I have shipped many, many thousands of these and here is what I do and my success rate is massive.
Don't use toploaders at all. I would have spent $900 on toploaders last year and I only had about $30 in damage claims and the ebay insurance paid out on all of them. Envelopes with top loaders vanish, show up empty or get redirected, delayed, or show up postage due far too often.
Get yourself a huge stack of junk cards. I use either bulk magic the gathering cards or bulk sports cards, both available for nearly free in large numbers (expect to pay $3-5 per thousand). Sports cards are better because they have square corners, you can't protect sports cards with gaming cards because gaming cards have round corners.
Get yourself some packs of gaming sleeves, the cheaper the better. These are the kind of sleeves people use to protect their magic or pokemon cards while playing, not the soft sleeves people put sports cards in.
Here is how you pack your cards. Take that card the customer bought and slap a sports card on either side of it (make it 2 cards on either side if using magic cards instead of sports cards), and slip that inside a gaming sleeve, then tape the gaming sleeve off center inside the envelope with double sided tape. Switch sides from one order to the next.
You tape off center alternating sides for two reasons, first the envelope can be bent in half with no damage. Second, a stack of these envelopes will sit flat and not get on the nerves of any postal employees making up their own rules.
The gaming sleeves and bulk cards are only going to cost you about 3-4 cents per order in supplies and you can use regular envelopes, I usually get a huge box of them from Costco or similar. Top loaders cost way more per order and have way more problems.
Never add cardboard and do not use cardboard or paperboard mailers. You have free insurance already, you only need to do the bare minimum I outlined and your damage claims will round down to zero.
mam98031 • Volunteer Community Member • Buyer/Seller since 1999
