Quote:
Originally Posted by deek05
In hindsight, it seems like common sense to have switched to selling those same types of cards in lots instead of singles. With lots, every order is a multi-card order and, with my custom software, the lots are faster and easier to list than singles (even with CDP or Kronocard). I do occasionally sell some singles and slabs, but my target there was a minimum asking price of $10 (now it's $20).
What is your minimum number of cards in a player lot? I've tried the buy 1 get 1 free on the $1 cards as well and saw the same results as you. Also tried 5 card player lots but didn't get any views. Well known young players too...thanks
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I've been testing a few sizes and my best sizes right now are 20 and 100 card lots. 50 card lots have done well for me too. Having the scans is a huge value add for shoppers that allows you to get a premium per card price compared to competing lot sellers.
Take my Ken Griffey Jr. lots. I sell them for $80-100 shipped for 100 cards and they move pretty quick too.
If I listed them as singles for $1.99 shipped, I have an hour into them there. Another hour to pick/pack/ship the 100 when they sell.
Listing them all as one lot takes 2 minutes and another 2 minutes to pick/pack/ship.
Assuming no coupon discounts, no multi-card orders, etc., selling all 100 Griffeys for $1.99 shipped it $199 in revenue. Let's say I have $0 into the cards because of a bulk buy or something and they all came pre-sorted. Then $0.75 in shipping/supplies. 8% promoted and 8% sales tax as a toprated seller.
That's $0.54 profit per sale, $54 profit total or $27/hour in profit.
Now with my lots, I take those same 100 Griffeys and pretend I ask $100 but take an $80 offer. Let's say I have $0.20 into each card from sniping them from auctions (no sorting time required). Same 8% sales tax, 8% promoted, TRS, etc. Round shipping and supplies up to $7.
That leaves me $36.36 profit per sale for 4 minutes of work (let's say 5 minutes for easier math) which is $436.32/hour profit.
To achieve the same amount of profit per hour with singles, you'd need to profit over $8 per sale on each individual card.
If all of your singles sorted themselves, scanned themselves, listed themselves, and you sold 800 singles per day and just shipped for 8 hours every day, 365 days per year, at $27/hour in profit, you're capped around $80,000/year in profit. This is why the low end volume seller mix in some raw to grade cards, or the higher end finds/buys, or just chasing the "hits" of the multicard orders.
If you take this same hypothetical scenario and pretend only 4 hours per day but that includes both listing and picking/packing/shipping, with an average profit per sale of $20 (my target minimum), the profit per year cap skyrockets to $350,000. Those extra 4 hours can be used to continue working on the business systems and sourcing in larger and larger quantities.
The real money in low end singles is when customers buy multiple cards at a time. Each listing is a lottery scratch off that you put time into hoping to win that 3 card order or that 20 card order, 40, 100, etc. I loved the rush of selling some random person a hundred singles. It's great. But you can't scale a solo-business purely on that hope. I spent a year using all of my sales, marketing (my primary business/career is in marketing), and customer service skills trying to crack the code to consistent multi-card orders. I couldn't make it work. But just switching to lots solved that problem, all I needed was a way to list them as fast as I list singles. This gave birth to my software project that actually makes listing lots FASTER than listing singles.
Multicard orders of $1.99 shipped cards can often easily dwarf that $436.22 profit per hour (and even my $240 target) but the problem is that it is too infrequent. I think that the role that those cheap cards play in a full-timers business is an insurance policy to guarantee some baseline sales and also as motivation to keep going (because those highs are HIGH). But the advantage that I have as a part-timer is that I'm not counting on cards to pay my bills--I'm growing this for fun and for maximizing profit per hour so that it can some day comfortably be my primary focus. I have the freedom and security to work ON the business (particularly maximizing profit per hour) instead of IN it trying to make sure the bills get paid. I can spend my "eBay time" coding some crazy #@#@#@#@ to test an idea, have it be a failure, and just move on without having lost a part of my livelihood because I wasn't listing. Whether it's cards or any other business, I highly recommend this sort of play and experimentation before shoving all of the chips in.