RareCandy began auctioning high-end Japanese cards and sealed product
smpratte transitioned his consignment service from eBay to PWCC
PWCC was bought by Fanatics
Goldin was bought by eBay
eBay Vault was bought by PSA and merged into PSA Vault
PSA Vault began consigning via eBay
Z&G split their business partnership and moved from Arizona to Indiana
Probstein continues to hit record sales numbers year over year with very low rates
So much has happened in such a short period of time.
What will happen to small or beginner cosigners? Is there a place for them? Is this business sector already optimized for TCGs?
I would think that there will always be a place for large and small consigners. The market is so large and diverse that it can support those selling $100 million per year and those selling $100,000 per year.
Part of it comes down to individuals supporting their peers and local community vs. a large business. Another part may be filling niches. As TCGs grow and morph, I expect that small consigners will quickly find what works for their specific community of consignees (e.g., small consigners specializing in a specific TCG, graded vs. raw cards, sealed product, etc.).
Something Ive mentioned in patreon that I think will happen is the lowest end will have less options. PWCC’s new fees are an indicator they are disincentivizing cheap slabs as it’s a waste of time to process. This coupled with eBay actually charging normal vault fees will eliminate a lot of the options people had when things were too good to be true. Ideally it will help balance the amount of junk slabs, but that’s probably wishful thinking as they will just be mystery box filler.
They will automatically “authenticate” anything raw shipped to them. Maybe someone shipped those to their vault by mistake and just selling them off
Personally I think the only niche left (and it is quickly filling) is eBay Buy it Now consignments. If you want to fling something to auction and not do any work yourself, there are now plenty of options, on plenty of different platforms.
However the value of using someone’s BIN service is pretty big. Still doing none of the work, but getting a pretty significantly larger chunk of money for your cards is very attractive to someone who wants to sell but doesn’t care so much about selling now.
I think the market of people who want this sort of service is probably smaller than people who want auction services, so I imagine just 1 or 2 big names coming into this space will probably satisfy that demand
