paulcarlcards
11-12-2023, 09:12 PM
It’s great as a hobby or a fun side gig, but if you wanna slang singles for $2 shipped (or less) on eBay as your primary source of income, I have bad news for you:
It won’t work by itself.
You can start there, but you can’t finish there.
If you make $0.50 profit per sale and you wanna profit (pre-tax) $60,000/year then you need to sell 329 cards per day, every day.
Multi card orders help, but they are too rare. Even with a buy one get one free coupon most of my orders were still just one card. I’ve talked with several other sellers who had the same experience. As far as I can tell, the typical bulk commons sellers averages about 70% of their orders being for just one card.
Chasing multi card orders when selling <$2 singles is like ripping wax to try to hit a card that will pay for your box: it happens, but not often enough to make it worthwhile.
I see two paths from this baseline: sell higher end cards or sell lots.
Higher end cards require more capital and have higher downside risk from getting bad grades, player issues, or loss of hype.
It’s possible as many here and elsewhere have demonstrated, but too risky and capital intensive for my personal preferences (especially since this is currently just a side hustle that I’ve been experimenting with).
Selling lots is the way I went. Much higher STR than singles (my STR is 30-40% since the switch for last month) and much higher profit per hour. No downside financial risk since bulk commons are dirt cheap and easy to get.
A bulk common box can net me $15-25 per sale. My player/team/set lots of 100 typically net $25+ and are they faster to list than singles. I list them by scanning into Kronocard and running their AI to generate a list of cards included for my description. I don’t actually check the AI’s work like I’d have to with singles. Instead, I put a disclaimer in the description saying that it’s AI generated and likely has some inaccuracies, trust the scans not the list. This helps with SEO on eBay. I use Kronocard’s export add-on and a Python script to automate creating the lot listings so customers can see scans of each of the 100 cards they’d receive.
For sorting, collections will often already be sorted by team/player (and if not then you just cherry-pick the better cards and bulk out the rest). Sorting efficiently takes way more space than I expected. I’ve got an entire room dedicated just to sorting now so each card only gets touched once.
If your singles are all priced at $5, you only need to sell 33 per day at a $3 profit (before COGs) to hit the 60k. I’ve been doing a mix of sending my $5+ singles to COMC, listing them on eBay, or listing them on my website.
For my player/team lots of 100, I shoot for at least $30 shipped as a minimum. 100 cards is a good place to be for this target because $0.30 per card is a great deal on eBay, even compared to Burbanks selection of 280,000+ singles listed BIN for $0.99 shipped. This is a huge threat to bulk volume sellers and, if that’s you, you better hope that the increase in their employees’ time spent shipping single card orders makes them change it. I think it’s a marketing play (so they can build up their eBay marketing lists, mail adverts in their orders, and further improve their SEO on eBay), but time will tell.
Anyways, at $30 shipped, that’s a $17 profit per lot (minus whatever your COGS is, but it should be 0 most of the time since bulk is so cheap and you break even super fast).
Sell just 10 per day and you’re at that 60k. I averaged 2 per day with just 100-150 active listings for that first month. I didn’t even send any coupon deals either so the sell thru rate could have been even higher.
I shipped 63 lots last month and made the same profit that I did from selling 4,000+ singles in the last month that I had 100,000 active $2 singles.
And it took virtually no time to list/pick/pack/ship compared to singles (especially since I didn’t have to spend any time checking AI accuracy). If you have a huge inventory to sustain lots, you could increase your profit per hour exponentially just by selling lots instead.
With certain players or better cards in the lots, you can sell them at $50+ too. That price point is about $32 profit per sale. Sell 11 of those per day and that’s $120,000 profit per year.
I’m still early in this experiment, but the results so far are promising. Next weekend I’m picking up another truckload of cards and will be shifting a lot of my “eBay time” away from antique mall inventory and back to listing on eBay so I can start scaling this up more. Will report back with my findings and see if I can maintain my STR as I move up to 500 active listings.
It won’t work by itself.
You can start there, but you can’t finish there.
If you make $0.50 profit per sale and you wanna profit (pre-tax) $60,000/year then you need to sell 329 cards per day, every day.
Multi card orders help, but they are too rare. Even with a buy one get one free coupon most of my orders were still just one card. I’ve talked with several other sellers who had the same experience. As far as I can tell, the typical bulk commons sellers averages about 70% of their orders being for just one card.
Chasing multi card orders when selling <$2 singles is like ripping wax to try to hit a card that will pay for your box: it happens, but not often enough to make it worthwhile.
I see two paths from this baseline: sell higher end cards or sell lots.
Higher end cards require more capital and have higher downside risk from getting bad grades, player issues, or loss of hype.
It’s possible as many here and elsewhere have demonstrated, but too risky and capital intensive for my personal preferences (especially since this is currently just a side hustle that I’ve been experimenting with).
Selling lots is the way I went. Much higher STR than singles (my STR is 30-40% since the switch for last month) and much higher profit per hour. No downside financial risk since bulk commons are dirt cheap and easy to get.
A bulk common box can net me $15-25 per sale. My player/team/set lots of 100 typically net $25+ and are they faster to list than singles. I list them by scanning into Kronocard and running their AI to generate a list of cards included for my description. I don’t actually check the AI’s work like I’d have to with singles. Instead, I put a disclaimer in the description saying that it’s AI generated and likely has some inaccuracies, trust the scans not the list. This helps with SEO on eBay. I use Kronocard’s export add-on and a Python script to automate creating the lot listings so customers can see scans of each of the 100 cards they’d receive.
For sorting, collections will often already be sorted by team/player (and if not then you just cherry-pick the better cards and bulk out the rest). Sorting efficiently takes way more space than I expected. I’ve got an entire room dedicated just to sorting now so each card only gets touched once.
If your singles are all priced at $5, you only need to sell 33 per day at a $3 profit (before COGs) to hit the 60k. I’ve been doing a mix of sending my $5+ singles to COMC, listing them on eBay, or listing them on my website.
For my player/team lots of 100, I shoot for at least $30 shipped as a minimum. 100 cards is a good place to be for this target because $0.30 per card is a great deal on eBay, even compared to Burbanks selection of 280,000+ singles listed BIN for $0.99 shipped. This is a huge threat to bulk volume sellers and, if that’s you, you better hope that the increase in their employees’ time spent shipping single card orders makes them change it. I think it’s a marketing play (so they can build up their eBay marketing lists, mail adverts in their orders, and further improve their SEO on eBay), but time will tell.
Anyways, at $30 shipped, that’s a $17 profit per lot (minus whatever your COGS is, but it should be 0 most of the time since bulk is so cheap and you break even super fast).
Sell just 10 per day and you’re at that 60k. I averaged 2 per day with just 100-150 active listings for that first month. I didn’t even send any coupon deals either so the sell thru rate could have been even higher.
I shipped 63 lots last month and made the same profit that I did from selling 4,000+ singles in the last month that I had 100,000 active $2 singles.
And it took virtually no time to list/pick/pack/ship compared to singles (especially since I didn’t have to spend any time checking AI accuracy). If you have a huge inventory to sustain lots, you could increase your profit per hour exponentially just by selling lots instead.
With certain players or better cards in the lots, you can sell them at $50+ too. That price point is about $32 profit per sale. Sell 11 of those per day and that’s $120,000 profit per year.
I’m still early in this experiment, but the results so far are promising. Next weekend I’m picking up another truckload of cards and will be shifting a lot of my “eBay time” away from antique mall inventory and back to listing on eBay so I can start scaling this up more. Will report back with my findings and see if I can maintain my STR as I move up to 500 active listings.