Marketing Your Items On eBay

I'm always curious to see what the new marketing and sales trends are on eBay. Sellers come up with all sorts of innovative ideas to sell items. eBay also does their share by improving functionality and offering great features like Buy It Now and Make An Offer.

One of the newer trends I've noticed in the trading cards area is the "You Choose" sales style. The seller will offer up a large list of cards, usually from the same set, and allows you to choose a pre-determined number of cards from the list. I've noticed these more and more as I've been working on my 2009 Topps Heritage SP set. The most common type of auction is for the seller to allow you to choose 10 SP cards from their list. Here is an example auction.

The great thing for the seller is that this style of auction tends to yield more money per card than selling them individually or even as a lot of 10. I've picked up SP singles for $1 and picked up a lot of 10 for just over $12. The auction that I linked to above is about to end and it's at just over $36. I've chosen not to go this route as a buyer as my cost per card would be more than I want to pay. But it got me thinking about the possibilities as a seller.

I posted yesterday about CheckOutMyCards.com. I think that's a great site to sell cards that that book for anything over $4 per card in Beckett. The reason I set the $4 minimum book value is because I'm figuring I can get at least $1 for it. It's really not cost effective to sell any cards for less than $1 because of the selling fees.

As we know, there are a lot of cards that book below $4 each. What do we do with all of those? Well, I figured since buyers are responding well to the "You Choose" format for cards from the same set, why not try auctions with cards from different sets?

I've had cards sorted by player and stored away for a while. I picked out all the cards with $4 and higher book value out of those boxes and sent them off to COMC some time ago. So, I started some player auctions today that list all of my cards from a certain player and allow the buyer to choose 10 cards from the list.

I started out with Derek Jeter, Ken Griffey Jr., Cal Ripken Jr. and Nolan Ryan. I set the Buy It Now price at $7.99 and the minimum bid at .99 cents. I'll keep you posted on the results. I put them up for a week so they'll end next Sunday. Hopefully the results will be good and I'll have a viable option for getting rid of a bunch of cards from my childhood that I'd rather not have in my closet. I'd then have more money to buy cards that I do want want to have in my closet.

I'm curious to see what any of you reading think of this format and whether you'd use the same idea. What about the Buy It Now price? Too high? Just right? Click here to view my Ripken auction.

1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. BGS 10 on eBay

I couldn't resist pointing to this auction too. According to the latest BGS Population Report, fifty five 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. rookies have been graded a Pristine 10. This is the first one I've seen on eBay but I'm not in the market for one of these.

This is the top card produced in the 90's and one of the most famous of the modern era. You'd never be able to find a more perfect example than a BGS 10.

I wrote about a couple of the 1989 Upper Deck Griffey Buy Back Autographs earlier this month. They ended up selling on eBay for $1,600 and $3,650 respectively. I'm not sure why there was such a large difference.

Which card would you rather have? The perfect example of the Griffey rookie or an autographed version limited to 89 copies?

You can view the BGS 10 auction here: KEN GRIFFEY JR. 1989 UPPER DECK #1 RC BGS 10 PRISTINE

Ken Griffey Jr. 1989 Upper Deck Buy Back on eBay

A 1989 Upper Deck Buy Back Ken Griffey Jr. is up on eBay. You can find it here. The bidding was at $1625.00 at the time of this post. There is also another fixed price auction on ebay that's priced at $4895.00. You can find that here.

This is a great card that I would love to own but I can't imagine paying that kind of price for it. You could buy so many Griffey signed items, including game used equipment for that kind of price. I'm pretty sure one of these already sold in the range of $4000.00 but I couldn't find a completed auction for it on eBay.

One thing I'll say, Upper Deck sure knows how to create a buzz. I can't think of a better item to promote their 20th Anniversary than a signed version of the best card they've ever produced. If you collected in the late 80's and early 90's, you know that this was probably the top card of that era.