Should you sell a card collection locally or online?

What selling online yourself really involves

For a small number of genuinely good cards, listing them yourself is the right answer and it is not close. The difficulty is that most collections are not a small number of genuinely good cards.

Per card, the work is: identify it, judge its condition honestly, photograph both sides well enough that a stranger trusts you, write the listing, price it against completed sales, answer questions, pack it so it survives the post, ship it, and handle the occasional return or dispute. Then multiply that by four hundred.

• The marketplace takes a cut of every sale, and payment processing takes another.
• Shipping a card safely costs more than people expect, and the cheapest options carry no tracking.
• Cards described optimistically come back. Condition is the most common kind of dispute.
• The commons at the bottom of the collection will not sell individually at all, which leaves you where you started with most of the boxes.

What a local buyer is actually paying for

A local offer is lower per card than the sum of what those cards would eventually fetch online, and it is worth understanding exactly why rather than assuming somebody is taking advantage.

• They are paying you today for money they will receive over months, if it arrives at all.
• They are taking the whole collection, including the part that will never sell one card at a time.
• They are absorbing the work you would otherwise do: identification, condition, photography, listing, packing, shipping and returns.
• They are carrying the risk that a card is not what it appears to be.

That is the trade. It is a real service with a real cost, and the way to judge an offer is not to compare it with the best price a card ever fetched, but to ask whether the reasoning behind it holds up.

Consignment: the middle option

Consignment is the arrangement where somebody else does the selling and you keep most of the sale price, less a commission. You wait for the money instead of receiving it in one payment, and in exchange you get closer to the online price without doing the online work.

It suits higher-value cards, where the gap between a cash offer today and the full price later is large enough to be worth waiting for. It suits bulk commons badly, for the same reason selling them yourself does: the work of listing a card does not shrink because the card is cheap.

Which one fits what you have

Whichever you choose, do not ship cards to a stranger

This applies to every route. A collection that leaves your hands before a price is agreed is a collection you are negotiating for without leverage, and if something goes wrong the options for getting it back are poor and slow.

• Do not mail a collection for a sight-unseen appraisal. Get the number before the cards move.
• Do not accept an offer made before anybody has seen the cards. It is not a real number, and it can be revised downward once they are in the room.
• Meet in a public place, during the day, at a time agreed in advance, and bring photo identification.

We refuse mail-ins for exactly this reason, and we do not make offers on cards we have not seen.

How this works locally

We are based in Jupiter and cover Palm Beach and Martin County, from Stuart down to Boca Raton. Selling and consigning both start the same way: photos of what you have, a reply from a person, and if it is a fit, a meeting in a public place near you rather than near us.

Each of these towns has a page on meeting there, and on which places nearby the same trip covers: Stuart, Jupiter, Palm Beach Gardens, West Palm Beach, Wellington, Boynton Beach, Delray Beach and Boca Raton. Every other town we cover is on the service-area page.