I’ve sold cards on and off for probably a year now, and it was always fun selling cards I came across to buy other cards I wanted. Here lately I’ve actually put a lot of work into starting an actual eBay store though, that generates revenue. I’ve spent some on cards for my personal collection, but mainly my goal has been to actually have additional income. I’ve been selling cards, video games, video game consoles, and some other random things I come across at thrift stores, and on Facebook. To my surprise, my store has been doing really well. I’ve done 9 orders this week so far, and honestly, it feels really amazing making money doing something I’ve come to really enjoy. My question is for full time, part time, and hobby sellers. Does the great intense feeling of instantly knowing you’ve made $5, $10, $15 dollars, and so on essentially from just buying and selling things go away? I get this really satisfying feeling doing this. I’ve been thinking about working my way to doing this full time if I can in the future. I’m slowly working my way. Any full time sellers really love what they do even after months, or years later? Any regrets, or advice you care to share? Just wanted to start a different conversation. I’m in no way, shape or form in this hobby to purely make money. I’m a collector at heart, but it’s an interesting topic imo, and it’s something I’ve really grown to enjoy.
If you are making money and doing something you like, ENJOY IT 
I’ve been at it 10+ years now and nothing beats the commute to the basement working in my undies watching sports center
Key thing to note for collectibles is that a rising tide lifts all boats. So you might have a card flipping business that will gives you profitable deals repeatedly. It is very easy to run a profitable business when card prices in general are rising. When the tide goes out, that’s when you’ll run into problems because you’ll have a card that you’ve invested $100 into that now sells for $50-$75. Now imagine this occurring for 50-100 cards. Make sure you can handle stuff like that otherwise you will be mentally defeated. It won’t be fun anymore.
Having a business model that is somewhat similar to alpha investments I think is a wise choice. You have a combination of long-term holdings and then you use more modern products to flip. Be willing to change your strategy as you go. Maybe you start off with raw card grading to flip but that ends up getting flooded so then you need to switch your strategy to buying up PSA cards that were excessively graded by other people.
My advice would be to learn every nook and cranny of eBay’s policies as soon as you possibly can. It will save you a lot of headache and a lot of heartache.
When new sellers learn about the ‘Item Not As Described’ policy, and how it can be used (and sometimes abused) to force a seller into accepting a return, they try to craft their listing to be as vague as possible in the hopes that eBay will somehow magically side with them if a customer were try to use this technique to force a return. This doesn’t work, and when a seller does this to intentionally hide damage via deceptive pics or vague listings, they’re just begging for a return. Be upfront about everything that’s going on with the item - deception is a long-term loser’s game.
Spend more than 5 cents on your packaging, and spend some time learning about the best way to package and ship your items. I’m not sure there’s a good reason why tape should ever be on the inside of a package, unless you’re selling tape. Rubber or plastic bands and cheap ribbon do the job just as well and make your customer’s experience opening whatever they bought 100x easier. Bubble mailers, cardboard, and card savers are staples when it comes to shipping pokemon cards. If you must absolutely use toploaders, wrap the toploader in a piece of printer paper, throw a rubber/plastic band around it to make sure it doesn’t come undone, and wedge it between two pieces of semi-thick cardboard. Toss it in a(n appropriately-sized) bubble mailer and you’re done. If the card you’re shipping is so low value that the cost of the above is too high, look into top-loader sized envelopes and non-machineable stamps.
If you ever send a card, by itself with no other protection, immediately delete your eBay selling account. Cheap is easy, but wrong when it comes to collectibles.
Factor your shipping into your price and offer free shipping.
The world’s full of sharks and scumbags. You will meet both if you sell long enough. Don’t let them get under your skin.
International shipping can be a headache, and international buyers almost universally hate the thing that makes it less of a headache: GSP. I can safely say that all of my international sales would have eventually sold domestically, but at the time I was willing to take the risk of shipping internationally without GSP. Each seller has to figure out what’s best for them when it comes to international buyers.
The buyer’s obligation to you as a seller is to pay for the item. Once they pay, leave the positive feedback. You can’t leave actual negative feedback anyway, and leaving negative comments in a positive feedback is against feedback policy and will be removed by customer support if the buyer requests it.
Contrary to popular belief, sellers do actually receive protection by eBay against fraudulent buyers. Make sure you adhere to the seller protection guidelines when shipping your item, e.g., >$750 items need signature confirmation. I highly recommend purchasing postage through eBay. When a buyer requests a return, accept the return, even if you’re getting scam vibes out the wazoo. Most of the time you will get the item you sent back in the same exact condition you sent it. For the few losers out there that try to pull a scam by sending back a different item, as long as you met all the requirements for seller protection, you will likely get paid out for the item. And the buyer will still likely get their money back as well. This can be a hard pill to swallow. If it’s pokemon-related, you can ask to have them added to the blacklist here on the forum.
Spend some time learning how to take good pictures, and invest in some cheap lights and stands to display your products. Presentation is big part of making the sale, and good pictures not only give the customer more information about what you’re selling, they also show that you’re a competent seller.
Also spend some time either finding an eBay description template or making your own to make your listing process easier and your listing stand out from the auto-generated description that you’ll find on 90% of eBay listings.
Given enough time, you may become quite sad at how much eBay and PayPal take out of your earnings. You will have to reconcile those feelings with the realization that listing your cards in almost any other medium would result in 99.9% fewer eyeballs on your products and much less money. Both are a necessary evil for selling your stuff.
That’s actually sounds like really solid advice. Thanks! I completely agree with you. I’ll be honest with you. I’m definitely not buying insane amounts of cards or anything. I’m eons away from that to be honest. I’m mostly finding lots on Facebook and offering them a fair price, but that I can definitely make a profit on in the long run. I’ve kindof started thinking about venturing more into the video games more than cards mostly because it’s so hard for me to let go of cards. Once I have a nice one, I really want to keep it. Hahaha, the collector in me. I actually watch most of Alpha Investments videos, so I’m also aware of the strategies you mentioned. Good stuff.
@hypernova If there was some sort of gold like they have on reddit, I would give it to this post 5 times. I really appreciate you going above and beyond on this because it was extremely helpful to me. Some of this I knew, admittedly, however a lot of this I didn’t, and I will most definitely benefit from a lot of this well written post. It kindof sucks being new, but I guess everyone has to start somewhere. I’m sure I’ll get burned more than once, and definitely have to deal with my fair share of scammers and assholes, but I guess that is just part of the game. At the moment, I do not ship outside of the United States. I’ve been thinking about doing international as I would definitely get more business, but I’ve never shipped anything outside of the U.S. before. I’ve learned tons of stuff just from efour and Youtube, but I still gotta figure that one out. I’m sure it costs a hell of a lot more for one. Anyway, I couldn’t agree more about the packaging. Anything I ship is secure, even if it costs me a little bit more. I’d rather pay a few extra cents than have a customer get some banged up card or product because I was too cheap to do it the right way. I do use two very tiny piece of tape on the outside of the toploader to tape a little piece of paper to block the card from coming out into the envelope, but other than that, screw tape, lol. Also, out of the maybe 20 cards I’ve gotten online, I actually did get some moron that shipped me a stack of like 10 cards from a lot I bought loose in an envelope. You can guess they all had whitening by the time they made it to me… *Facepalm*
Anyway, thanks again. 10/10 helpful.