Interesting Stats on Probstein’s Ebay Business
 

The latest episode of the Sports Card Madness podcast interviews Rick Probstein. He said he’s the largest in the hobby on Ebay by a factor of 2. (Note: other categories on Ebay are larger than collectibles).
He has 850,000 sales/year. For each of the last four years they’ve sold over $100M/yr with the biggest year being $160M. He uses the same pricing for everyone who consigns a card regardless of price/volume. It’s a volume business in his mind and it’s too difficult to have special deals for some of their customers - more efficient just to have standard pricing.
They receive over 100 packages a day. He has about 30 employees. He said “I only have 4 or 5 that know what they are doing.” (That’s one hell of a quote!) Many of the employees are paid minimum wage but the most important are the two head scripters who are responsible for listing and titling the cards placed up for auction. I suspect many of these employees are opening mail, sending out mail, or scanning cards into Ebay.
One notable part of the interview was where he said he feels EBay’s Buy It Now listings are completely broken with the average BIN card listed at 5 times latest comps. Some BIN listings have been up for over a decade (not sure how much hyperbole is in either of those statements but I agree with the general sentiment.) He’s getting rid of all of their BIN listings and replacing with auctions that have a minimum floor price. If the card doesn’t sell they lower the floor price and will relist for auction.
His personal collection has to be worth tens of millions based on some of the cards he owns and discussed during the interview. I guess that makes sense if your business is low margin, your revenue is $100M+, and you’ve kept your labor costs as low as possible. He didn’t mention another equity partner so his profits from the business should be substantial.

Those are some big numbers. Based on what I see on eBay, I wouldn't have expected that he was hitting $100M+ in top line sales per year, but what do I know?

Obviously he's top dog now that PWCC is no longer on eBay. I suspect they were topping him by a large multiple every year. Now that they're out of the picture, Rick is kind of the last man standing.

And it's nice to hear that he's moving away from the BIN format, to more of a reverse auction or dutch auction format. I suspect that means stuff will move faster, although he may have some consignors that don't want to use that format.

If I'm being honest, it doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that he has minimum wage noobs doing most of the work, with the level of volume that he has. Just seems like a recipe for stuff to disappear under mysterious circumstances. But hopefully he has robust controls in place to prevent those sort of shenanigans.

I live not too far from the Probstein mothership and a few years back bought an expensive Type 1 photo from him. I asked if I could just pick it up and he said sure; gave me an address like 3 miles from my home. When I got there it was the most non-descript generic industrial park I'd have ever seen. Like people had paper signs taped to their door for the mailman. His office had some little sign that said Probstein Enterprises or something. Presumably this was his shipping hub. I rang the bell a few times and eventually I was greeted by a friendly Mexican or Central American girl, maybe 20 years old, who made clear to me quickly that she didn't speak a word of English. Finally I got "Gehrig photograph" across and she left and came back and handed me the photo with a post in on it. All worked out well but was certainly a hell of a weird experience.

This is simultaneously comforting and horrifying at the same time.

Get me the address. I'm going to go and ask for "babe ruth" and see of they will bring me one.

It did dawn on me that their non descript office park probably housed $500,000 in sports memorabilia. Discretion probably well justified. Guy next door could have been selling glass pipes by the box as far as I could tell.