How to buy a Pokémon card collection
Someone puts a box on the counter. You have twenty minutes, a queue behind them, and a number to produce that is fair to them and survivable for you. Here's the method.
Written by Ben and Tom, Cardinal
Triage before you price
Do not price the collection card by card. Sort it into three piles first: the hits worth individual research, the mid-range worth valuing as groups, and bulk worth valuing by count or weight. Most of the value sits in the first pile and most of the cards sit in the third.
Tell the seller what you're doing while you do it. A visible, explainable process is the difference between a deal and a suspicious customer.
Building the number
Add those up for a total market value. Your maximum offer is that total multiplied by your buy percentage — and your buy percentage should be lower than usual on a large lot, because you're taking on cards you haven't examined individually.
Numbers are illustrative. Your own percentages should reflect your fees, your turnover speed and how much of the lot you can genuinely sell.
Where vendors lose money
- Pricing on asking prices. The seller has often looked at listings, not sales. Anchor the conversation to completed sales instead.
- Ignoring condition on the hits. A played chase card can be worth half the number you first quoted.
- Over-valuing bulk. Bulk is only worth what you can actually move it for, minus the hours of sorting.
- Forgetting fees and time. If most of the lot sells online, marketplace fees and postage come out of your margin.
- No cost allocation. Buying a lot for one price and never splitting that cost across the cards makes every future margin figure meaningless.
Allocating cost across the lot
One payment becomes hundreds of inventory items. Allocate the purchase price across them in proportion to each card's market value, so an expensive card carries most of the cost and a bulk common carries almost none. Do it any other way and your reporting will tell you the hits were unprofitable and the bulk was a goldmine.
Cardinal handles the whole flow: photograph a binder page or a marketplace listing, get the cards identified in bulk, price them from sold comps, see a suggested maximum offer, and have the agreed price allocated across every card automatically as it enters inventory.
Value a lot in minutes
Try the bulk flow in the demo: upload a page of cards, watch them get identified and priced, and see the offer and margin behind the total.
Keep reading
Make better deals with your own stock.
Know what you own, what it's worth and what you're making on it.