The hobby of diminishing returns
Welcome to 2015. With Topps and Panini going down to the wire with their 2014 product releases, it will take at least another couple of weeks to finish off all of the year in review pieces here. With any luck, we’ll have the Best Mets Cards of 2014 post up this weekend. But before we get to that, let’s look at how my luck fared with packs in 2014. Spoiler: it was crap.
My spending was down in 2014, with just under $3,000 going toward unopened 2014 product. That yielded just $540 in eBay sales, though, for a variety of reasons, I ended up not selling quite a few of the biggest hits. Meanwhile, even the lesser hits were tough sells; cards that would have sold for $20 or more a year or two ago were lucky to go for $10 this year. Part of the problem is overproduction. Topps in particular has been pushing out more products with more parallels than ever before (and somehow without featuring more players). This results in a glut of low-numbered parallels of star players. That’s great for collectors who buy singles, not so good for sellers. If a Jose Altuve parallel numbered to 35 isn’t going to sell for more than $1, I might as well hang on to it. And so now I have piles of 2014 hits that can’t find good homes.
Of course, even the cards that did sell didn’t always sell. Out of 130 sales on eBay this year, three resulted in non-paying bidders. We’re not talking about junk cards either, these were big names: Clayton Kershaw, Kris Bryant, and Robin Yount. All of these cards went relatively cheap compared to other listings, but all three went unpaid. This seems to be an increasing problem as eBay has become more and more biased against sellers, bending over backwards to placate buyers while making selling more of a hassle. With Check Out My Cards getting into auctions, it should be interesting to see how eBay fares in the sports card market. We could see a tipping point in the next few years.
But enough doom and gloom, let’s get to the pretty cards.
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