Good or Bad idea?

[Y2Jay247]

Hey guys..I'm seriously thinking about opening my own online card store, try to gank some customers from DA=) Seriously though, how bad of an idea is this? I'm thinking about doing baseball, basketball, and football boxes. I want to get 15-20 cases of each sport and work from there. So my question to you is, am i nuts? and in the event that i'm not, i was wondering if any of you would throw out some lists as to what cases i should look into getting for each sport. any help would be appreciated, whether its on something that i've mentioned or anything that i've left out! Thanks!

Jay

[Chris C Two]

Best of luck! I would try contacting some of the companies to see if they would throw you some freebies.

[Star_Cards]

I would try using eBay stores. You have to do some promotion, which you would do if you had your own site, but you would have ebays base of users. If that does well, you can use ebay auctions and that store to move traffic to your main website. using eBays popularity and store interface could help you see if there is a way to make money at what you want to do. I'd start small and build it from there if you are making money. Hope this helps.

thanks,
mark

[Y2Jay247]

do companies actually give freebies out?

[S.A.M.]

I don't know if it's such a good idea. The only reason I say this is that to get dealer prices from the card companies you usually need to have an actual physical storefront, not just one online. So if you're only online then you are going to have to purchase your inventory from some existing dealer. Then when you try to sell your boxes you really won't be able to mark them up at all for a profit because you'll be competing with the same dealer's prices you just purchased your cases from. Without access to cases at wholesale/direct prices you'll zero or negative margin.
Good luck and go to the card company's sites. I know Donruss lists the qualifications a dealer must meet in order to buy direct from them.

[Star_Cards]

SAM is correct. I also believe most companies only sell directly if you have a store front. They also probably have restrictions that force you to buy 5 cases of regular topps to get 1 case of Topps Chrome.

[Y2Jay247]

so getting them from a distributor is a horrible idea?

[Star_Cards]

it's not a horrible idea, but it's not that easy. You have to more than likely prove that you have an actual shop and not just selling online. Plus, don't deal in wax but isn't the markup a very minimal percentage of your cost?