I am curious about the business model of selling high end / rare Pokémon cards.
It seems that once you sell your inventory, it would be very difficult to acquire new inventory due to the scarcity of the cards.
How do you stay in business after selling your cards because you just don’t have the ability to replace them instantly with more inventory? and even if you can find a new card to buy, you would have to sit on it until the price goes up to be profitable.
I can see making a bunch of money if you were a collector a long time ago and now you are selling at peak prices. But once you have sold your collection, it seems hard to repeat.
Longer Answer: Scaling is two fold; increased Sales & increased Spending. Most people don’t talk about the latter. Every successful business in this hobby is paying more today for high end product.
You are correct about difficult to repeat. Some items you will never own again. Even if you are Jeff Bezos, there are some items that simply haven’t appeared, or don’t consistently appear. And if they do, you are competing with more individuals and capital today than any point in time.
Bingo! And yes it’s hard to replace if not impossible to replace some high end items. That’s why you don’t sell unless you don’t want the card again. I mean you can hope and pray that mint collections will pop up cheap but there’s so many people doing Pokemon search every second of the day from all around the world
You make more connections as time goes on, and you also learn how to detect deals better. For years I’ve been buying inventory form old school sellers who have websites that are impossible to find through normals search, due to their web 2.0 designs, and I’ve closed at least five of them down because they undersold product to me/I’ve cleared their inventory and I know it was me because I made the purchase and the next day they’re offline. Basically, once a year I go onto their sites and since they haven’t updated any of their prices, cards that were market price last year are now underpriced, recently I’ve bought a base box for 4k and a 1st ed fossil box for 3k. Some of the site owners I still have contact information on and can email them for some cards. Very few of these sites are still active, and most of these sites are pretty much sold out now. No, I will not share any of them or my search methods for finding them, my list of these sites is very short now.
The more practical way is to find someone selling cards on eBay and messaging them asking if they have other cards you look for. The majority of people only list the higher ticket items because they don’t have the time to go through their entire collections and sell off every card, but will happily sell what you’re looking for if they have it. This is way more effective than trying to search for the needle in the haystack old school pokemon site and is honestly my go-to method.
This. I just found an obscure sports card shop in Canada with some pokemon product. I bought an insane amount of DP era packs for like $7.50 each and cleaned them out.
It does become harder, but you become better/more efficient/smarter/faster, just like anything else in life if you work hard at it.
Just think of it like sports, sure you can be good in little league hitting a 60 MPH fastball, but then as you age and rise up in the ranks, that fastball gets to be 70 MPH, then 80 MPH, and eventually if you get high enough in the big leagues, it starts to hit 100 MPH.
Would you like to go back to the time when kids threw to you at 60 MPH…sure. Just like as a seller it would be cool to go back to a time when mint cards were everywhere. But you’ve graduated and you’re on another level now, and if you’re good enough… you can still hit it relatively well at 100 MPH. Because you became better.
And a little luck. But luck comes with any endeavor in life as well.
I’m not nearly as big of a seller as many of the people here but I’ll add my perspective. Similar to many others, you start by selling inventory you were able to acquire for below the current market price either by picking it up a long time ago or acquiring from a low cost source. At that point, you then sell the product at today’s higher prices and make a profit.
This brings you to your first crossroads: choosing to reinvest those profits into value added activities or pocketing the cash and walking away. If you choose to pocket those profits, you will ultimately end up paying more if you want to get back into the selling game. If you chose to reinvest, you must make a decision into what activities will bring the most value: buying raw, grading, and flipping? opening sealed product? purchasing and sitting on sealed product for future sales? All of those at one point were viable options, over time some have become more/less profitable than others.
Ultimately, as long as there is demand for Pokemon cards, there will be demand from buyers for someone to sell them those cards which should provide opportunities to make a profit