What happens to a collection after you sell it to us

Short version: you send photos, we send a written offer priced from recent sold comps, you ship the cards at your own cost and insurance, we check every card against those photos, we pay after that review, and the collection is then split into singles worth listing, bulk, and grading candidates. Our offer is below what the same cards would gross sold one at a time. That gap is the business. This page explains what the gap buys you, and who should not take the trade at all.

Theo TCG buys Pokémon collections out of Denver, so everything below is our own process rather than an industry survey. Other buyers work differently, but the stages are broadly the same everywhere — and if a buyer is vague about the money stage, that is the part worth being suspicious about.

What are the stages of selling a collection to us?

There are seven stages, and the money changes hands at stage six, after the cards have been checked.

Stage three is the one people skip past. An offer you decline costs you nothing but the time spent photographing the cards, and it leaves you holding a written wholesale number to measure every other route against. Plenty of people should decline; there is a section below on who.

How is the offer priced?

The offer is priced from recent sold transactions for the specific cards in your photos — not asking prices, not price guide values. A sold comp is the only number that reflects what somebody actually paid.

Better singles are priced individually; the rest is priced as bulk at a per-card rate. The offer arrives in writing with the comps attached, so you can check the arithmetic yourself before agreeing to anything.

Where does your margin come from, honestly?

Our margin is the spread between what we pay for a collection and what the cards eventually sell for, and the spread is meaningful: a wholesale offer sits well below the sold-comp total of the same cards sold one at a time. There is no version of this business where that is not true, and a buyer who implies otherwise is not being straight with you. What the spread pays for, on our side:

• Fees on every eventual sale. eBay’s final value fee in the trading card categories is 13.25% of the total amount of the sale up to $7,500 per item, plus a per-order fee of $0.30 or $0.40, charged on the whole sale total — item price, shipping the buyer pays, and sales tax included.
• Postage and supplies on every card that goes out.
• Cards that never sell. A meaningful share of any collection sits unsold for months or forever. We have already paid for those.
• Grading fees and grading risk, spent before anyone knows what the grade will be.
• Returns, chargebacks and lost parcels — a cost of marketplace volume, not a rare accident.
• The bulk, taken because it is part of the collection, not because it earns its keep.
• Labour and margin, the honest remainder.

That list explains the spread. It does not oblige you to accept it.

What are you actually buying with that spread?

You are buying certainty, immediately, for the entire collection including the parts that have no individual market. Every cost and risk below moves onto our side the moment we pay, and that transfer is what the spread charges you for.

That final row is the whole trade, and the bulk row is the one people underestimate. Selling a collection card-by-card does not end when the good cards are gone; it ends when you are sitting on several thousand commons that cannot be listed profitably at any price. Bulk Pokémon cards are worth something, but only in volume, to somebody set up for volume.

The trade is real on both sides: a worse deal in dollars, a better deal in time, certainty and risk. Which you need more of is not something we can tell you.

Who should not sell a collection to us?

If you have one or two high-value cards and you are not in a hurry, sell them yourself. A single expensive card is where the wholesale spread costs you the most and saves you the least: one card is one listing, one photograph session, one parcel — perhaps an hour of work — and it keeps the large majority of its sale price after fees and postage. No wholesale offer competes with that, ours included.

You should also probably not sell to us if:

• You enjoy the process. Plenty of people find sorting, photographing and posting cards pleasant. If that is you, the spread is money you are choosing to hand over.
• You have somewhere to store the collection and no deadline. Cards do not spoil. Selling over eight months rather than one afternoon costs you nothing but attention.
• Your collection is mostly sealed product or graded slabs. A sealed box is one item and one shipment; a graded card needs no condition argument from anybody.

The wholesale route suits the mirror image: a large mixed collection where the value is spread thin, a seller short on time, or somebody handling an inherited collection they cannot identify card by card.

What happens when the cards arrive?

Every card is checked against the photos you sent and against the offer — card by card for anything priced individually, by count and weight for bulk. Nothing is sorted or moved into stock before that check is finished, because the photos are the record the offer was based on.

Three things get looked at. Identity: that a card is the printing the photo appeared to show — the edition, the set symbol, the presence or absence of a drop shadow. That is where most honest mistakes happen on older Pokémon cards. Condition: front and back, under angled light, looking at centring, edges, corners and surface. Authenticity: on anything valuable, because a convincing fake in a collection is usually a surprise to the person selling it rather than a deception by them.

Please pack cards in a penny sleeve and a toploader before posting. (PSA asks for semi-rigid holders and specifically not toploaders for cards going to them — a different situation from posting a collection to a buyer.) How to ship Pokémon cards covers the packing properly. Postage and insurance are yours to arrange and pay for; in Denver you can skip all of it and hand the collection over in person.

What if the cards do not match the photos?

If the cards do not match the photos, the offer is revised for those specific cards and re-quoted to you before anything is paid — you are never told after the fact that a lower number was applied. You then either accept the revised offer or ask for the collection back.

Most mismatches are innocent. Phone cameras flatten surface scratching and hide edge whitening almost completely, so a card that photographs as clean can be plainly played in hand. The reverse happens too: cards sometimes arrive better than they looked, and the offer moves up. What matters is that a revision is shown with photographs of what we found, not simply asserted. The condition guide uses the same language we do.

When do we pay?

We pay after the collection has been checked in and reviewed, never on arrival and never the same day the parcel lands. A buyer promising payment before the cards have been looked at is promising something they cannot responsibly do, and it is not a favour to you: it just moves the disagreement about condition to after the money has changed hands.

The review takes as long as the collection takes: a shoebox of a few hundred cards is quick, six long boxes with forty individual condition calls is not. We would rather say so than rush the stage that protects both sides.

How does a collection get sorted?

Once the collection is paid for it gets split three ways: singles worth listing individually, bulk, and the small pile of grading candidates.

Singles to list are everything with a real individual market — the mid-value holos, the playable modern cards, the older commons scarcer than they look. These get condition-graded, photographed, priced against sold comps and listed. This is the slow part, and most of the work the spread paid for.

Bulk is the commons, uncommons and energy cards that cannot be listed individually at a sensible hourly rate. Bulk moves by the thousand, often to people building decks or hunting through it themselves.

Which cards get graded, and why?

A card gets graded when three things are true at once: the raw-to-graded price gap is wide, the card looks likely to grade well under close inspection, and the grading fee is small relative to the outcome. If any one of those fails, grading loses money — the fee is spent whether the grade comes back a 10 or a 7, and a 7 on a card that was worth more raw is a straightforward loss. That is why the grading pile is a small minority of any collection, and why most cards are not worth grading at all.

It is also why we will sometimes tell a seller that a specific card is worth grading themselves before selling it to anyone, us included. That advice costs us money on that card and we give it anyway.

Where do the cards end up?

Cards end up with collectors and players, sold individually or in lots, mostly through online marketplaces and partly at local events. Graded cards go out in their slabs; singles go out in a sleeve and a toploader, packed the way we ask you to pack yours.

Nothing is destroyed and nothing sits in a vault waiting to appreciate. A collection that took someone fifteen years to build gets dismantled into several hundred transactions. That is the unsentimental truth of it, and it is why some people ask for an offer and then decide to keep the cards — a perfectly legitimate outcome.

The short version

• The stages: photos, written offer from sold comps, your decision, you ship at your own cost and insurance, we check every card against the photos, we pay after that review, we sort into singles, bulk and grading candidates.
• We pay after the review, not on arrival. Postage and insurance are the seller’s responsibility — penny sleeve and toploader, tracked and insured, or meet in Denver.
• Our offer is below sold-comp value, and the spread is the business. It pays for fees, postage, unsold cards, grading risk, returns and the bulk nobody else wants.
• The spread buys you one payment, now, for the whole collection: no listing work, no fees, no waiting, no cards that never sell.
• If you have one valuable card and some patience, sell it yourself. That is where a wholesale offer serves you worst.

If you want a number to measure your options against, send us photos and we will price the collection from recent sold comps and put the offer in writing. If you would do better listing the cards yourself, the offer will say so.