This past week (17 Aug - 22 Aug). I discovered a new to me trading card buying and selling website via some year old YouTube "How To" videos. I might have seen the site almost a year ago before but brushed it off. It is BuySportsCards.com (BSC) you can buy and sell individual sports cards there but not any Non-Sport or Gaming Cards. They have no plans of doing Non-Sports or Game cards. You can't sell by set or lots. The site is a marketplace style similar to SportLots (minus auctions) where there are multiple sellers and the sellers maintain their own inventory. They are currently just USA ONLY, no international sales. If and when they go international I will not ship international unless they have some sort of box deal like Sportlots.
Anyway I signed up with them first as just a buyer and then decided to try my hand at selling over there. They have a "standard envelope" system similar to Ebay, but I think it might be more user friendly than the bay's. Not sure yet. One of their advantages over Sportlots (which buyers don't like) is that the sellers can use stock photos of base cards. Many have said the images are stolen from other sites. Stock images speeds up the listing time for sellers. For serial numbered cards or relics or cards that are less than Excellent condition (but still sellable) scans are required, or actually requested. Some cards get up without images anyway but the sellers are supposed to supply card images if possible.
My bank account got the test deposits of 7¢ and 8¢ from the site and I verified I received them so I am unlocked for listing. I started listing. I have added 100 cards in 3 days, some baseball, football and hockey. For the task I switched off my "store" so the listings are "hidden" as they like to say. While I load up my inventory I will keep the store "hidden". Long ago I heard from some Sportlots sellers that is the best strategy to use. That way you are not interrupted with sales notifications and not distracted from listing. I plan on keeping the listings hidden until I have at least received a couple of the cards I ordered to see what the standard envelope labels look like. I am hesitant of having too many cards available for fear of getting overwhelmed with an unmanagable number of orders to ship out within their 72 hour time limit. At this time I am limiting the cards I am listing to cards that are a minimum excellent condition so I can let the card catalog on the site use the stock image for my listings. There is one card I added that has a serial number, so I added the image for it. I noticed that once you add a listing you can make some edits to the card attributes if you goofed up, but not the condition. To change the condition it looks like you have to delete your listing and redo.
For my first purchase I decided on ordering the remaining cards I needed from 2010 Topps Baseball The "Million Card Give-Away" cards insert/contest set. The prices for cards at BSC start at 25¢. There is a minimum order total of $3.00 order value (items + shipping) per seller, so I had to search the seller's "stores" to find more cards to get. The minimum amount is to make the sales worthwhile for the sellers so they don't lose out with just one or two 25¢ sales. In just about a week I have received 7 of the 8 packages (PWE). I have noticed that the BSC standard envelope tracking is similar to the Ebay standard envelope tracking system which means it isn't all that accurate. Most of the time when checking the tracking numbers (all of which ended in "23" for some reason) the status is unknown. Once or twice I found a time when it provided some updates. I guess that is something as a buyer I'll have to get used to not being able to tell exactly when my order will arrive. That is par for the course, when I order through Sportlots most of those are regular PWEs with NO Tracking whatsoever.
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