Sports Card Investing 101: Where to Buy Sports Cards.

if you're new to sports cards welcome to this amazing and fun hobby where you can make some money if you are patient and persistent or you can lose a lot of it very quickly if you're not besides asking yourself what cards should i buy another common question you may be asking yourself is where should i buy them while there isn't necessarily a wrong source of finding cards some sources will offer more deals or opportunities than others and as a new collector or investor it is crucial that you make sure you don't overpay because you're already going to be making more mistakes than if you've been in this hobby for a couple of years so in this video i want to make it as easy as possible to understand i'm going to go over the eight different platforms the pros and cons of each so then at least you have a good idea as to which methods and platforms you want to start with and which ones you might want to just push to the side and either check out in a couple months or forget about all together so with that being said welcome back now let's get to work starting with the number eight spot are garage sales or classifieds and that's because garage sales are more like this fun thing to do it's more of like this scavenger hunt but you never know what you're gonna get and i think that's the fun of it and look i'm someone that loves to sleep in on the weekends i don't want to get up at 6 or five in the morning in order to be at a garage sale an hour before it opens in order to be the first one to take a look at what could be decent sports cards but more than likely will just be a waste of time and effort it's not my thing i like going to garage sales for the fun of it but if you're expecting to find great deals non-stop at garage sales i would say that it's more like finding a diamond in the rough so my suggestion would be if you like garage sales go for it but also try and learn about coins and records and toys and all sorts of other stuff to flip even furniture or appliances but if it's just for sports cards more than likely you're not going to find anything good and if you do you might have eight other people that are flippers that have beat you to the punch speaking of scavenger hunts the next one on my list is beckett marketplace and this is like an online scavenger hunt because it is not the friendliest platform to buy cards off of uh for one they don't show you the picture of the actual card so there's that but what it is is a platform of all these amazing card shop owners around the country that list their lower end raw cards on there so it's a great place to find multiples of a card it's a great place to find a specific card for your collection and the biggest perk of beckett is that a lot of the prices are outdated so it's great if a player is all of a sudden becoming a starter court starting quarterback or he he was a nobody last week but now he's a somebody and his cards are going through the roof and you see that on other platforms on beckett there might be a seller with five of his rookie cards uh for sale still for three dollars a piece while everywhere else it's through the roof i also love the fact that they don't charge tax unless you're within the same state at least that's the way it is here in california where if i order from a card shop in georgia or new york i don't pay tax and i don't pay shipping because a lot of the card shop owners have a free shipping threshold of about 25 to 50 don't expect becca to be full of deals right now because i pretty much wiped them out a couple months ago and then i did a video on how i was able to find deals which i'm sure open the door to a lot of other investors and collectors but it's still something worth checking out just remember to use it with those under the radar players that no one has heard about and also for uh for trends on certain sets like i bought a lot of first-year select basketball cards on there because i really felt like that was undervalued and there were a lot of card shops that had those cards listed for a dollar or two dollars a piece while now i see a lot of them are selling for six or eight dollars a piece oh yeah one more warning about beckett you might find yourself spending hours piecing together this amazing order only to receive this horrible email the next day that your order has been completely refunded because the card shop owner doesn't have those cards anymore because he sold it on another platform next on my list are card shops and look we all love walking into a card shop just like when we were a kid and it was so magical because we had the memorabilia all over the wall we saw all of these really cool rare expensive cards that we could never afford and it just reminds us of our childhood and why we love the hobby so much some of the perks of going to a card shop are that number one you start to develop a relationship with the owner and the staff and look if you're getting into this hobby you don't know much right i barely know anything and i've been in for eight months and i learned something new every day but these guys a lot of them have been in the business for five years 10 years 20 years 30 years and they've seen the ebbs and flows they know so much information and just the ability to go in there during down times during slow hours and just introduce yourself ask some questions ask what the hobbies been like what they see is changing and evolving and maybe you know maybe you collect a rare player or a rare card and just say look this is my guide do you ever get these cards in or if anyone tries to sell these cards to you just know that you might have a buyer in me so you could always just leave your name and number or just ask if they do something like that or keep an eye out for certain cards they also offer different services so one cool thing about it being 2020 is that a lot of times these card shops will offer psa or bgs bulk submissions so you don't have to sign up on their websites on psa's website or bgs and do it yourself you can actually go in the store drop off the cards and they will ship it off to you that's what i've done here in la with the bullpen it was a very simple process and i'm hoping that the relationship with psa allows them to get the cards back a bit sooner than if i did it myself but either way it's really cool to be able to support them in that manner and start to develop the relationship the biggest downfall with card shops are that they have overhead they have salaries to pay they have insurance they have rent and that means they've got to make their money somewhere and while a lot of them do make money from card breaks that you can buy into and some psa submissions and whatnot a lot of times it's the boxes they sell and the singles they sell and that means that if you can find a card for 200 online there's a good chance it's not going to be cheaper than that in person it'll probably be more expensive with that being said it's always a great idea to just say hey look i found this card it's selling for 200 online what's a reasonable amount that you can charge knowing that i can click a few buttons and get this i'd like to support you and your business but i can't pay 250 or 290 or 350 dollars for this card when it is just so much cheaper and a few clicks of a mouse away uh for 200 bucks just start the conversation see where it goes and see what kind of deal benefits both of you guys next up are card shows and man card shows are like a card shop on steroids because you go in and there's literally a hundred different vendors all with cards all with their displays and you know everyone's looking to sell so there's a lot more deals to be had because they don't want to leave with the same amount of cards and pack up their van or their car and then drive three hours they want to make money so they're looking to make deals and when you have a hundred different vendors with the same cards if it's a common card then there's a lot more wiggle room a lot more negotiation to be had i was fortunate enough to go to a card shop back in tampa a few months ago and i saw boris from the hobby box there and it was overwhelming it was so much fun but it's definitely something you need to prep for because it's it's like walking into a library without any labels without knowing where that one specific book you're looking for is and there's no dewy decimal system bet you didn't think you'd be hearing the phrase dewey decimal system today did you and just remember you will feel like a kid in a candy shop so you've got to be able to simmer down your emotions because you will be on a natural high and you will want to buy everything you see so take a couple breaths understand why you're there make the relationships shake some hands but do not buy all these other cards that you were not anticipating investing in next up are facebook and discord groups and i've not really used these to be honest and that's just because i've been dealing with a lot of raw cards or lower end cards that i could just ship off somewhere else but the perk is that when you're going into these higher end cards that are in the hundreds or thousands of dollars and you have trustworthy members of these groups that will buy and sell these cards without an issue you save a lot of money in all those fees from the middleman which is the platform the downfall is that not all groups have the same caliber of members some are very tough to get into you've got to be vouched for you've got to prove that you're trustworthy which is good and then other groups aren't as strict but that means that you can get scammed and if you get scammed then you might not have anyone to step in and refund your money the same way you would get that protection with an outside platform if this interests you i would just start by searching on facebook for different groups and i'd ask your local card shop owner if they know of any good groups that they can join as well and just get started and then just start with like some lower end transactions build your rapport learn how things work but i wouldn't start selling really expensive cards or buying really expensive cards in a brand new group uh to me that's just too risky the next platforms i'm really excited about are star stock and stockx and these platforms are doing a great job of alleviating us of a lot of the pain points we experience as investors and it's because look we love sports we love cards we love looking up deals and researching and all that stuff what we don't like doing at least me is going to the damn post office and trying to track mail and you know this package gets stolen and then the line at the post office is a nightmare today and i have all these packages and i got to be back tomorrow and what's cool about them is that you ship all the cards to them they list it at their headquarters at their their warehouse and then anyone can buy the cards and receive the cards whenever they would like that you do not have to have the cards sent to you asap at least on star stock i believe stockx will ship you the card but sites like star stock hey you can flip it there without the card actually leaving their headquarters so imagine shipping out 500 or a thousand cards to star stock and that's it you don't have to ever do anything again when the cards arrive there you go in their system you upload the prices you would like they all have data tools in there so you see exactly what cards are selling which ones aren't um and it's just a great way for investors that are buying cards for short to medium term flips that don't necessarily need the cards right away i will say this with star stock they are focusing on rookie cards of current or active players and that is because they're more like a stock market so it's a good way of investing in players that you've done research on and you believe that they're really going to do well in the next season or so that brings me to number two which is ebay and look i don't love ebay but ebay is the juggernaut it is the establishment it is the only platform that has been around since 1998 and the only platform that people know about that is not specific to sports cards so even if you've never heard of trading cards or sports cards before you know what ebay is because you've bought something on it in the last 20 years and that means a lot of people can sell their cards there and it's the first place they think of just because it's like yeah well it's either ebay or amazon and amazon's not really a place for me to do this so ebay is the alternative and the problem i have with ebay is that it's not the platform itself it's that there are enough bad apples in the batch to really um put a bad taste in your mouth and that's because if you're a seller and you sell a card a buyer who impulse bought that card and bought at the wrong time we'll try and get a refund and say hey the card wasn't in the shape i thought it was going to be in or i changed my mind or can you refund me when that's not how it works if you are a seller and you sell you send the card and it's as described that should be it but a lot of people want to uh back back away from what they committed to because they realized it was a bad investment and honestly that's just up to ebay ebay needs to step in and be a bit more nuanced with how they handle the sports card hobby because it is such a big part of their business and it is really opening doors to these other platforms that are really putting in parameters and and protocols in place to ensure that the good buyers and the good sellers are there and all the the scam artists and the the shill bidders the people that artificially inflate the prices all that kind of stuff gets left behind something as simple as just asking buyers and sellers to videotape themselves packing up and shipping out a card in detail showing the card and then when you receive it opening it up in front of your phone everyone has a smartphone now pretty much and knowing that if one party has that and the other party does not take that videotape then that's the way it's gonna go and that takes me to my number one platform and that is comp c compsee has been one of my best friends since day one of getting in and it just like star stock it's one of those platforms where you send all of your cards to their headquarters up in washington i think they have another one in canada and they'll list it for you and it's not as modern looking as star stock but there are some advantages and i just love the fact that i can look at all these different cards i can sort by highest discount uh highest price i can compare and contrast it has been such a valuable learning tool for me just because i can really use my overly analytical virgo mind and try and find these outliers and these deals and it's really helped me buy on ebay and star stock and other places just because i can see what's undervalued very easily one big difference between comp c and star stock is that com c will accept pretty much any card and they do upload the actual picture of the raw card so what you see is what you get as of now star stock has that feature but they've not released it yet instead if you send them a raw card they will classify it in one of three categories based on the condition it's in one downfall with com c are the fees but just like any platform they all have their fees comp c is more than star stock but one thing that i gotta say that benefits me a lot is that with comc they have most of their listings transferred over to ebay so if i list a card on comp c more than likely it's going to be listed on ebay as well and if i look into the sales i've made a lot of them about a fourth or so have come from people buying that card via ebay but instead of getting charged ebay's ten percent and com sees five percent i only get charged five percent period com c for me is best for raw cards and then comparing prices of different sets and of different players because just laid out in a way that's very easy to do that it's helped me find undervalued sets or certain cards of players that i felt like were really cheap compared to others and just help me see patterns but it's not necessarily the best for graded cards because there's there's a lot more raw cards on there than graded it seems like when people have graded cards they sell on ebay or in the facebook groups and they do everything they can to avoid any fee that they can incur now this is just the way i rank these platforms based on my style but the good news is that there's always ways of finding deals and underpriced cards in one platform and then reselling on another known as arbitrage and that's something i've been doing using a couple of the platforms i mentioned uh here today so if you'd like to see how i've been doing that over the last couple months check out this video up here and i'll see you over there

Channel: The Comeback Card Investor

Views: 38,800

Keywords: sports card investors, sports card investing, sports card investing 101, sports card flipping, where to buy sports cards, where to buy sports cards online, basketball card investing for beginners, sports card investing for beginners, basketball card investing 101, comc vs ebay, comc vs starstock, comc sports cards, flipping sports cards on, flipping sports cards on ebay, what sports cards to invest in, how to make money flipping sports cards, sports card investor

Id: tl1dAbKTQrY

Length: 17min 34sec (1054 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 31 2020