Howdy! I have been absolutely hyperfixated on trading cards for the past few weeks now, even more so as you may have noticed I haven’t posted in a few weeks lol! And since I am trying to do everything I can in my power to get my Pro Website so that I can directly link people to my store and so that I can kind of calm down with what I am doing and move on to the next thing, I want to provide an update on the experiment!
Things were still moving a little slowly when I originally started a draft of this blog post, but since my last update I have made 29 total sales! And there have been not only multiple double sales days, but one or two three sales days! It makes me so excited to go to the post office bumbling with my lot of packages and making sure I don’t fk it up and plop them all inside the drop off and tell all my nice customers that their cards are on the way! I feel so abundant about the whole thing, and my goal is to hit 50 sales by the end of the month. I still believe I can do it. Just need 2 sales a day, and it’s not like I don’t have the inventory at a competitive price to do so.
I also want to update on my current inventory quantity – I have uploaded nearly 1700 cards for sale! (1679 as of typing this out!) Now, there are multiple cards in there that are worth multiple cents at most, and some maybe a quarter if you’re lucky. But it is all chill. I love putting the cards up for sale. And the super rares and secret rares and alternate arts all usually go for far more possibly upwards of nearly tens or twenties of dollars or more.
But anyway, the experiment had been a little slow until the recent firing up the last 2 or so weeks. I literally started trying to sell my cards on TCGPlayer.com last year around March, so as of late June 2022, I have been trying to sell cards for nearly a year and 3 months now. The problem came in that when you start off, you can only put a few items up for inventory, and as you sell more and level up, you can put more items up for sale. So I once could only upload something like 50 cards.
At that point I wasn’t trying to upload every card I had, because I couldn’t even upload a whole deck of nearly anything I owned! Then I got to level 2 after a few sales and could upload 100 or so cards. So then I tried to add more cards, the ones that were worth a little something, not just big bangers of 15, 20 nearly $100. And then after only 11ish sales, I got to level 3 and now I can upload 50,000 cards. So that meant it was time to ramp it up (and to hopefully figure out something to do with the massive bulk of inexpensive cards).
Another issue I only recently noticed I had is that I cannot directly link anyone to my store to have them shop only for items for sale from me. So I looked into seeing if it was possible, because that would get me to more sales SOOOOO much more easily if I can blast it at anyone I want and link it on social medias. But first I must fulfill 50 orders. And that ain’t going to happen unless I sell me some more cards.
So that led me to buy about 20 packs of Digimon cards about six (I think lol) weekends ago (when I was looking for a booster box) and a booster box (containing 24 packs of Digimon Cards and some guaranteed super rare cards that are quite desirable) roughly 4 weeks ago for the new booster that just came out. As of typing this, however, there is a new themed Digimon Booster coming out regarding the third season of Digimon – Digimon Tamers. Here is a link to the card list:
https://world.digimoncard.com/cardlist/?search=true&category=522009
Which is awesome to see the cools, the cuties and the desirables. I wish Pokemon would do something like this but I didn’t find anything useful.
And also, we can use TCGPlayer to get a pulse on the price of some of the cards which will be going up for sale once the box is out. And, predicatably, the protagonist’s super powerful digimon will be going for a fetching price (even MORE fetching as an alternate art) as seen in the links below:
Gallantmon Crimson Mode (secret rare): https://www.tcgplayer.com/product/274347/digimon-card-game-digital-hazard-gallantmon-crimson-mode?xid=pie7ce5d9a-5eda-4568-ad74-2cef8d328757&page=1&Language=English
What is slightly more surprising, is that a side protaganist is going for even MORE on the presale by $10 for a total of a $60 market price:
Beelzemon Blast Mode (secret rare): https://www.tcgplayer.com/product/274905/digimon-card-game-digital-hazard-beelzemon-blast-mode?xid=pi5df27ef8-6ebe-4165-85ed-e2bfb1841cb4&page=1&Language=English
And for comparison the regular Gallantmon is going for a market price of about $10 as a super rare:
So there is some money that could be made here but I’m a glutton for Digimon and I love Gallantmon and Guilmon so I’m going to get a box and likely use whatever I’d like to upgrade my Red Hybrid Gallantmon Deck then put what I do not want up for sale.
But to go back to the experimenting I mentioned above the diatribe into the brand new booster box – I did get some great pulls like an Omnimon Zwart (~$5), and Omniomon Alt Art (~$12), a Diaboromon (~$14.5) an Ogremon Classic Alt Art (~$9.5). And I don’t necessarily want to use any of those in a deck or keep them for collection purposes so I have them up for sale. As of this point I believe all have sold except for Omnimon Zwart, which I had actually taken down because I like it so much and wanted to use it in a deck. But to make my cards show up differently and stand up to do something different compared to my competitors, I used photos and I think I set the price reasonably. I did get a bit impatient and I think it’s okay to lose a dollar or two if it means I can obtain my Pro Website sooner rather than later. As usual, if you sell the big hitters you can theoretically recuperate the costs of purchasing cards, so if I sold nearly all the cards I bought, I would return a profit. But that requires selling tons of smaller items that go for cents on the dollar.
It could happen, but it seems very hard to right now. But that’s a bit of defeatist mindset. It CAN happen. And I’ll find a way.
So, the other reason I bought the booster box (not the one from the digression) was that it was brand new, and there’s always a lot of hype around new cards (and I did want to be a part of that) but the cards will always have a huge increase in price due to demand the week they are for sale. So I thought maybe I ought to try to see if it’s worth it to keep up to date with the new boosters and sell the cards. I did analyze the ones I have, and I do think I can at the very least recuperate the costs of my buying the booster box (of $80) and perhaps sooner than later since I will be among some of the first to sell the cards on TCGPlayer. And to be honest, it was a little mid.
I set my prices too high at first, to match the pre-release hype of the big stores who are allowed to post pre-release products. And then I got bamboozled when I came back to a card that was overpriced by 100% that I had to recalibrate multiple times to the market. It was my Shivamon Alternate Art (as seen in the link below). But it sold! And I am happy with that!
And my final thoughts about my min-experiment right now are that I started a spreadsheet for those 20 or so packs I bought earlier to check to business viability of selling the great card hits to recuperate my costs then to turn a profit (and it wasn’t pretty). So then I decided to just keep track of ALL of the Digimon cards I had for sale on it as I uploaded and indexed them. The total potential profit of every single Digimon card I have for sale on my store at Colossicus Cards on TCGPlayer.com (at the time I had originally wrote this) was $376.78 cents. That’s absolutely liquidating everything I have when it comes to Digimon besides the new packs I just got.
And I still bought another two booster boxes that I will tell you about later lol.
And it would be great to get all that money. But then I’d have to buy more stock. And even then I only made about $300 on possibly $200 worth of card packs. That doesn’t seem promising outright, BUT that would be a 50% profit, which uh is kind of awesome when Real Estate tries to realize a 12% profit and stocks generally go up at an 8% profit a year (unrealized but you get the point).
I don’t quite know how well this could turn out, but I will update you on anything new for this mini-experiment as I go further. I am also super excited because I DO think it can turn out super well! In fact, I checked my profits for this year up until this point in June and I made $365 dollars minus fees back! That might actually be an effective $300, but still that’s amazing for selling shiny pieces of CARDBOARD. But I do really likes the cards and learning about them and seeing them and playing with them. And at the very least, I will not be stopping until everything I have in my house is safely in my customizeable binder so that it is safe and maybe I could pop up at a flea market and sell them for potentially more profit.
So what do you think? Have you tried to figure out how to sell your old trading cards? Don’t really know what to do with them? Maybe you just really like cards like me? What’s your favorite?
Anyway hope you have a good day.
Godspeed,
Dennis