Shipping on Theo TCG

Local card shop or eBay: what each route actually nets

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 17:00:00 -0600

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.

What Grading Pokémon Cards Actually Costs in 2026

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:00:00 -0600

The sticker price on a grading company’s website is not what grading costs. It is the largest single line on the invoice, but it is usually somewhere between half and three-quarters of what you actually spend, and the rest arrives in pieces small enough to feel like rounding errors until you add them up.

How to Ship Pokémon Cards So They Arrive Intact

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 12:00:00 -0500

A card that arrives creased is worth what a creased card is worth. Nobody splits the difference on that, and the postage you saved was pennies.

We take in collections every week and we ship a lot of cards back out, so we have seen most of the ways this goes wrong. Almost none of them are exotic. It is nearly always a bare card in a plain envelope, or a top loader that arrived fine but got cut open with a knife, or a $600 package with $100 of coverage on it.

What Is Bulk Pokémon Actually Worth Per 1,000 Cards?

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Bulk is every card in a collection that isn’t worth listing on its own. Commons, uncommons, energies, duplicate trainers, the reverse holo of a Pokémon nobody plays. It’s usually 90% of the cards someone hands us and under 5% of the money.

How to Sell a Pokémon Collection Without Losing Money

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Every route to selling a Pokémon collection charges you roughly the same percentage. eBay and TCGplayer land within a fraction of a point of each other. What actually separates the options is how many separate transactions you have to perform, and that is a cost measured in hours rather than dollars.