How do you sell raw cards???

TMc

Just curious if anyone has whipped this yet. I've got hundreds of cards that are not worth grading. Puckett rookies, 78 star cards, 2nd year stars ....tons of stuff. If I send them out to grade, pay 8.00, wait 2 months, pay for listing, then sell them for $10.00....you get the point. So you skip the grading, and list them as raw. Not much or little action. Do you gang them in a big lot to avoid the small multiple sales? Do you eat them? These are all cards that should go for $8-10. Ebay does not move these well. Any thoughts? Any one out there done big lots of star commons, non mint rooks or 2nd year cards? Thx

Knlsportsandmore

Most of my Ebay sales comes from raw cards. The thing about raw cards on Ebay is you have to throw the book out the window. I start 99% of my cards for less than 1.00 and let the market decide their value, then I offer a flat Shipping and handling rate of either 2.00 or 2.50 regardless of how many cards they buy. If you are not wanting to pay the listing fees or what ever you could always set up an ebay store or list them on Bidville(which my sales are starting to pick up there).

TMc

Is putting them together in lots a good idea, or suffer thru the singles thing? I just hate to get into alot of $3-5 transactions.

wolfbear

Sell the stars and popular semi-stars individually.
Sell the cards of players from popular teams as team lots or sets.
Sell the remaining off grade cards and players from unpopular teams as one lot.

If you start the auctions at 3.00, with 2.00 shipping,
you'll never have to mess around with less than a 5 dollar sale.

The above works if you have plenty of time, and actually enjoy the process.
If not, just sell them all in huge ( or as some sellers say "hugh" ) lots, but less effort = less return.

MorrellMan

TMc : Wolfbear hit it - list the stars and semi's individually, but on the same day, and offer discounted shipping for multiple wins. Group the commons by condition and offer them as exmt lots, vg lots, whatever. But the key on small dollar cards is limiting what the buyer would have to add for shipping, so make it a large offering that set builders can use to fill holes in their sets without doubling the cost with freight charges. Good formula WB: less effort = less return.

wallst32

tmc - I recently cleaned out a bunch of cards by selling them in lots. The bulk of the cards were in NM/MT+ condition. I'll post links to the results.

The hardest part is advertising; you have 35 players, from 50 different sets, from 12 different years; what to put in th title to attract the most hits?

The trade off of course is time versus revenues. I wasn't going to run off to the post office to mail out $4 worth of cards every day for the next few weeks. Also, with the popularity of PayPal, you need to consider the listing cost, the ebay percentage off the realized price, and the PayPal percentage. I like to use BIN, so that's already $0.40 lost off the posting fee, minus PayPal/ebay fees, and there's not a whole lot left over to pocket on a $1 auction.

I would definitely sell the rookie cards individually. I packaged 85F,85T Puckett and maybe 10 assorted cards of him from other years; did something similar with Sandberg and Boggs and did well on those. I doubt I would have done as well including them in a bigger lot where they would just get lost. Non-rookie cards just don't sell (aside from the newer GU/AUTO cards). For the higher dollar non-rookie singles, look up completed auctions for raw cards to get an idea for what they sell for. I was suprised to see some of my Bonds, Clemens, Gretzky, Rice, etc star cards selling for under a $1, and decided then that lots were the only option. I was motivated to sell since I wanted to clean up space, and took what I could get.


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