Local card shop or eBay: what each route actually nets

Short version: on a mid-size collection, selling card-by-card on eBay usually beats a shop’s cash offer by 40 to 60 per cent — and costs you around 37 hours to collect that difference. Whether that is a good trade is arithmetic, not opinion, and the arithmetic turns on how the value in your collection is distributed. Value concentrated in a few expensive cards favours eBay strongly. Value smeared across three thousand ordinary cards favours a shop, and it is not close.

Below is a worked example with every fee, every postage cost and every hour accounted for.

What does a card shop actually offer for a mid-size collection?

A card shop offers a wholesale price for the whole collection in one payment, and in the worked example below that offer is $1,150 against $2,400 of eBay sold-comp value — roughly half. That ratio is normal for a shop buy and it is not a lowball: the shop takes on every listing hour, every unsold card, every return claim and the several thousand bulk commons nobody wants, and still has to make a margin.

Theo TCG buys Pokémon collections out of Denver and prices its written offers from recent sold comps, so we will state our own side plainly: our offer is lower than the eBay total. It has to be. The question is whether the difference is worth what it costs you to collect it.

What is in a mid-size collection, and what is it worth?

A mid-size collection is usually a few thousand cards of which only a hundred or two are worth listing individually. Here is the worked example, stated as assumptions rather than as facts about any particular card:

• 40 better singles, averaging about $45 each on recent sold comps
• 120 small singles, averaging about $5 each
• ~2,800 bulk commons, uncommons and energy

Total sold-comp value of the singles: $2,400. Bulk is handled separately further down, because bulk is where the two routes stop resembling each other. If your collection looks different — one $900 card and nothing else, or six thousand commons and nothing else — skip to the sections on which shape favours which route.

What does eBay take out of a $2,400 collection?

eBay takes about $370 in fees on $2,400 of trading card sales, and postage plus packing supplies take roughly another $390 on top of that. The fee side is the part sellers budget for. The postage side is the part that quietly eats the profit on cheap cards.

eBay’s final value fee in the trading card categories is 13.25% on the total amount of the sale up to $7,500 per item, and 2.35% on any portion above $7,500, plus a per-order fee of $0.30 for orders of $10.00 or less and $0.40 for orders over $10.00. Payment processing is not billed separately: eBay states that with managed payments you do not pay third-party processing fees, because processing is folded into the final value fee.

One detail catches people out. The total amount of the sale means the item price plus any handling charge, plus any shipping the buyer pays, plus sales tax. Charging the buyer for postage does not dodge the fee, it moves the fee onto a bigger base. The example below assumes free postage absorbed by the seller, which keeps the fee base at the item price.

That is 68 per cent of gross. The postage lines are where the estimate is softest:

USPS Ground Advantage starts at $7.90 at a Post Office and $6.93 at commercial pricing, the tier eBay labels bill at. It includes tracking and $100 of insurance, which is why it is the right call for a $45 card. The $6.93 figure is a floor — a heavier package or a distant zone costs more, so the real bill on 40 packages runs above $277.

eBay Standard Envelope is the cheap route for low-value cards. eBay’s help page quotes $0.74 at 1 oz, $1.03 at 2 oz and $1.32 at 3 oz; eBay’s Seller Center page quotes $0.78, $1.07 and $1.36 for the same tiers, so the two eBay pages disagree by four cents, most likely because one lagged a rate change. Either way it is under a dollar. eBay Standard Envelope carries tracking but only $20 of shipping protection, and caps at 3 oz and 24 raw cards per envelope — fine for $5 cards, wrong for $45 ones.

Supplies are costed at a penny sleeve and a toploader per card: BCW lists standard sleeves at $9.99 per 1,000 and 3x4 toploaders at $14.99 per 100, so about $0.16 a card. That line leaves out mailers, labels and tape, so the net figure above is if anything flattering to the eBay route.

How many hours does the eBay route actually cost?

Selling 160 cards individually on eBay takes roughly 37 hours of your time, three quarters of it listing and packing. This is the number that decides the whole question, and the one no comparison table includes.

Eight minutes for a better single covers finding the sold comps, checking the card against a condition scale, photographing front and back, and writing a title that will surface in search. Four minutes for a $5 card assumes batching and a reused template. Not in the table, and real: buyer questions, relisting, and the occasional return claim.

What is the eBay route worth per hour?

The eBay route is worth about $16 an hour in this example, measured properly — not as total proceeds divided by hours, but as the amount eBay beats the shop offer by, divided by the hours it takes to collect that difference.

Sixteen dollars an hour, before income tax, is the honest headline. That is real money and a fine use of a few winter evenings for plenty of people. It is also below what many readers earn at work, and it assumes every listing sells at the comp price, which they will not. If 80 per cent sell in the first 90 days and the rest need price cuts, the effective rate drops toward the low teens.

The rate gets worse as the cards get cheaper. On a $5 card, the final value fee is $0.66, the per-order fee $0.30, postage around $0.74 and the sleeve and toploader $0.16 — roughly $1.86 of a $5 sale, or 37 per cent, gone before you count the four minutes you spent listing it.

When is selling to a shop the worse deal?

Selling to a shop is clearly the worse deal for single high-value cards, and it is not a close call. On a $500 card sold on eBay, the final value fee is $66.25, the per-order fee is $0.40, and Ground Advantage postage runs from $6.93 — total deductions of about $74, leaving roughly $426, or 85 per cent of the sale price. Listing and shipping one card takes well under an hour. No wholesale offer competes with that, ours included.

The shop is also the worse deal if you are:

• Patient, with somewhere to store the cards. Nothing in a collection decays if you sell it over eight months instead of one afternoon.
• Someone who enjoys the listing process. Plenty of people find sorting, photographing and shipping genuinely pleasant. If that is you, the $16-an-hour figure is beside the point.
• Holding sealed product or graded slabs. A booster box is one item, one listing, one shipment. A graded card needs no condition argument and photographs in two minutes.

If your collection is four cards and one of them is a Base Set Charizard, do not take a wholesale offer for it. List it, or get an offer and check it against sold comps yourself.

When does the shop win?

The shop wins when the value is thin and spread wide, when your time is scarce, or when the collection is too mixed to price efficiently.

Bulk. The ~2,800 commons are the clearest case. They cannot be listed individually at any sane hourly rate — a card that sells for $0.40 loses money the moment you touch a toploader. Sold as a lot on eBay, bulk fetches very little and you pay to ship a heavy box. A shop takes the whole box at a per-card rate and the transaction is over. See what bulk Pokémon cards are actually worth for how that per-card rate is set.

Time-poor sellers. With a newborn, two jobs, or a house to clear before a move, 37 hours is not a discount you can accept. The shop offer is a real price for a real service.

Collections you did not assemble. The slow part of the eBay route is deciding — what each card is, what condition it is in, what it sells for. If you inherited the collection and cannot tell a Shadowless from an Unlimited on sight, that 10-hour sorting line becomes 25 hours and the hourly rate halves.

What the arithmetic above does not include

Tax. eBay reports your gross sales to the IRS on a 1099-K. A cash sale to a shop is taxable income too, but the reporting mechanics differ and the 1099-K threshold has been revised several times recently, so check the current rule rather than a figure you remember. The eBay figures above are pre-tax.

Risk. Marketplace selling carries return claims, item-not-as-described disputes and the occasional package that vanishes. The eBay column above assumes zero losses across 160 transactions, which is optimistic.

Getting the collection to a buyer. If you sell to a shop by post, shipping and insurance are your cost and your responsibility — that is true of us and of every buyer we know of. In Denver you can skip it and meet in person. If you are posting cards, pack them properly: penny sleeve, then toploader, then a rigid mailer. We pay after reviewing the cards on arrival, never before.

The short version

• eBay’s cut on trading cards is 13.25% up to $7,500 per item, plus $0.30 or $0.40 per order, with payment processing included and the fee charged on the whole sale total including shipping and tax.
• On a $2,400 collection of 160 singles, fees, postage and supplies come to roughly $760, leaving about $1,640.
• That costs about 37 hours, and beats a $1,150 shop offer by about $590 — an effective $16 an hour before tax.
• Concentrated value favours eBay. One $500 card keeps about 85% of its sale price.
• Spread value favours a shop. A $5 card loses about 37% before you count your time, and bulk cannot be listed profitably at all.

If you want to know which shape your collection is before committing 37 hours to it, send us photos and we will price it against recent sold comps and put an offer in writing. If the arithmetic on this page says you should list it yourself instead, we will tell you so.