Becomming a dealer for full time income.

[jcmtiger]

If It was 1975 I would say yes. But 2012 NO! NO!!! NO!!!!

Joe

[packs]

I feel like you would have needed to purchase your entire inventory today in 1980 in order to make substantial profit on it. Or you can set up at shows, put ridiculous price stickers on your cards and show up every month with the same cards still on display. Sounds kinda dumb but every time I go to a card show I see the same guys with the same stuff telling me they aren't collectors, they're interested in money. Go figure. The guys who are interested in making money don't ever make any and the guys who are interested in collecting keep growing their collections buying from someone else.

[barrysloate]

After further thought: keep your day job no matter how much you dislike it, start a baseball card business that you can develop at night and on the weekends. Only try it fulltime after you've established you can make a living at it. My guess is you will make some money but not nearly enough to support a family. It's much tougher today than when I got in in the early 80's.

[kcohen]

For all of the reasons stated in prior posts, I'm loathe to see how one can actually make a living as a new entry into the market. I've been setting up at shows for 8 or 9 years and I recognized right off the bat that having to actually do it for a living would be exceedingly difficult and would totally suck all pleasure from the hobby. Once an avocation becomes a vocation, it's a totally different animal.

[Big Ben]

Originally Posted by barrysloate

After further thought: keep your day job no matter how much you dislike it, start a baseball card business that you can develop at night and on the weekends. Only try it fulltime after you've established you can make a living at it. My guess is you will make some money but not nearly enough to support a family. It's much tougher today than when I got in in the early 80's.

I very much agree! IMO Stating small on the internet and trying to exploit a niche in the market would be the way to go. That being said, I am not sure if there is a niche out there in the card market that has not been tried. I also have to wonder about the degree of disposable income that people currently have to devote to cards. I have been away from the hobby for a while though. I have known of two instances in which a person has purchased an existing card business. In both instances, I have seen the buyer not really able to recoup their initial investment and in one case, the buyer inherited the problems with the previous business. I think that it is safe to say that most of us have flipped cards for a profit. It is much easier to flip cards when a person does not have to worry about supporting yourself and or your family.
Best of luck to you on whatever you decide to try.

[alanu]

If it already hasn't been mentioned, make sure you factor the cost of health insurance into your business plan.

[buymycards]

Hi,
I normally have between 500-1000 items on ebay at any one time. (I am taking the summer off, so I don't have any listings right now) This requires constant work. Every morning before work and every evening after work, I am shipping cards, answering questions, responding to offers, etc. Every weekend I am scanning dozens of items and listing them in turbolister before I upload them to ebay.

Having a successful ebay store requires constant work. You have to be willing to let go of slow moving items at a loss so you can buy more inventory. It can be tough to find enough inventory, at the right price, to keep the store stocked. Most of my items are BIN with best offer, and I nearly always accept any offer that is 40% or more of my BIN price. If I buy at the right price I can accept 40% and still make a profit and the whole point is to sell the cards. I would rather make two bucks profit on a card and move it right away than let it sit for 2 years so I might possibly make $10.

When I think about quitting my job and doing this full time, I start doing some math. If you look at my salary, vacation, sick leave, life insurance, health insurance, retirement plan, etc, I take the annual total and divide it by 250 work days. ( Mon through Friday 50 weeks per year). Now I know how much PROFIT I need to make every day in order to match my current income.

Let's say that profit number is $250 per day. Now, I need to have enough daily ebay sales so that I can make $250 per day. That means that if my state and federal taxes are 35%, and my social security and medicare is %15 per cent, I have to make a before taxes profit of $500 per day. Now, if you figure the cost of the items that you sell, ebay and paypals cut, shipping expenses, utilities, ink for your your printer, and all of the other costs that come with it, I would probably need sales of $1000 per day in order to end up with $250 in my pocket.

If you are selling items at $10 each, that would be 100 sales per day, 100 invoices to print, 100 packages to mail, 100 cards to scan, 100 cards to list, plus you would need to be super organized so you could find the cards right away to prepare them for shipping. That is a lot of work for $250 per day.

Not only that, but if you are using BIN's rather than auctions you would probably need to be running 2000-3000 items in order to sell 100 items per day.

You can supplement your income on the weekends by setting up at shows. I have set up at shows when I didn't make the $35 table fee and I have set up where I sold every item that I brought, so you never know. In the past I was able to purchase a lot of inventory that customers brought to the shows, but that doesn't happen much any more. The nice thing about shows is that you can normally blow out a lot of junk that won't sell on ebay.

A brick and mortar store would be great, but the overhead would be a killer. The great thing about having a physical location is that you will get a lot of people coming through the door looking to sell their collections. The perfect solution would be to have a regular store, an ebay store, and set up at shows on the weekends, but it would be one hell of a lot of work.

Good luck with your decision, but make sure that you fully analyze your costs. The general rule for most start ups is figure what you think your start up costs will be - then double it, and you will still be short.

Rick

[steve B]

Another thing to consider is that every hobby business that I've seen be siccessful -defined as lasing more than a few years- Has taken advantage of a great deal of networking and making smart moves.

The stamp guy I did some work for aimed at turming most stuff quickly, hopefully in less than a month, occasionally in less than a day. As long as he had profit he was happy, even if he left a good deal of money on the table.

Closet full of stock certificates? Sold before he got them back to the shop.
Much postcard? Turned in a week for a nice profit, eventually sold through a couple other people and ended up going at auction for 10K! And he wasn't bothered by that. His customer had the one contact to get from $500 to $5000 and was a regular.
He also would buy a collection at a show and sell it before he got back to the table. That takes a lot of general knowledge plus mentally keeping track of who will buy what.

The local card shop sells lots of memorabilia too, current posters and penants type stuff.
But they also use internet contacts very well. The day Curtis Martin went to the Jets they sold their entire inventory of his cards to a NY dealer. Not for full price, but they unloaded what would soon be dead inventory and the NY guy got an instant inventory of what would be that weeks hot cards in his area.

More business happens at stamp shows before the doors open than after. Same for coins. I haven't seen that the couple times I did a show, but I was new and didn't have much money or inventory. (Always seemed to have the wrong sort of stuff. Just one reason I didn't get into it full time.)

Steve B