The Archives has recently started listing cards on our eBay store, and things have been going great! We’ve been getting rid of some of our duplicate or unwanted cards, and our customers seem pretty happy so far. I wanted to take a moment and write an article about how I went about doing that, what supplies and products I used, and what strategies have worked.
Table of Contents
Why eBay?
When you get to the point where you want to start selling cards you’ve got a few options. You can attend local trade nights and card shows, sell at local swap meets and yard sale events, use a product like COMC, build your own shop – or sell through an auction platform like eBay. For many people starting local or using services like COMC might be the best choice, that eliminates a lot of the risks of selling direct.
When you sell direct, whether through a site like eBay or Amazon, or through your own store – you have to manage things like shipping, failures in shipping, returns, refunds, angry customers and the often overlooked problem of inventory management. At the same time if you have enough product to sell and think you will be doing this for a while then setting up yourself will be the better option in the long run. Services charge you a lot of money to handle all those things for you and I’ll try to show you in this post that they aren’t that difficult if you approach things carefully.
Some of the products we’re talking about here are very niche too, so we need to make sure they can be viewed by the widest possible audience. Sites like eBay make that easy. Pricing these types of cards is really tricky too, so you end up in a situation where you don’t know what the price of something should be – and it is going to take maybe months to find a buyer who can tell you what that price is. I’ll show you how to configure listings on eBay to precisely exploit that sales niche.
Before You Start
Before you list anything you should make a few important decisions and gather some supplies together. Your first sale could happen faster than you think and you don’t want to disappoint your very first customer by not having something you needed to complete their order.
First things first get registered on eBay, make an account if you don’t already have one. Buy some things with that account over a few weeks, maybe some cards you wanted anyway, just something to get a little bit of feedback and life behind your account. Make sure you complete your profile with an avatar, a description – talk about why you collect, or what you want to focus on in your store.
Pick out 10 cards or sealed products you want to open your shop with. I know that doesn’t seem like much, but trust me that is going to take you a while to get listed when you are just learning all the user interface screens. You also don’t want to overwhelm yourself, you need to figure out things like your inventory system and shipping strategy and doing that with 10 listings is way easier than trying with 100 listings.
Buy the shipping materials you need. If you are selling single cards, get top loaders and bubble mailers. You might be tempted to try shipping in plain envelopes but what if they get wet or bent? If your cards are worth 10$ or more, then it’s worth it to you or your buyer to ship them safely in a top loader and a bubble mailer with tracking. You can offer shipping discounts if you’d like but honestly the peace of mind is worth it for everybody.
Take good photos of your cards. Now read that last sentence again, especially that second word “good”, think about what you want to see when you buy a card. You want bright, clear, close photos that show the details of the cards and don’t hide things like the edges or back. I use a cheap, like super cheap, light box and a tiny plastic easel to help photograph my cards.
I take one full image of the card front and back, then close up images of the top and bottom of the front. I’ll add close up images of any special details, certifications, numbers or artist information. If the card is a a relic or autograph I’ll also include close up images of those parts of the card. Sometimes I have to remove the card from the top loader to get a clear photo, I make sure to mention in the listing description when I did that. Stick to a white background for the photos to match the eBay site.
Listing Your Cards
Once you’ve got all your supplies together, have a good set of cards to start with and great photos of those cards – it is time to actually build out your store. Now, assuming you are also selling non-sports cards for the most part like I am you need to understand that these do not typically sell fast. That will happen once in a while, and it’s awesome when it does, but for the most part you will be waiting or even months for things to sell. We will manage that problem as we go, but it’s important to understand that.
That’s the reason we’re going to use “Buy it Now” style listings and not auctions. Auctions only last a week and we need more time than that for our buyers to find our cards. Buy it now listings on eBay last forever effectively so once we do the work of listing a card it will stay there until it finds a buyer. This is great for us because it means we can build out a huge inventory over a long period of time. Every card we add is another way for buyers to find us and see the rest of our inventory.
Above you’ll see the home page of my “store” on eBay as of when I wrote this article. Notice how “clean” it looks, that is not an accident, that happens because I took the time to make sure all my pictures have the same lighting and backgrounds. Notice also that there is a range of prices and products available, I want to offer something for everyone in my store so it’s all about variety.
Real stores operate in a similar way, they will have “hero” or “halo” products that are high end, very expensive and in some cases not even intended to be sold. I have a few of those in my store too, like my JoJo sketch card is just there because it is really freaking cool, I priced it so high nobody would ever buy it and if they do, well then they earned it. Think about this as you build out your shop, choose a range of cards that will draw customers in and but also give them lower end options that they are more likely to buy on an impulse.
So to get started list your first 10 products. Write good descriptions, find competitive listings to help you figure out pricing. Make sure you “allow offers” on your listings. In my shop I usually list something for the upper end of what I think it is worth and then allow offers even below what the floor of the market looks like. If somebody offers me a super low ball offer – that’s ok, I’m not insulted, I’m happy I have an engaged buyer! I’ll counter offer them and try to negotiate to something reasonable. If somebody offers a reasonable price I’ll often just take it, with cards like these waiting another 2-3 months for a new offer is seldom worth it.
Having the right attitude towards business is really important, don’t get emotional about pricing or offers, remember you are here to make money. Think about the price of your cards so that whatever they sell for makes you money, but list them for the highest price you think the market will bear. This gives you maximum room to negotiate and make every buyer think they are robbing you while you are still making money on every single sale.
Maintaining Your Store
Congratulations on your first 10 listings, maybe you even made a sale already – if so skip on down to the next section, but until then you still have a bit of work to do every day to keep your store running.
The most important thing you’ll be doing each day is adding 5 new listings. This is your mantra, your reason for living, the air you breathe is whispering “5 more listings every single day”. I’m joking but sticking to some kind of strategy to grow your store is absolutely critical, at least for the first month you really should take no breaks or feel really bad about the ones you do take.
The reason your doing this is because these cards take a while to sell, so you need a lot of them up there to cast the widest possible net. Every listing is a way for a buyer to find you, maybe they find your SpongeBob card, then click on your Marvel listing but end up buying your Goddess Story – if you don’t have the cards up there that never happens. At the same time you do not want to just list 100s of cards because that causes a whole other problem.
Once a card is listed on eBay it becomes “inventory” and you have to manage it. That card might be inventory for months, or even a year or more and you have to be ready for that. 6-7 months from now an email comes in that somebody bought that card – how will you find it quickly? When you start with just 10 cards it seems so simple, it’s just 10 cards. After a few weeks of 5 cards a day though it’s 100 cards, so get ready now.
I’m using 3000 card mega boxes, I use the rows to organize what stage a card is in the inventory. The cards on the right are cards I’ve photographed but not listed yet. The cards in the left 2 rows are listed cards. It’s the same for my pack bundles, I have multiple bundles of loose packs for sale. When I listed those i took those packs out, put them aside and they are inventory now. If somebody buys one of those bundles they get that exact pack I put aside when I made the listing.
Another aspect of maintenance is keeping your listings fresh. You can do this by updating the photos, maybe adding a new close up, or taking a better angle. Only do this for high value listings, and only every few weeks at most. Updating the description can also help, you could add something like “We accept reasonable offers” after a few weeks as a strategy, that way you are always making the same update to your listings and not having to think about it.
Finally pricing changes, the market changes so make sure you consider that. This probably only matters for your high value listings but lowering the price after a month is almost always a great way to reinvigorate that listing. Offering free shipping can also help move a stale listing. Ebay has tools for this too where you can send prospective buyers offers and price reductions, make sure you carefully time when to use these to maximize their impact.
Making The Sale
Your first sale will be pretty exciting, especially if it’s a high value card. If you set things up the way I did then you should be able to buy your shipping label directly through eBay. I’ve used services like Pirate Ship for a long time so I can say that eBay’s shipping pricing is competitive if not better in most cases and it’s so much easier if you use their labels and tracking.
I like to stick with the USPS for all my orders, that’s a personal preference just so I only have to drive to one building to drop things off. I pack my orders in the bubble mailers and always try to include something extra, maybe a loose pack or other duplicate card, just something so the buyer feels like this order was special or different. It will make them more likely to leave feedback and buy from you in the future.
I always drop my packages off at the post office and get a receipt. This seems excessive but it’s important. When I first started I was dropping them in a mail box instead and one card was lost this way. Because I only dropped it in a mail box and don’t have a receipt that the post office accepted it, my case is more difficult to solve. Spending the extra 5-10 minutes to get a scan receipt will make any kind of claim so much easier so it’s always worth it to me.
Keep an eye on the tracking while your order is on it’s way. Ebay makes this very easy as you can see them all on one screen under orders. If something seems to be going wrong, like it’s been 3-4 days and the state hasn’t changed, be proactive and look into it. Message the buyer and let them know you see the problem, don’t wait for them to tell you.
If something does go wrong and it isn’t obviously the buyers fault then again be proactive and do the right thing. Already in my young shop I’ve issued one full refund for that lost package. It hurt to do that, both losing the revenue but also knowing that rare card is likely lost forever too. Still, it was right and I did not wait for the customer to ask. You will need to have this mentality too. If you priced things well then you should be getting enough profit that the occasional refund to make things right won’t break you.
Conclusion
That’s everything I’ve learned so far. I’ve explained how I went about starting my store with only 10 carefully chosen and well photographed listings. How I’ve grown the store in an intentional way by choosing 5 new cards each day and ensuring the photography quality remains consistent. I’ve solved 15 cards already and had 1 shipping issue which was entirely my fault for taking a short cut. I issued my first refund.
Those are all things you will do too if you start down this path. It can be very rewarding to see your old and unwanted cards start turning into cash. The effort might seem like a lot at first but you will develop strategies and patterns to make things go faster with each new listing. Take the leap and start your own eBay store!