I write Insider articles now. You know that, probably. If you've been following me for a while, you know I used to not write Insider articles and now I do. If you have never read one of my articles you know I write Insider articles now because you clicked on this on the Insider side and now is now. No denying that.

What's the point? Well, the point is that when I was moved to Insider, the expectation was that I would write about buylisting. I wrote quite a few buylisting articles, and I think all of them were informative and they were articles I'm proud of. However, it quickly proved to be a shallow well and I reverted to my "write whatever the hell I want as long as it's entertaining or informative" and I didn't get fired.

Still, I continue to buylist a significant number of cards and I'm always thinking about what lessons it's teaching me and what I can pass on. This weekend I realized that I had slightly changed the way I do things, and to an extent I had started to contradict advice I gave earlier.

FLIP FLOPPER!

Hang on, let's clarify. To an extent I'm contradicting advice I gave, but to a greater extent I am clarifying a vague guideline I sketched out. That makes me sound less crazy.

I'm not crazy, but I am starting to lower my "I'm not going to buylist this at that price" bar.

Why should I do this? Although I just described my thoughts on the subject last time I wrote about it as "vague", there was a mathematical basis to it. Basically, if the spread was more than about 40% on a card, you're losing a ton of money. Why would someone who has TCG Player and eBay as a potential out let someone else makes so much profit?

Obviously there are exceptions, and lower value cards make less sense to ship on TCG Player, but the number I decided (arbitrarily-ish) was a good rule of thumb was 40%. Lower spread and you were getting a good deal since someone else had to do far more work than you do and they only make 40% or less on the card, any more and you're a rube and you might as well rip up your cards and flush them down the toilet. Basically.

But there's nothing basic when your time and money are concerned, and recently I started doing the math a little more differenter.

Pennies on the Dollar

Most of the cards I process these days comes from collections. With the margins on Standard cards so thin, it's tough to get people locally to sell you hot Standard cards cheap enough to make a lot of profit. You can do business in volume, but lately my best sellers have been my specs and I'm scraping by on other stuff.

Collections, however, are great. If you buy correctly (don't pay too much) you should be able to make a small profit buylisting the "known" stuff if you have to, and the "unknown" stuff that you find when you finally start digging through boxes is all gravy. We all know this is the best part of buying collections, but we also know that to do with the known stuff, don't we? If you have a TCG Player account, you're not reading my article to see what you should do with an Elspeth right now. No, chances are you want to grind the less obvious money using a buylist.

The less obvious stuff is what I want to talk about today. There are times when you want to sell the less obvious stuff for what feels like pennies on the dollar. We're talking about 70%+ spreads. Why? Because your time is worth something, too.

The Math

Let's pretend your non-buylist out is TCG Player. You can adjust the equation based on whatever you're using. Broadly, I'm going to set up a simple equation to show why it isn't worth it to sell small stuff on anywhere but a buylist.

TCG Player takes a flat fee of 50 cents and 10% of your sales, and your shipping costs are generally around $0.50 if you're jamming a toploader in a plain white envelope and slapping a first class stamp on it.

y  = (.9x) - 1

For values of y under $1, I will ship to a buylist at over 80% spread.

Seriously.

And why not? The point of buylisting is that you're getting rid of a ton of cards quickly and easily. You're paying a convenience fee in the form of the spread you consent to so that you can dump a ton of cards all at once. If you don't like the spread numbers, you have a few options.

1) Put Them in a Box

Sitting on cards until the spread numbers are more favorable is a strategy I have endorsed in the past, and for cards that seem just ridiculous, like an offer of $0.05 on Wirewood Symbiote, waiting until the offer improves is a good way of maximizing the amount you can get. I used to put a lot more cards in this "wait" box than I do now, and there's a decent reason for it.

Why you might not want to - Those cards are something you have to sift through later. The more that's in the box, the more problems you have. Are you going to type the name of every card in the box into Trader Tools later to see if the offer improved on all of them? The opportunity cost of having the cards sit in a box is small when the box is small. When it's bigger, you have to ask yourself how much the offer would have to go up before it wasn't worth it.

Even if you're getting a dime on cards that sell on TCG Player for $1.50, you can do something with that dime today, especially if that dime goes out with $1,000 worth of cards. You can do more with a dime in your pocket than you can with a card in a box. I'm not saying don't jam stuff in a wait box, I'm just saying don't put every nickel in it. It's reserved for egregious cases.

2) TCG Player Them Anyway

Sure, you're making next to nothing after fees, but you're not going to let some jackass store offer you 20% of a card's value, are you?

Why you might not want to - Even if you were going to end up with like $0.50 or $0.75 after fees and the buylist offer is a dime, who is buying these cards? Regular TCG Player operations are going to see you sit on these cards a long time before they sell. The opportunity cost of sitting on a card that will sit in TCG Player inventory for a long time is the same as it sitting in your wait box. If the card were desirable and selling quickly, it's likely the spread would be lower and it would make more sense to buylist it.

Remember, the buylist spread is a good indicator of the demand for the card, at least from dealers. There isn't usually a huge disconnect between cards that move briskly on TCG Player and ones which dealers aren't selling.

That being the case, are you really getting an extra $0.40 or are you better off just letting someone else deal with a card that's not moving very quickly right now? Remember, bidwicket is also a site--if between bidwicket and Trader Tools you're not seeing a decent buylist offer, you can be reasonably sure that your sample size is big enough to indicate dealer demand isn't really there. So the cards may be turds. That dime is starting to look pretty good, isn't it?

3) Sell Them to "That Guy"

For a while I have been wanting to sit down with Carter Hatfield and pick his brain. Carter is a QS Insider and local dealer. When I have cards that are solid picks but I can't just buylist them for whatever reason, like when I have 24 copies of a card and Card Kingdom only wants 20, I put them in a box and ship them to Carter.

He's set up on Crystal Commerce and lists cards simultaneously to Amazon, eBay and TCG Player as well as his own website. While I wouldn't want to list Typhoid Rats on TCG Player, Crystal Commerce tracks his inventory, and if they are purchased on TCG Player, it sucks less because the new rule is that the minimum order is $1 so they are likely to order quite a few cards from him. He sells good picks all day and has said in the QS forums repeatedly that he loves to buy those boxes of picks.

If you are stuck with decent cards but don't have a convenient out for them or you're between buylist orders, consider finding someone locally who is set up to deal with those kinds of cards. The biggest reason to sell to someone like Carter is that your shipping costs are $0.

Why you might not want to - You can't. Not everyone knows a "that guy"

4) Become "That Guy"

Does your area not have someone who does what Carter does? Consider doing it yourself! You can be the guy to offer dimes on cards like Land Grant and while you need to sit on them for a bit, you will make 90% profit when they do sell. Having a steady supply of picks means you don't need to chase down collections. You're practically Troll and Toad at this point.

Why you might not want to - It's a lifestyle, not a business decision. Your inventory will grow, and while your sales will be steady, you will sit on a lot of inventory and have to put it somewhere. If you're really successful, you may have to take on help.

It's a lot of sales work, but it's a lot of sales. There is an initial startup cost of $500 for Crystal Commerce and you're going to have to buy a lot more envelopes than you buy now. I'm not saying anything negative about it other than that it's a lot of work and you have to be prepared to do it.

As a side note, I'm not really the person to talk about this exact process, but I'll be picking Carter's brain about it in the future and there is an article or two in there for sure.

5) Ship

Put it in the box. Take a dime on it. You could get more, but you're making the card someone else's problem. You don't deal with the opportunity cost of sitting on it, you don't have to comb through a box every time you put together another buylist order and you don't have to wait. You are selling into a wide spread, but maybe there are reasons for that.

Do you care? No, you're taking the easy way out, and when you have 100 cards, you might not want to take the easy way out. When you have 100,000 cards, maybe you do. Leave 10% for the next guy, even when the next 10% is more like 40%.