The program will begin rolling out Monday, with buyers seeing the new option in the coming weeks for individual raw, non-autograph cards priced above $250 with more than two images in the listing.
Eligible cards are included in eBay’s Authenticity Guarantee service, which requires sellers to submit cards for inspection by PSA before they are shipped to the buyer.
The new feature will offer the option at checkout to have PSA grade the card immediately after it passes inspection before shipping to the buyer.
Collectors won’t need to register for a PSA account to request grading.
Additional details on pricing and grading service tiers is expected this week.
Currently, PSA is on the march towards pandemic levels of turnaround times for TCG, brought on largely by the chaotic market and the addition of GameStop submissions.
I personally have a PSA submission that will enter its 8th week in Research & ID this week and was delivered the first week of January (~12 total weeks now).
To me there’s a million things that could go wrong in this process and it seems like PSA is willing to take on more and more opportunities to have more cards submitted for grading even though turnaround times continue to suffer.
Thoughts? Is this a solution in search of a problem? It doesn’t seem like a money grab by PSA given the $250 barrier to entry (definitely not ‘junk slab’ territory) so it’d be interesting to see what the thought process may have been in deciding to implement a feature like this.
I don’t buy too much raw nowadays anyways from eBay but I can’t help but feel like not being able to properly inspect a $250 raw card before deciding to submit is self-defeating.
I can’t help but feel like not being able to properly inspect a $250 raw card before deciding to submit is self-defeating
Can’t say I’d ever see myself not at least looking at a card physically after spending (at least) $250 on it and saying “yup good enough for psa”. I imagine if this does get utilized we will see a lot of people getting PSA 6-7s on cards that were listed as “near mint”.
In reality you’re inviting card swapping or disappointment when your mint raw looking card comes back a 7. Leaving a buyer out of pocket for an overpriced card and grading.
Especially given how slow PSA have become lately. Can’t exactly refund it after months and months plus it being graded.
I am in the camp of this will only help turnaround times on your bulk submissions. PSA is already handling your card to authenticate it. Whats another 10 seconds to grade it and 3 minutes to slab it. They are likely adding staff to handle this extra work, and not taking staff away from the normal grading.
It should canabilze some grading volume in the future since the card is now graded that would have beern submitted anyways. Remember, you can just hit buy it now. You don’t need to hit buy and grade now
i think it is a great idea if u are spending $250+ on a raw card u gonna grade it anyway (although this locks u into psa but cgc is realistically the only other good option anyway)
however, no one on ebay is gonna sell a $250+ card raw if its gonna get above like an 8
This could be the case, although I’m not sure if the people authenticating are trained as graders. If they are, it probably won’t increase turnaround times too much. However, if the cards need to pass authenticity guarantee and then go to a different employee for grading, we might have issues.
As others have pointed out, people selling $250+ raw cards on eBay are likely selling them raw because they aren’t worth PSA grading. It will be interesting to see how much this actually gets used.
One potential issue is the difference in ebay’s condition guidelines vs. PSA 1-10 scale. Ebays condition guidelines dents are acceptable as near mint, now say you opt to grade that card and PSA gives it a PSA 6 which by their standards isn’t labeled as “near mint”.
I see this as having a ton of issues. How would someone go about doing a return with eBay if the card comes not as described from the eBay listing? Then having it already slabbed by PSA creates another issue if purchased this way. Especially if the card exchanges hands multiple times before it even arrives at your doorstep.
Although I’ve paused all buying for the forseeable future. In 2023 and 2024 I saw very solid returns with nearly every grading submission.
With current market conditions and overall economic uncertainty, it no longer makes sense to me to continue doing so, so I’m planning to pause until at least late 2025, early 2026.
There have been some niche low-pop Japanese cards that i’ve bought on eBay raw that exceed $250, but the times this happens is few and far between now…which is why I was having a hard time wondering who the target audience was for this service is.
I’d assume that most people that would buy a >$250 raw card are doing it under the pretense of “taking a chance it could 10” and that they’d just relist it raw again once received and inspected in-hand…and in this regard, grading it first and then potentially having to crack the card out if it didn’t actually get a 10…then relist it…and then send the label back to PSA to take the card out of the pop…just seems like a gigantic waste of time and money for everyone involved.
