re: My Son is Dragging me into the Sports Card World

For just beginning, eBay and PWE is the best for under $10 probably. It’s better to just move the stuff quickly and eat the fees, especially on the middle tier rookies you know nothing about whose usage is questionable. You miss on them not improving or getting leap frogged on depth charts and those cards depreciate with the quickness. Leverage some of that money into buying/investing on bigger players you believe in outside of your normal ripping and breaking, which is now better funded.

It’s a little bit of work listing the dang things, printing labels, packing the stuff, shipping it out in a timely manner. Once you get a groove with it, you’ll have some actual income coming in and you’ll probably learn to just stay on top of it. It won’t hurt so much to play too.

At the end of the day, it is essentially the “Athlete Stock Market”. The speed and visibility on eBay makes up for the fees imo on the smaller stuff.

Whatnot and FanaticsCollect are alternatives I’ll be looking into soon as well. The amount of money ebay makes just pisses me off, though I appreciate how easy it is to use and how many people use it. It ends up being like 15% cause they take fees on the taxes too.

The fee does at least drop to 2.35% over $7500, but it’s absurd.

ETA: poster above me mentioned something I forgot to mention. Be overly honest on the card condition. Try to get the best pictures possible as well btw. People are ridiculous about that stuff. The better your description, the more likely the sale I find as well, which unfortunately means learning terms for refractors/prizms etc.

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How did your 7 year old afford to enter this hobby and amass that collection?

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He most certainly doesn't have a "killer collection". Just a bunch of $5-$20 cards with the occasional Dylan Crews autograph. Every Birthday, Christmas, and any prize for doing well in school over the last 2 years he has asked for cards

ETA: and his uncle who was a big card collector started him off with a couple massive boxes of random cards which we picked through together and found ~40-50 solid $5-$10 cards

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There’s a sports card shop in Albany, Chucks Field of Dreams.

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Chuck's is legit. Would make that trip a few times a month before I quit the hobby.

Did anyone else growing watching that show of two guys selling cards?

GEM! MINT! TEN!

Ebay has gotten absolutely nauseating with fees, and the last slab I sold ended up being damn near $8 for Ground Advantage shipping versus the usual $4.90-$5.00, so I lost on that. Ebay also takes the sale + tax + shipping (grand total) and fees off of that number versus just the sale which is bullshite.

I just made a budget box of football cards that I will run at $1 on Whatnot and dont really care if they only sell for a dollar. WN fees are like 8ish % , just sucks arse packing and shipping after a show.

Bigger cards I am now conflicted. I used to sell on FB groups but got tired of all of the scammers messaging me about Zelle and shite.

Card shop is a toss up. They will want to pay 70% on mid cards to have a margin which is understandable, but tough to let something go that cheap if you dont have to.

You can also try FB Marketplace to see if you can get some local hand to hand sales.

I prefer to trade if possible since I always have something I am eyeing for PC, but it is always nice to have the cash from a sale.

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Packs these days are absurd. The hobby is skewed towards breakers.

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Basically anything involving something you can collect ends up being skewed toward the "whales" eventually.

I have dabbled on and off in cards when my ADHD/nostalgia hits and will buy some from time to time. I recently bought a PSA10 Jac Caglianone thats 1 of some low-ish number to put away. Maybe it'll be worth something in 10 years, if not he is a Gator so it'll be worth something to me.

I've hit big on a few guys in the past. Mike Trout rookie PSA 10 before he was Mike Trout (and sold for something like 20x before his stardom kind of fizzled in the wake of his injuries and Shohei). I also have a couple of graded cards that I could maybe get back what I paid for them

If you want to collect cards of any kind for money stick to popular players + teams and get stuff thats graded 10 or don't bother IMO. Or just rip a bunch of packs and try to get a 1 of 1 or 1 of 10 or something.... I've never really been that deep into it so I haven't done any box breaks.

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Don't even think about ripping that li'l kid off.

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not a chance. He's cost me my own money getting into buying a few boxes so we could rip open some packs together and he gets to keep them.

EDIT: I brought him a box of Topps baseball 87 and he was quite fascinated, yet disgusted, that a near 40-year old stick of gum was in each pack.

Bought a couple boxes from every decade between the 80s up to now and he's having a blast with this stuff.

So far it has been fun to do with my son. I'm using it as a teaching moment on the basics of running a business. He sees 15 orders so far for $55 and then I show him fees, taxes, shipping material etc and we are left with $30 profit. Nice eye opening experience for him. He helps me pack the orders and likes me taking him to the post office to drop them off. I'm not sure we will keep at this long term but so far it has been a good experience