Baseball card auctions/sales are dead lately

[jastr2580]

Hello All

I am a small seller of baseball cards from the 1960's through the 1990's.  All my cards are part of my personal collection.  Lately, I am not selling very many cards through auctions or BIN's.  In fact I am not getting any bids or views for that matter.  Is anyone else having this problem? Your input and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

[split_aces]

My sales of items (not sports cards) have been almost non-existent lately.  I'm guessing it is because I am not putting most up as promoted.  Could be economy is not so good as well. 

[fashunu4eeuh]

Hi, i took a look at your sales for the last 90 days. You sold 130 items out of 193 listings. That’s a pretty decent return. There are a few days where no sales were recorded, but otherwise, they have been fairly steady. What were your expectations?

[tobaccocardyahoo]

My baseball card auctions (T cards) are mostly bid on by other sellers who will have them graded and resell them. Their business is bad and they are buying less.

I'll try again in the spring.

[steady2304]

I was looking at your listings. Do you by chance have immediate payment required set on your listings. If so that is probably a factor in the low number of Best offers and bids.

eBay recently started requiring buyers to input a payment method before a buyer can make a Best Offer or bid on an auction. eBay was not very upfront about this and also enrolled sellers into this program without their knowledge.

You might want to check your Buyer Requirements setting to see if these 2 Buyer requirements are checked:

 

Buyer Payment Requirements

Require buyers to provide a payment method before they place a bid. 

Require buyers to provide a payment method before they make an offer. 

To get their select settings and go to selling preference, then scroll down to Your buyers, Manage who can buy from you, click on that to Buyer Management and scroll all the way to the bottom and see if both of these are checked or not. 

[deltilogical]

Your cards cost almost nothing!

I sell postcards and there are simply too many copies of some cards with no market. The cards are in fine shape etc but just have no market.  

I assume baseball cards suffer the same.  Are there many other copies of this available?  Do people mostly collect graded cards these days?

Bundling sometimes helps.  

I think collectible sellers across the board - with the exception of very high end - agree business is down.  

[jsriley]

I am in the same position, Private small card collector,  Storage shelfs full of Fireboxes all full or cards taking up too much space and the same issues, I have had two auction's end with ZERO bids on very hot CJ Stroud Panini Mosaic Rookies. I did the eBay promotion and even took out an ad on Facebook to promote one of those auctions.  I see the same exact card going on auction for 80-90 bucks every  single day and I can't even get a single bid??  I just had a Corbin Carol Team USA autographed serial number card go for cheap because it received only 2 or 3 bids.  Link below to a current auction, starting bid I set at 10 bucks so maybe too high? Appreciate any feedback. 

🔥🔥 2023 Panini Mosaic C.J. Stroud Green Reactive NFL Debut #ND-3 RC 🔥🔥 | eBay

[reallynicestamps]

FWIW- We found both in our B&M store and online that collectors give themselves an allowance for collecting.

And come holiday time they tend to use that allowance to buy gifts.

When our shop was open (we retired) we used December to do inventory, because the shop was so slow.

Then come Boxing Day- they came pouring in.

We scheduled our annual Customer Appreciation Days for the Boxing Day to Epiphany period. (which is another story)

How do this year's sales compare to 2022? 2019? 2018? (Ignore the pandemic surge inonline selling of 2020 and 2021)

[susanb1872]

I'm not sure how many Americans know what Boxing Day is (I do!) 🙂

[reallynicestamps]

@split_aces 

Although you have been a member since 2014, you have only been a Seller for a few months and have sold less than  a dozen items in that time.
In my opinion, that is more important than either Promoted Listings or the economy, which may be poor where you live, but is booming in much of the country.

Since you don't have any comps in 2018/19/22 (again we can't reliably use the pandemic surge in online selling of 2020/21), I would suggest moving away from Auctions to Fixed Price.

Which you have mostly done, I notice.

And make sure you have not been shoved into the AutoPay which demands that potential buyers register their financial information before bidding or making Best Offers.

And set up your BO listings with automatic accept/reject parameters. That will take stress off you by sending polite letters automatically to lowballers and immediately billing those who are willing to pay an acceptable price.

I use Promoted Listings Standard at the minimum 2% but it looks like they actually sell less often than the non-PL listings. They do pull eyeballs and those eyeballs seem to browse in my Store and buy.

(Don't open a Store until you have more than the 250 FREE listings you have now. Stores pay a monthly subscription fee for their 'free' listings and it's not economically viable for less than 750 or so listings.)

[onefootflippers]

Free advice that you won't listen to.

Those 99 cents plus shipping listings only clear about 50 cents each. This assumes the cards were free.

Card pull and pack time has been widely studied and averages at 20 cards per hour,

That means you can make $10 per hour on those cards if all the cards were free and they magically listed themselves.

[gamersbaystore]

99 cents or best offer? There is no profit to be had selling anything for 99 cents here given the outrageous costs associated with selling on ebay. Its not worth the time and effort to list anything for 99 cents.

Likewise, sales across ebay have plummeted by the tens of billions of dollars over the past 2 years alone as consumers tighten their wallets due to runaway inflation and out of control costs of living.

I would seriously rethink the products you're selling and what your business strategy is.

Its harder to get views now too because the average seller has thousands of listings today. Virtually every category on ebay is flooded to the max now. You need to have a very large inventory of products if you plan to drive revenue in e-commerce today, or a very specific product that no one else has.

[fashunu4eeuh]

@jsriley  I noticed you have included your (non-eBay) website address in the description fields of the listings i reviewed. eBay considers this a rather serious violation of their policy (see links below). It can be a fast one-way ticket to getting one’s selling privileges suspended. I urge you to not wait to remove that info from your listings.

https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/payment-policies/offers-buy-sell-outside-ebay-policy?id=4272

https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/listing-policies/links-policy?id=4248#:~:text=To%20protect%20our%....

”To protect our members, listings or products can't contain links that direct customers to a site other than eBay, even if the link is not clickable.”