Get Off My Lawn is a series of articles from SWU Harvest contributor Ben “ObiWein” Weiner. He gave us a really good deal on this one.
Decades ago, in the early days of the internet and e-commerce some friends and I started out as collectible card game vendors. We had a dealer table at some standing local events and eventually went to GenCon as vendors for a few years. It was a fun way to spend time with friends. There were some annoying aspects such as trying to take a credit card for payment with a manual hand held machine to get an imprint of the card in triplicate for later filing. There was also the fear that we would get mugged for the amount of cash we had to carry around to events.
Fast forward many years and a long hiatus from card games…
When I pulled a showcased Iden Versio a friend quickly posted it on Ebay for me and it sold within hours. However, after opening numerous additional boxes of Spark of the Rebellion I quickly realized that there were a bunch of things that I just wasn’t going to use and needed a way to sell them myself.
I found it remarkably easy to setup an online marketplace account not only for buying singles that I needed but also for posting and selling cards. I’ve learned some things in the process both good and bad that I figured it might make sense to relay to others.
Supplies
Having a decent stock of plain white envelopes, bubble mailers, top loaders, penny sleeves, team bags, stamps, etc. is key. When an order comes in, you don’t want to have to scrounge around for a stamp to send something out.
The actual supplies for packing cards up doesn’t matter a ton although things that are super easy to use and reproducible are nice. As a buyer I’ve received cards that I’ve purchased that are all kinds of crazy wrapped up in multiple index cards and packing tape. A plastic top loader or premade cardboard shipping sleeve is much easier to pack up and also to unpack on the receiving end.
Printer Ink
Don’t run out. You’re going to need it for printing out the packing slips. Ideally you could also use it to print out the addressing on envelopes as well.
Communication
Get ready for some customers being overly communicative. Within hours of my marking an item as being sent out, I’ve had multiple people message me asking if it was actually dropped off at the post office or just waiting to be dropped off and would actually be sent the following day. Even had one person message me immediately after placing the order to inquire about when I would be sending something out.
Dude, give me a chance to actually see the order email and get to it. It’s also not super important to message the seller each day to let them know that it has not arrived yet.
Post Office
Get ready for many trips to the post office. Luckily I pass one on the way to work each day. My children have teased me about how often I go there. Plus, be ready to get another order of something to come in the moment to leave the post office.
Annoying Orders
There have been a decent share of orders that are kind of a pain. Like fifty cards that are all common foils, not hyper foils, just normal ones, and then that is way too large for a normal envelope so you end up making basically nothing on it since the cards are so cheap and the shipping costs more.
I guess this one is helped out a little bit by the orders that are for a single common foil worth a dime or less and then you are basically making money on the shipping, or at worst breaking even.
Lost Items
Be ready for some share of just things that get lost in the mail. For better or worse, the USPS is going to lose something at some point. They aren’t magicians. The simple fact that you can put something in an envelop, throw a stamp on it, and then it’s getting from New Jersey to Alaska is pretty amazing. I’ll cut the postal service some slack on this since it’s only happened a couple of times so far.
The mitigation would be to ship everything tracked, however then you either need to increase prices to the point that you are not going to sell things or you will lose money on shipping costs.
It seems helpful to keep good notes for what you’ve bought and sold. Knowing that a specific legendary card was something you pulled in a draft pod and basically didn’t have a ton of cost vs. a legendary that you spent $30 to get, will help determine what you can reasonable sell the card for without taking a loss.
There are some fun sides to the note taking as well. Knowing that I only have a few states to go to which I haven’t yet shipped something is pretty cool. Oddly Alaska and Hawaii would not have been states that I thought I’d have covered already before Vermont.
Organization
Make sure it is easy to find cards when they are sold. Have some system to keep track of where everything is located. Alphabetical, sure. Color and rarity order, also works. Card number order, if your eyes are good enough to read those little numbers go for it.
Regardless of your organization system definitely recommend keeping the cards you play with separate from the ones you have listed for sale and keep both of those groups separate from anything you are actively trading. It’s a bad feeling to trade something away only to check email when you get home to realize that the same card also just sold and requires you to cancel the order out.
Final Thoughts
Don’t plan to get rich doing the whole buying and selling online thing. It’s almost a meta hobby to go along with playing the game.
I don’t plan to do this forever. For Spark, it was a bit more fun as even hard to get, above MSRP boxes usually turned a profit when opening them. Shadows is much less the case and there are absolutely boxes that are not actually worth opening in terms of trying to profit from the sales.
Opening a bunch of boxes and then using online market places as a means of essentially trading outside of a local game shop has it’s merits. For future sets I may just buy the singles that I want instead of all the buying and selling.
Granted, opening packs is still super fun though. I’ll sit out on the lawn while I do that. However, you need to get off it.
Ben is a technology professional by day. He has been an avid gamer for 40 plus years spanning everything from Dungeons and Dragons, board games, and through multiple past and present collectible card games. His non-gaming spare time is spent with his family and playing guitar. Warning: Do not play Jenga for money with this person.
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