Facebook Groups for Sports Card selling and buying are a lot of fun and doing well
Think about it you have an accumulation of old or new sports cards sitting around and you want to make some money from your childhood hobby. You are lucky and your mom did not throw out your cards! You still have them and they are tremendous & nostalgic pieces of our past. Well you have multiple options selling sport cards. You can try the Facebook Marketplace and that can sometimes work well. Sort of like Craigslist you are advertising to a wide variety of people and you may luck out if a specific collector or dealer decides to view your listing. Then you need to meet with that person or ship with very little rules and guidelines. It is productive, but yet a bit scary and disorganized.
Then you have the massive marketplace of eBay to sell in or try to. eBay has grown to be a proven source for buying and selling. If you are all about the money and nothing else matters to you then you might want to try selling on eBay. However, realize there are so many competitors on eBay. I have been collecting for 45 years and turned into a seller roughly about six years ago. Any card I have in my massive hoard, I mean collection is not unique. Someone, somewhere or many people in fact are selling that same card or cards! Maybe even nicer ones than yours and maybe for less than you thought yours would sell for. Another issue for me personally with eBay is no matter how much you do you would need to spend a lot of money to standout and create a name for yourself on eBay. To become a respected well known seller.
There are so many sellers and you can not reach out to the buyers without fear of getting in trouble violating one of the many eBay rules on solicitation of their customers. I understand that from eBay's perspective but from a seller I want to interact, build a rapport and get return business with customers. eBay's systems leave very little to accomplish this without spending a lot of money! Their feedback system meant to show trust just gets to be a monotonous thing to keep up with and you really know very little about the seller when buyers and sellers just leave similar feedback for everyone. What you can do is learn perhaps who not to buy from. The rating of buyers really does not exist as sellers get the short end of the stick and can not leave negative feedback for sellers. Seems not very fair.
This leads me personally to prefer selling in Facebook Groups. These groups are geared to the customer's obsessions and desires. For example the people that buy and sell in my groups are people that are interested or passionate about sport cards. That is great! Here is a group of people with similar interests. Certainly leads to successful and productive environments to buy and sell. I got addicted to these groups by starting as a seller in an existing group for vintage football cards. You can check it out here and request to join:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/vintagefootball/
Following being a buyer and seller in this group for thousands of successful transactions I started in July of 2019 a Vintage Basketball Group and about a month ago I rekindled a group called "Lot of Cards" that I was using for 4 years but not real effectively I must admit. Now since this rebranding if you will and allowing the group to be public it is doing amazing. You can view this group and the vintage basketball groups here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/vintagebasketball/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/lotofcards/
These groups have specific rules designed for productive selling which provides a safe family environment for sharing your passion as a kid with your kids and perhaps grandchildren. I have made so many customers using these groups it is amazing. However, what is even more amazing than that is I really feel like I am friends and return customers in so many people in these groups!
That level of communication, sharing and interaction is not available with eBay. Lastly when you do have sales you simply use PayPal goods and services to finish the transaction paying PayPal's fee of 3% of the transaction price. That is less than you pay on eBay with PayPal by about 80%. That is a big savings on cards that sell from just a few dollars to hundreds of dollars.
Once you get some success selling in Facebook Groups you will be hooked if you like developing relationships and interacting with people all over the place with similar interests. If you have any questions on selling or buying safely in Facebook Groups feel free to reach out to me on Facebook or via email.
Mike Levine @ sales@lotofcards.com