Bulk Listing on Ebay - Advice?
 

I hope this is the right spot to post this!

I will soon be listing 30,000-40,000 vintage cards on ebay. I've got them all catalogued and priced on Excel and I've been slowly photographing them.

I will not be consigning the cards. I've tried that in the past with mixed results, at best!

What tools/methods do you use to bulk list?
Any tips or suggestions?
Any services who create Excel sheets for File Exchange, etc?

Thanks,
Eric

There are services such as Invest In Baseball that can efficiently list 30,000 to 40,000 cards in under a day. Maybe you should give them a try.

Are you talking about creating 30,000 individual listings?
Like, --1959 Topps Duke Snider VG+-- $10.00 etc?
I used to sell 5 cards at a time on there and found it to be more trouble than it was worth, and that was 5 cards at a time. It was very time consuming. To me, it's worth every penny to ship it off to an auctioneer and let them do all the work.

I'm lazy so I use http://www.comc.com

Aren't you Invest in Baseball?

COMC is awesome for buying, no idea on selling.

COMC is great for selling, and great for flipping. Mailing 40,000 cards to 15,000 different addresses seems like a drag, personally.

Yes, I'm talking about doing 40,000 individual listings on ebay.

As for Invest In Baseball, thanks Sean, but as you may recall, we tried to do a deal a few years ago and it didn't work out too well.

Make sure that the cards you offer are both accurately graded and priced competitive with actual market prices or you will be running a card museum versus shipping cards you sell. Scans of the front/back are now the norm, so ensure both scans are included.

If you work full time and as such have limited time don't list more than 10 items per day or you will be overwhelmed. It will take you years to get rid of them.

Now that's funny! Sean pretending to offer unbiased recommendations to his own company!

Would need a staff of people to move 40,000 items. Not sure you've thought this through. Shipping supplies along would be daunting. Not to mention time and effort to ship.

+1

If one person could ship out (pull, package, print label, etc) an average of 100 cards/hour (including both single card orders and multi card orders) and worked 8 hours a day w/o a break, it would take TEN 5 day work weeks of time just to ship out the 40,000 cards.

In reality, with 40k FP listings on ebay, a seller may realistically expect to sell 200-300 cards a day. So figure on 2-3 hours each day for one person to ship all of the sold cards from the previous day.

Damn, I must be slow as trash. I need to set aside like 2-3 hours just to ship out 10-15 packages. LOL!!!


100 an hour? :eek:


It would take me at least a couple hours just to print out 100 sets of invoices and labels.

I would think processing 15 packages in 2 hours is about right.....if you ship 15 packages in 2 hours containing 14-15 cards (on average), you can ship 100 cards an hour. If you have a 40k item inventory, likely you will be getting a good number of multi item orders as so many buyers strive to save on s/h.

If a seller is shipping nothing but single cards to each buyer, they will obviously get no where near 100 cards an hour, but 20-25 single cards an hour shipped would be more realistic.

I'd advise easing into it. I hit a wall at 20 items a week where beyond that I started missing emails and being a bit slow on shipping. I'm sure a more organized person would do a bit better. But it's best to set up the physical system for packing/shipping, and see how far your system gets you.

Anything that's a common card in average condition should probably go in a lot. There's a limit to your time, and it's far easier to list a lot of several commons for say 9.99 than it is to list 10 cards at .99 I never saw much difference in the percent sold, but it made for a lot less work. (I did pretty well for a while with lots of somewhat random "junk" 400 cards fit pretty well in a small priority box. After a while they stopped selling. Fortunately right around the time I had a local guy ask about larger lots and made a deal for about 20,000+ cards.

Steve B

I use TurboLister, the free tool from ebay, to upload my bulk listings. However, I only have ~300 listings total. Not sure if there is a way to convert from spreadsheet to TurboLister format.

Does COMC do autographs as well? I know they have autographed cards. But 3x5's, photos and the like?

Tom C

Only if they've been slabbed by PSA/JSA/SGC. Send them an email at staff@comc.com to confirm, though. If you send in unverified autographs, they will usually load them into your account as "NEEDS TO BE AUTHENTICATED" and you can either send them back to yourself or submit to BGS through their service with COMC.

Man.... I know you say you don't want to use an auction house, but think of the labor of just doing 1/40th of your collection for sale? 1000 things!!! If it took you an avg of 10 minutes to make the ebay page that's 10,000 minutes or 167 hours! Then the same ten minutes to make a label, pack the card and ship it off is another 167 hours!

For 40k cards that is 3334 hours (or 416 days at 8 hours a day with no breaks non stop) realistically we are talking a full time job for 2 years just selling em.

If you valued your labor at $15 an hr that's $50k AND you have to do all the work. I would think that even if you paid $75k in commissions the ease of just shipping em off would offset that.

but ymmv! good luck!

comc
 

At a board member's recommendation, I tried comc last summer. Since then, I sent them 300 cards and about half have sold. I love paying .25 per card to get an uploaded picture. And, as of this last month, all my listings are now on ebay. You must pay 20% for the ebay fees (same with amazon). Never dealing with the buyers and never scanning and going to the post office a few times a year is wonderful. From experience, I would say that it is good to take comc's advice and don't list too many cards that are under $1 because you don't really make much money. As a buyer, comc is also a great way to bundle shipments that only cost $3 to mail to you.

I appreciate all of the input.
I've been selling cards for several years and have used some of the ebay tools such as turbo lister. I've listed up to 1,200 cards over 3 days. Adding them took a lot of work.
I'm set up to do a lot of shipping in a timely manner.
Because I have all of the cards already entered into Excel and will have all of the scans done soon, I'm looking for another alternative.
I know using File Exchange will allow me to set up an EXCEL spreadsheet. I just need to use proper HTML for each heading.
Once this is done, I can paste the list of cards from that year, then paste the links to the correct images, then you can upload the entire set.
It will take under 30 minutes to list every individual card from each complete set (because image links have to be added one at a time).
I just don't know how to write the HTML for all the headings.

If you're used to using TurboLister, just create a sample listing in it that is set up how you want, export it to an Excel csv file, and use that as your template.

I would also advise using some sort of naming convention or id number to link each item to its associated images as you scan or photograph them. If you're handy with Excel, you can use formulas to "write" the necessary headers and descriptions based on your inventory spreadsheet, auto-generate links to the images, and basically create the listing for each item based on the information you have entered in your inventory spreadsheet, keeping all of the shipping info, weight, return policy, etc as static information (assuming you are listing all the same type of items). Using a 3rd-party image hosting account that will create a predictable link to each image that you upload will save a ton of time over dragging individual images into each listing, and even if you use a paid account, will be well worth the time saved.

This is exactly how I used to upload to my eBay store/auctions before I set up a separate website using the Simple Auction guys' "Simple Store" platform (thanks Bob!), which has eBay upload and relist integrated into the store software. I still use a series of Excel spreadsheets to catalog items and generate the listings, but the functionality of the SS platform software is worth the expense to me in the time it saves managing my eBay listings. Also, the TurboLister software tends to get very *kachung*y" when you get up to managing several thousand listings, and will tend to crash or bog down your machine where the SS software does not. So that might be something else to consider once you've gotten into the swing of things.

I was looking at on option for selling some bulk as well. The best consigners IMO would be PWCC or Probstein. Greg Morris is hit and miss and the newer guys that have come around in the last year or two have that capability but really crappy scans (crooked and in card savers etc.) Great scans with centering get premium prices and when they are poorly done it leaves money on the table. You will probably be better off listing yourself unless you want to leave 20-40% on the table due to poor scanning. If you list yourself make sure your cards are centered on a black background to show all edges. Good luck.


Jason

Eric,


Also if you are in the KC area, my business partner and I are working on a project right now addressing this exact issue. If you want to PM I can pass on my number and perhaps we could meet and talk about it.


Jason

Options
 

Be careful with Turbolister. It is OK for listing a few dozen items quickly, but it tends to crash when you are uploading several hundred. A couple of years ago, I lost 500 listings when eBay "upgraded" Turbolister. EBay could not recover them for me.

COMC can be good, but if you send them 40,000 cards, it will cost you $12,500 plus shipping - up front. If you sell a COMC card on eBay, you will pay the eBay fees. When it comes time to pull your cash out of COMC, COMC hits you with a 20% cash out fee, so it ends up costing you more than eBay. You do save time on scanning, listing, and shipping, so that is significant. In addition, COMC is quickly becoming another eBay in regard to high prices, and many sellers do not take offers, or they only accept offers that are 5% or 10% off of the original price. If you take a look at pre-war cards, there are many cards that have been on the site for 3-4 year with no price reductions. There is one seller who lists beat up T213-2's for over $400 and he won't accept offers. These are the same type of cards that sell for $35 on eBay. Just like eBay, when you do a search, your search will be filled with overpriced BIN's, just like on eBay. I guess what I saying is that if you have reasonable prices and accept offers, you will sell some cards.

If I was selling graded cards, I would send them to PWCC. It will save you a lot of time. I enjoy listing, selling, and shipping cards, so I don't mind the work, so you might want to list some of your raw singles yourself.

Anyway, you might want to analyze your inventory and do a mix of PWCC, eBay, and COMC, and the best place to sell is right here on the BST.

Rick