Pricing Baseball Cards

Pricing baseball cards, no easy task to do when your venue for sales is the internet. Whether you use the Beckett baseball cards site or eBay or have some other venue, you should not sell the value of your sports collection or individual cards short.

Included in my internet sales plan to succeed with the sales of sports cards, is the buy it now option that eBay offers. It seems to be the new trend in internet sales. People are desperate and want it now, actually they wanted it yesterday. Here in lies the tricky part, you have to stand your ground. What do I mean by that? Well this is what I mean, Beckett Sports Publications will price most cards and they have various publications they even have one that prices graded cards. When pricing your cards, you have the book price, and the consensus internet price but be prepared to have your price, especially when attempting to sell cards that are not in demand to large groups of consumers of players that are not particularly hot or sports that are not in session.

SPX Daiske Matsuzaka

Scan over the list of cards that are being offered, that you are attempting to sell. Try to price your card a few dollars below, after all you have to determine do you want to sell the item or not, if the answer is yes, then you might as well be competitive and aggressive. Every time I list a card for sale, I already have a price in mind which I will not go below, and I never choose the option of turning away potential buyers with a preset limit, those of you that have used this before know what I am talking about, sometimes dialogue with a potential buyer is everything.

Getting cards graded is not always the best way to go, things to considered are whether or not this is a sports card that you wish to keep for your collection or sell. Pricing baseball cards is tricky, I recently sold a BGS 9.0 2007 Upper Deck SPX Daiske Matsuzaka autographed rookie card for $175.00 on eBay. The buyer used the buy it now option, never haggled on the price either. This card would have fetched the same price ungraded, although the BGS graded card price indexed is roughly $200.00. Incredibly the sale came the day after the RedSox’s ace beat the Tampa Rays in the Baseball League Championship series. This buyer saw the bargain and purchased the card outright. The card had been on eBay for close to 20 days. I guess with that timing was everything with that sale.

1975 Topps Baseball Mini

Now by the same token, I will tell you that I sold a BVG 9.0 1975 Topps Baseball mini, for $130.00 and with this card the buyer went back and forth with the sale of the card, we finally agreed on $130.00. I thought that this was a fair price, after all I learned that because there are far more PSA vintage sports cards graded, than with BVG there are just as many more collectors out there looking for vintage cards with the PSA grading, frankly I did not think there would have been many more takers. PSA registry’s are driving many of the sales of vintage PSA cards to dry up, occasionally you will see someone breaking a registry set and the sales of these cards usually skyrocket.

In any business, repeat business is the foundation of the sales, treating people fairly, not over-pricing your cards and pricing baseball cards according to market values, regardless what a pricing book states is the best way to have your business progress with internet sales.