From the moment I began selling cards in March of 2016, low end cards have been my focus. Selling off my extra base and insert cards throughout my set building journeys fueled my ability to have a self-sustaining hobby. Eventually, I started buying collections with the primary intention of reselling.
It has been an insanely profitable venture. When you can buy cards for fraction of a penny and sell them for $.18 - $1 each, those account balances start to add up! However, there is no getting around the fact that sorting, listing, selling, pulling, packing, and shipping thousands of .25 cards a month is a lot of work.
Back in February I bought a truck load of cards from a local shop. It was a ton of base and insert cards from the late 90s through about 2014. Those were the years I wasn’t collecting as much so I did not have many of the products in my current inventory. I knew I could use this stuff.
The first step was organizing them by sport, year, and product. Once I got that done, I was able to begin the process of sorting them into number order so I could list them on Sportlots.com. That is where the scope and scale of my purchase started to get real. I had monster box after monster box to go through. Fortunately, I had space in my storage room and my garage shelves to use as a staging area!
I only have so much time during the week to devote to these activities, so I’d plug away a little at a time. A few hundred cards here, a few thousand listings there, and slowly but surely the pile of unlisted boxes got smaller.
Well last week, I finally reached the end. I listed my last card from the monster purchase. When I started the process back in February, I had about 378,000 cards in my Sportlots inventory. After this last batch, I’m now up to just over 440,000 or so. Add in the fact that I’ve sold about 12,000-13,000 cards over the last 6 months, and that results in me having to sort and list about 75,000 cards from that purchase.
That was a lot.
That was a grind.
And I’m worn out.
You can love buying and sorting collections and still need a break.
You can get motivated by making sales and at the same time dread having to fill another order.
Those 440,000 cards in my Sportlots inventory have a total of more than $120,000 in asking price. Based on my typical cost per card in these bulk collections, I probably paid somewhere around $4,000-6,000 for them over the years.
I typically sell between 2,000-3,000 cards per month on there which generates a pretty nice chunk of change to use for my own collection and to continue to build the business. Yes it is a lot of work, but man, it generates a lot of low risk, high profit margin income. It’s let me build over 6 figures worth of inventory all paid for with profits.
I won’t be looking for any “sportlots” collections for a few months. I’ll enjoy having a break from the sorting and listing side. But once the snow starts falling, I’m sure I’ll have another stack of boxes to start working my way through.
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