Should you consign your cards or sell them outright?

Three questions that settle it

Almost everybody arrives here trying to work out which route pays more. On this site part of that is already settled, and it is settled on the service pages rather than in an article, because it is a figure and figures belong where they can be kept current. At the same sale price, consigning returns more to you than our cash offer on that card would have. That is a rule we hold ourselves to rather than a sales line, and both figures are published on the two service pages, so you can check it instead of believing it. What the rule cannot promise is the price: a card we reduce to move it can sell for less than the cash offer was.

What no page can answer for you is the question that actually decides this: which of the two arrangements can you live with? Answer these three honestly and it usually makes itself.

Do I need the money by a particular date?

Not whether it would be nice to have it soon. Whether there is a date. A bill, a closing, a tuition instalment, a car that has to be replaced. If there is one, the decision is made, because nothing in this market can promise that a card sells by a given day. A card sells when a buyer for that particular card turns up, and nobody knows when that is. A deadline and a consignment are not merely awkward together. They are incompatible.

How long am I willing to leave this open?

Consignment is not a wait for one payment. It is a stream: cards sell when they sell, the money arrives in pieces, and the last piece arrives last. If what you need is a lump, to settle something or to divide between people, that shape matters more than the size.

Do I want to think about cards again?

This is the one people misanswer. They say they are in no rush, then check their listings every evening for months and feel it each time nothing has sold. If that is going to be you, the smaller payment that ends the matter today is not a consolation prize. It is the thing you actually want, and wanting it is a legitimate reason to take less.

What you are holding afterwards

The clearest way to see the difference is to stop comparing prices and look at what you own the following morning. After a cash sale you own money and a closed chapter: the cards are ours, and there is nobody left to chase, wonder about or think about again. After signing a consignment you still own the cards, plus an arrangement with a business, plus an outcome that has not happened yet.

Both are sensible things to be holding. They are simply not the same thing, and most of the regret people describe comes from choosing one while wanting the other.

Read down the two columns and most people find they preferred one of them before they saw a price at all. That preference is worth trusting. The money question is real, but it is the smaller of the two.

What consigning actually involves

Consignment is misunderstood in one specific way, and the misunderstanding is the reason people are nervous about it. So, plainly: the cards remain your property. They are not sold to us and then resold. They are yours while they sit on the shelf, yours while they are listed, and they stop being yours at the moment a buyer pays for them. The written agreement says so, which is the part that matters if anything ever goes wrong.

• We scan both faces of every card at the same scale, so a buyer can compare one listing with another, and so you have a dated record of exactly what each card looked like the day it left your hands.
• We list, store, pack and ship, and we deal with the buyer, including the awkward ones.
• Postage never comes out of your side of it, whatever it costs to ship the card.
• Cards are listed on our own site and across several marketplaces.
• There is a fixed term and a minimum batch value, both published on the consign page rather than quoted here.
• Nothing is accepted by post. Everything starts with an online submission, then an appointment in a public place, in daylight, somewhere near you.

That is also the honest version of the headline claim. Our consignment share is set so that at the same sale price a card returns more to you than our cash offer on that card would have, and you can check both figures rather than take our word for it. What it does not promise is the sale, or the price. A card that does not sell inside the term has paid you nothing at all, and a card we reduce to move it can sell for less than the cash offer was. Anybody who leaves those two sentences off is selling you something.

Leaving your cards with somebody you have just met

This is the real hesitation, and it deserves a straight answer rather than reassurance. Consignment means your cards sit somewhere you cannot see them, with a business you did not know last week, for as long as the term runs. Selling outright has no such exposure: once the handshake is done there is no counterparty left to fail.

What protects a consignor is paperwork, not reputation. People who have been badly burned in this hobby and in others were almost never robbed at a counter. They were reassured, then told stories, then told nothing. In more than one case the thing that persuaded somebody to hand over a collection was a credential, a familiar name or a television appearance. A credential is not a protection. A document is.

So judge any consignment arrangement, ours included, on whether these things exist.

• An itemised list of what you handed over, with condition noted, produced before you leave the table rather than emailed later.
• A written statement that the cards remain your property until they sell. This single sentence is what makes the arrangement bearable, and a great many people do not know it is normal.
• A record of what each card looked like at intake. Here that is a scan of both faces, all at the same scale.
• A live listing you can open for each of your cards, so you can look at your own cards the way a buyer does.
• A named human being, and a business name you can look up in the state's own public records.
• A meeting you can get to, in a public place, in daylight. Nothing is accepted by post here, and that is the reason: you hand the cards to a face you have seen, in your own county.

The scans do double duty, which is worth saying out loud because almost nobody in the hobby says it. The same images that let a buyer trust a listing are a dated record of what your card looked like when it left your hands. Protection for the shop and protection for you turn out to be the same document.

The part of an agreement people skip is the part about cards that do not sell, and it is the part that differs most from shop to shop. Terms published elsewhere in this hobby include a fee charged on each unsold card at the end of the term, automatic relisting at a low opening bid, return postage billed to the consignor, a short window to claim unsold cards before the shop's own rights begin, and, in at least one published set of terms, ownership of an unsold card passing to the shop. We are not telling you the trade is like that, because we have not counted. We are telling you those terms exist, in writing, on real websites, and that the only way to know which one you are signing is to read it.

Here is a checklist you can take to any shop in the country. Ask it of us too. Every one of these has a short, factual answer, and a shop that cannot give you one has not thought about it, which is its own answer.

When does the agreement end?

There should be a date, not a feeling. An open-ended arrangement is how "your cards are still with us" becomes a permanent reply.

What happens on the last day of it?

Ask specifically what becomes of a card that has not sold. Does it come back to you, or does it become theirs? Both answers are in use in this hobby right now.

Can I get them back before the term ends?

A term with no exit is a term you are stuck in, whatever changes at home. Here you can ask for any or all of your cards back at any time, for any reason, with no fee; listings start coming down the day the request arrives, and a card that sells before its listing is down is sold.

Who pays to get unsold cards back, and how do I physically get them?

Return postage billed to the consignor is a common late surprise. Ask before it is one. Here there is nothing to post: unsold cards come back the way they arrived, in person.

Can the price change while the card is listed, and who changes it?

Repricing is normal and often sensible. Being repriced without being told is not.

Where does the money sit between the buyer paying and me being paid?

When a business fails, the consignors who lose most are the ones whose money was mixed in with the operating cash. It is a fair question and it is rarely asked.

Does your insurance cover property of others in your care, custody and control?

Ask it in those words. Ordinary business cover insures the business's own property and commonly excludes customers' goods, so covering yours takes a specific kind of policy. A shop that does not recognise the phrase has probably not bought it. Here the answer is no: we do not insure your cards while they are with us, we say so on the consign page and in the terms rather than waiting to be asked, and what we owe if a card is lost or damaged is written down there too.

What happens to my cards if you close?

Nobody asks this. Everybody who has ever been burned wishes they had.

The market gets a vote while you wait

While a card sits listed, things happen to it that neither of us controls. An injury. A breakout run. An awards announcement. A Hall of Fame vote. A trade. A retirement. A death. A reprint that floods a player's market. A graded population that keeps growing. Some of those push a card up and some push it down, and neither of us knows which is coming.

That symmetry is the reason to trust the rest of this page. A cash offer fixes your outcome: it protects you from the fall and it excludes you from the rise. Consignment is not a safer way to get more. It is a way to get more if you accept that the market has a say while you wait. A consigned card can be repriced when things move, but repricing is an ability, not a rescue.

There is also a cost here that is not financial. An unfinished thing sits in your head. The useful finding about that is not what people expect: what quiets an unfinished task is not completing it, it is having a specific plan for how and when it ends. That is an argument for a fixed term, not an argument for cash. An arrangement with an end date and a written answer to what happens if a card does not sell is a plan. A box in a closet, or an open-ended arrangement with nothing written on the end of it, is the thing that nags.

Be honest with yourself all the same. If you know you will check the listings every night and feel it each time nothing has sold, that cost is real and it is yours to weigh. For some people it is on its own a good reason to take the cash.

Grading is the third path people discover halfway through this decision. A raw card that grades well can be worth materially more. It also costs money, takes time, and the grade that comes back is not always the one you assumed, which makes it another open loop stacked on the first. It is sometimes the right move. It is never a free upgrade.

When the cash offer is the right answer even though it pays less

We would rather say this here than have you work it out afterwards. Consignment is the wrong choice more often than a page selling consignment would admit.

• There is a date. Anything with a deadline attached to it takes the cash, every time.
• You want it finished. Being finished is a product, not a consolation prize, and paying for it is a reasonable thing to do with your own property.
• What you have is mostly bulk. The work of listing a card does not shrink because the card is cheap, which is why a minimum batch value exists at all.
• The cards are not entirely yours to wait with. Shared property, a divorce, a house sale or a family split all want a single payment on a known day.
• You are acting for somebody else.

That last one deserves its own paragraph, because it is where people talk themselves into the wrong answer with the best intentions. If you are the personal representative of an estate, your job is to turn property into something that can be divided and accounted for. A consignment is an outcome that has not happened yet: it cannot be handed to a beneficiary, it cannot be closed on a date you choose, and every month it runs is a month somebody waits and wonders. Unless the beneficiaries have agreed in writing to wait and one of them is willing to own the arrangement, take the certain payment and close it.

We are not lawyers or accountants. The value of a collection on the date of death, and the treatment of anything you receive for it, belong to the estate's attorney and accountant, who will want the itemised list either route produces.

Most people should do both, and the split is not by feeling

Almost nobody is holding one kind of card. A collection is usually a few cards worth real attention and a great deal of everything else, and the two halves want opposite treatment. The criterion is not sentiment and it is not what a card meant to whoever collected it. It is the money at stake on that one card set against the work of handling that one card.

• Worth consigning: the cards you already know by name, anything already graded, rookies and short-printed inserts in strong condition, and anything a buyer would want to examine closely before paying. These are the cards where a careful listing and a patient buyer change the outcome.
• Better sold outright: the long tail. Base runs, team sets, commons, well-loved cards with soft corners, and anything where listing the card costs more effort than the card returns. These do not become worth more by waiting; they become a storage problem.

In practice this is one appointment rather than two. Everything is submitted together and looked at together, and the split is decided at the table with both figures in front of you: this pile is an offer you can take today, that pile is worth listing. You are not required to do either, and you are allowed to take the offer on everything because you would rather be done.

One last honest thing. We are small and new, and we are not going to tell you that makes us safe. What we can do is put the terms in writing, itemise what you hand over, scan it before it leaves your sight, keep it your property until it sells, and publish both figures so the claim at the top of this page can be checked. Judge that, and judge everybody else the same way.