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Originally posted by JayC:
... you have to ship PWE and TCG always sides with the buyer so they can just rip you off without issue and you have no recourse...

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Same as ebay (which even sides with the buyer on tracked orders) and any transaction done through PayPal. MOTL's recourse is banning the person and publicly shaming them - which won't get your money back if the person wants to rip you off.

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Originally posted by Timmyhill:
So I'm sure this will sound like a very silly question.

But what is the easiest way to get more cards to resell?

I roam the sales thread here but it can be a daunting task to price it out, make an offer then have to deal with counter offers.

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Originally posted by Timmyhill:
That's very helpful chaos

Thanks JayC, that is kind of what I've been noticing. I've
always been hesitant to ship in PWE for the reasons you state but I might just have to.

I'm currently working 40-50 hours a week at my job but will quitting in February because we decided to start a Christmas Tree farm. Plus we are building a gift shop to go alone with the tree farm and we are going to fill it with a bunch of the woodworking that I also do.

So I was looking for a way to stream line trying to find new cards to sell as my days are pretty packed with "work". I don't have any delusions of making hundreds of thousands of dollars selling cards but it would be very nice to make a profit of 4k-6k a year as that would greatly help replace some of the income I'll be losing till the tree farm is 100% up and running.

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$4-$6k a year profit is certainly reasonable for about 2-3 hours a day of work which includes shipping orders, finding opportunities, etc. but this is assuming you can take advantage of those opportunities locally before others are via Craigslist and LGS's, etc. where you get really nice collections on the cheap, etc. If you are only purchasing at buy list, it will take a lot of volume to actually profit $500 a month in true net.

Take it from me, the costs stack up and never stop. Just some examples:

Printer
Label Printer
Ink
Paper
Labels
Address Labels
Envelopes
Padded Envelopes
Stamps
Sleeves
Top Loaders (of various sizes)
Boxes (Storage)
Card Dividers (Organized Storage)
TCG Fees
Shrinkage / Refunds due to 'shipments that didn't arrive' and/or 'quality did not match as advertised'.

Realistically, I'd be surprised if most people make 15% TRUE NET PROFIT at the end of it all, which means you'd need to ship over $5,000 USD a month which equates to about 500-600 orders using my average sale price of about $8 per order total. Consider if shipping that many orders, after sorting, grading, sleeving, and shipping is worth your time. You'll quickly find it's not if you have another alternative seeing that even at $10 an hour it would take you less time at a regular 'job'.

I'm not trying to talk you out of it, so much as tell you the dirty truth. Of course there's money to be made, and it's exciting as hell when you come up on a big collection super cheap, etc. but there's a lot of work involved and after a year of doing it hardcore non-stop I can tell you it's overwhelming and underpaying.

I'm curious why you need a label printer? I've been printing my shipping labels with a regular printer.

I'm averaging about 20 sales a month with an average of $15 per sale. But the more I sell the more I'm worrying about burning up all my stock with no efficient way of replacing it.

I've been a hoarder for some time now so right now I'm sitting on about 125k of commons, 35k of uncommons and about 10k of rares with a bunch of modern and legacy stuff I'm saving for when I really need the money. I know the commons/uncommons aren't much but I dig through them and buy list them to stores now and then. Plus I have some nifty plans for most of them, when if I get some extra time I'll post some pictures.

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Originally posted by jshields:
I have been pretty satisfied with selling on Tcgplayer.com as a whole and while I charge the maximum allowable for shipping, I always include tracking, as well as insurance depending on the value of the sale, after learning my lesson the hard way on ebay (not to mention their fees + pay pal fees ate up to 20% of the gross sale). Although I have been a Magic dealer since 2001, even I realize that when you sell a card, sealed product, or card lot, you are basically taking a gamble on earning money on what you paid for with the same item. As an example, I have dealt in wholesale rares, selling them between $0.50 - $1.00 apiece as a contracted store dealer being charged up to 25% commission to the store + $0.05 - $0.11 per bulk rare purchased, which is quite profitable on a junk rare, I know that many of the junk rares will often never sell until done as overstocks to another store, resulting in my earning as little as $0.07 per card after 1-2 years sold as part of a larger lot. For an average gross year total of $30,000 - $50,000 in cards, I typically earned conservatively around 15-25% of the total when combined with higher-end item sales; almost all of which went into a more reliable long-term money maker: a Roth-IRA retirement account and college tuition payment for a fair paying regular job. However, compared with selling to stores where your cards are bought at low-ball prices, putting effort into finding decent resources to sell your cards at fair prices to make a small income can be worth the effort, but as running a business is not guaranteed to earn money, you have to sometimes accept making do with what you have instead of what you feel you missed out upon.

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Originally posted by JayC:
Well, after you pay both state and Federal taxes you are making about $5,000 for a year of work, and that's depressing to me, coming from someone who does more than that in sales a year but still doesn't seem the opportunity in this business unless you're shipping hundreds of thousands a year out or you're not paying taxes, either or.

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Isn't there a minimum amount for fed/state sales taxes in the US? In Canada you don't need to charge federal sales tax if your total sales are below $30K/yr.

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Originally posted by Volcanon:
Isn't there a minimum amount for fed/state sales taxes in the US? In Canada you don't need to charge federal sales tax if your total sales are below $30K/yr.

For income tax, if your profit margins are that low, you should be earning barely any taxable income. 15% margins = clearing $500 after $6000 of sales = you only pay tax on the $500.

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Originally posted by stu55:
Any one know why I can't adjust the s/h charge on my items? I am level 1 seller for this thing.

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Originally posted by stinkinogre:
There is a range for them at that level .99 to 2.99 at level 1 I think. You should be able to adjust it in your details on the seller dashboard.

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Originally posted by JayC:
He's trolling you/us.

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Originally posted by JayC:
He's trolling you/us.

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Originally posted by stinkinogre:
Yep sure did but I'm sure someone could benefit from this though. Not everyone will realize you can't adjust outside that range till you are lvl 4 so you can't do free shipping starting off.

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Originally posted by Volcanon:
What's the rationale behind no free shipping? Seems like a weird thing to handicap people with.

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It's not much of a handicap. Just rewards those lvl 4 than punishes those we are not.

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Originally posted by Pail42:
Does TCG collect a percent of the shipping fee?

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