Tips on profiting?

[Oviefan5252]

Any of you out there sell hockey cards for good profit margins? If so, do you have any tips for someone like me who wants to start doing it on the side as a hobby?

[sparty07]

If it's a hobby you aren't trying to make a profit. But if you want to try to make it into a business, buying bulk cards for 60-70% of market rates and taking the time to sell them at market rates is your best bet.

[camsue]

Its a hobby for me if i come across something high end and i dont have an attachment to it team i like or player I usually trade or sell just to cover more product

[canucksfan007]

Buy low, sell high

Prospecting

Buying bulk and taking the time to get current market value ( this could take a long time )

Many hours searching ebay for items that fall through the cracks / end at bad times / have bad titles/ exclude shipping to certain countries


It really is knowledge based. Know your markets, know where youre going to sell a card before you get it

[cjb]

if you sell a high value card quickly after a new release you could probably make some money.

for example, days after upper deck series 2 came out you could buy a Cale Makar YG for about 110 dollars. Now you can buy it for 80 dollars

[canucksfan007]

if you sell a high value card quickly after a new release you could probably make some money.

for example, days after upper deck series 2 came out you could buy a Cale Makar YG for about 110 dollars. Now you can buy it for 80 dollars

That requires gambling and luck tho. Cant really be used as a strategy. Gonna spend more money opening wax than profiting off hot new cards

[Rraincock]

Here are a few suggestions:


1) Buy whole collections - usually you can get some really good deals if you buy a person's entire collection. This means you have to buy cards that sell well on eBay below the eBay final selling price (to cover fees, theft, etc). Most cards, and I mean most, will not sell on eBay. Think of eBay as a place collectors go, where as a place like a local card show or a mall is a place the general public will go (although at card shows there is a mix of the two, but 80% are public folks).

2) Buy someones "junk" - emotional attachment drives prices up, and conversely a box of 2007-08 autographs that have been sitting around forever without interest will gain hatred by the collector and drive the price down.

3) Buy Tim Hortons - there are a lot of collectors who will buy 500+ packs of Tim Hortons and quickly flip them online the week they come out. Remember that Americans don't get the packs. I used to do this without fail with McDonalds. I still remember selling blocks of 25 Crosby 'RC' .... those were the days.

4) Prospect - avoid the top rookies. The $100+ young gun of the first overall pick has almost nowhere to go but down (unless it is a long term payout like a Crosby). Think of the Yakupov crash. I get into common young guns ($1/each) and the middle of the road guys. If they hit a hot playoff streak, then you have made bank. I once held 30 Erik Karlsson young guns... in my commons box. The year it came out they were worth 3 for $5. I think the last one I sold I got $40 or something like that for it. This method is very risky.... I also have a TON of Johan Franzen YG that are hard to sell.

5) Online Sales - sometimes stuff comes up on eBay for cheap. Buy low / sell high... but you should look at the sales history for a guide.

6) Shop or Farmer's Market Sales - for a while I would bundle 200 cards in a box for $5 and sell this to kids. I would always include a young gun or a nice Crosby insert so that they would get well more than their $5 worth. Now a days the hobby has shrunk so basecard sales are a bit harder. I buy 3200 boxes of base for $20... and after packaging can usually sell it for about $80 worth.... but I only net $20 when you consider the cost of the box, cost of the special cards I put into it (sometimes jerseys and autographs), and deals I give out (3 for $10). It is a good way to get rid of existing stock, but I would not go hunting for blocks of base-cards unless you test your local market. Using two inserts of a player and putting them in Ultra Pro or BCW two card placks is another way to generate a pile of $5 bills. Make sure to shrink wrap them (or use other forms of plastic bags) as the plastic scratches worse than the old school CDs.

7) Don't start a card shop - I used to run a shop in Red Deer, Alberta in the busiest mall we have (Bower Mall). Back in those days I could buy a box of 2010-11 Upper Deck series 1 for $80+/- (plus shipping and GST) from the wholesale folks in BC or Quebec. So lets say $90 to my door. To sell in the mall, the usual 'cut' the mall gets is between 8 and 15%. Mine was 8%. So the box needs to be $97 to break even. I sold my boxes for $110 - so I made $13 per box. Take a slice for the debit/credit company.... rental of their machine, etc. and I make about $12. Factor in theft, depreciation of product value over time, etc. and you can take that down to $10. The trouble with this is that when a collector comes into my shop, spends $110 worth, I benefit $10. Most card shops have wax to get you in the door, but hope to sell you on Becketts, supplies, and singles.

8) Online alternative markets - places like Kronizio and COMC are opening markets for low to mid range singles. At $0.25 per pop on COMC and a 10% final sales commission for Kronizio, be careful what you list and what you price it as. I hunt COMC all the time for cheap McDavid, Price, Crosby, Gretzky, Richard, Dryden, etc cards and flip them for a quarter or so more. I use this card cash to buy the ones I want (I am a hardcore Red Deer Rebels collector) or to buy into more sales stock. I think I am up to about 4500 cards on COMC now... I usually sell about 8 - 10 a week. The benefit of this is that sales can happen without you having to stand behind a register.

9) Trade Nights - sometimes having a large collection of cards you can trade for stuff you can easily sell is a decent way to exchange hard to sell cards for cash. The downside of this is that most collectors these days know that $150 in Crosby inserts isn't worth $100 in Gretzky Autos. I don't go to trade nights anymore, but when I did, I used to have multiple boxes of jerseys, autos, rookies, and vintage for folks to look through. I was fairly easy on trade values. If I had a higher end card that I knew wouldn't sell well (Say a Patrick Roy jersey #/25) I would often trade it for a stack of $1-$5 cards. You win in the long run, but the folks around Red Deer still call me Tugboat - I would haul away everyone's ™™™™.



Good luck, and make sure you share any success or downfalls you have with us here on SCF!

- Rob

[cjb]

I just noticed that most (not all) young guns either stay the same or go down in price as years go by. The super elite seem to go up.

the low profile young guns (usually low draft picks) who come out of nowhere and starting playing better in their mid 20's are usually the ones that go up in price. If you buy them in bulk early and sell them later, maybe you can make some $$$

[30ranfordfan]

Best bet would be to buy a car that has a Flux Capacitor installed in it, and go to the future and buy a sports almanac :)

For real though: You could have bought guys like Kucherov or Quick for nothing. A Kucherov YG used to sell for under $10. I remember REFUSING to pay $10 for a Quick SPA. They kept ending on auction in the $12-15 range, so I passed on them all. Finally got one for $10.

Those kinds of massive jumps are not predictable though, I think. Most of the true hobby superstars, they had a lot of hype right out the gate.

There are lots of RCs you can pick up for a buck or less, and then flip them at the right time for $5 or $10. You won't get rich making those moves.... but if you do them enough times, you can make some decent coin.

But generally it needs to be good players, that are not super well known, on good teams. If a guy tears it up in the 2nd round of the playoffs: Those $2 YGs can jump to $15 overnight, because there will be a lot of attention on him. I think those kinds of moves can be a little more predictable.

Finally, Superstars, and key cards. I never would have expected modern YGs to sell for what they do today. I personally think that people are nuts for what they're paying for a Crosby or Ovechkin YG (considering there are 10s of thousands of copies of them).... but when you could buy Ovechkin for $60 3 years ago - we all should have known that those were good deals, and he was bound to go up. 10x that? No, I wouldn't have guessed it - but it was clearly a card that should be worth more than $60.

[jackpot]

Buy low, sell high

This doesn't mean much, you have to expand on your answer

Buying bulk and taking the time to get current market value ( this could take a long time )

Many hours searching ebay for items that fall through the cracks / end at bad times / have bad titles/ exclude shipping to certain countries

All this is not worth it because of all of the time it takes: searching, finding, calculating if it's a good deal or not, looking at ebay sold listings to see how much they sell for, negotiating, going through the cards and sorting them, putting up sales, dealing with people back and forth, preparing the tons of envelop, going to the postal office... Hourly wise you don't make any money, you just wasted time all along.

Making money in hockey cards is through investments, buy rookie cards, set them aside and do nothing, you just wait until the prices go up, you have to look it at same way as stocks or investments.