think is going to be most beneficial for you. So I've talked to you guys about a lot of things. Hopefully, I didn't ramble on too much. If you enjoyed this, go ahead and give me a like really quick. Make sure you subscribe to Slabnomics. Follow me on Instagram because I put a lot of cool content out there where I go into the nerdy stuff for you guys. And then, of course, www.slabnomics.com is where you're going to find the really cool stuff that's coming. So get excited for that. And yeah, that's all I got for you today. This is part two of my mini series about lessons I've learned in the first year of selling. Probably going to be three to five on this one. So look out for the next one. Keep building, and I'll talk to you guys later.