PSA: Sell your cards online!

If you're a relatively enfranchised player with a large collection of semi-valuable rares that you don't know what to do with, I suggest just selling them online. I've slowly accumulated a bunch of stuff (primarily from opening packs or from taking apart decks) that I don't use and didn't see myself using in the foreseeable future. My trade binder was overflowing and I kept on having to get more boxes for my playables. I do love trading but I don't really have anything I need right now, and the few things I do need are pretty hard to come by. I tried trading stuff in/buylisting but it always felt really bad how little value you actually get out of it. So I took a stack of cards and listed them online. I'll try to give you guys an idea of how and why it ended up being a good idea.

1. Ease

The main thing that was stopping me was time/logistics and worry about the cost of shipping. Turns out it's actually really easy. Probably the most time consuming part is actually putting up listings, and the rest takes a few minutes per order at most. Maybe some time spent reviewing current listings to make sure I'm close to market price. Once you have the bulk of your stuff up, adding random pack pulls and whatever is quick too. I recommend keeping your listings sorted by color at least, and even more granularity depending on how much you list. But at 400 current listings just sorting by color is enough for me to find whatever I need in a few seconds. I'm literally just a guy selling cards from my house and I've had no issues.

2. Value Proposition

This is the big upside. Trading is ideal for value (theoretically, you get 100% of your cards' value, in the form of other cards) but is incredibly slow. Buylisting is horrendous for value (40-50%, and that's being very optimistic) even if you can get rid of a lot of volume quickly. I've been selling for about 2 or 3 months now and have gotten 92 orders, which is more than an order per day, and by computing the total payout, which is post-marketplace fee, minus shipping costs times order count (I estimate about 1$ per order) I end up getting around 90-95% of my cards' value back as money in the bank. Your shipping costs are roughly 78c per stamp, 3c per envelope, plus toploaders, penny sleeves, and printing packing slips, and there are plenty of corners to be cut that don't hurt the order. For example, reusing toploaders/sleeves/team bags from your own purchases (god knows I've saved enough of those), or printing packing slips 4 or 6 to a page or even just handwriting them. Point is, it's a relatively easy and quick way to liquidate your spare cards while still retaining a good amount of their price.

3. Effectiveness

I was surprised by the breadth of stuff people will buy. I haven't really detected a big correlation between playability or price or premiumness and peoples' willingness to buy. So anything that is even remotely commander-playable is probably worth listing. Even the really cheap bulk is worth it, in fact more than worth it since you get less shafted by marketplace fees and make a profit on the shipping fees.

I'm currently using Manapool to sell, but this is definitely not meant to be an ad or anything, feel free to sell on TCGPlayer or Ebay or wherever else. But they definitely have a good seller backend and integration with TCGTracking. I'm just hoping this is a helpful introduction to online selling and can help anyone else out who's on the edge of making that decision. It's definitely worth it.