Ebay is a great resource for Newbie players to build their collections quickly.  Here is a description of my experiences on Ebay.  This second part describes my experiences of selling cards on Ebay.

Now that I finally had a healthy stock to sell I started by organising my cards into commons, rares and super rares.  I then split them into random grab bags.  After calculations I had worked out that I could sell for £1 with 75p delivery on top.  This covered my postage and high quality packaging (which I felt was important due to the experiences I had from buying cards) of bubbled envelopes and plastic bags for the cards.  The grab bags had the following quantities:

Common Cards = 15 cards per item

Rare Cards = 4 cards per item

Super Rare Cards = 2 cards per item.

I also had to look at what else I could offer to customers to increase the value of my items so I offered some customer promises.  They were as follows:

·        No swaps

·        All cards in out of the packet mint condition

·        An option to request certain cards.  This was limited to one request per item and 2 of each card, for common bags, and 1 of each card for rare and super rare cards

·        Full refund or exchange for any customer that felt like I had not fulfilled any of the above promises

I felt like I had a really good offer and I had come up with some great promises to help any buyers.  Everything was set and I went about setting up my listings.  I decorated it well and described clearly what I was offering, got a nice picture for the listing, set it up to finish at a time of high traffic to Ebay and then submitted the listings.

I watched and waited.

Even though it was a 10-day listing and was sat at the bottom of most searches I was still receiving about 20-30 viewings a day.  However no one was buying.  After 3 days I made my first sale 2 lots of Super Rare Cards.  It was a nice start and I posted them the same day I got confirmed payment through Paypal.  I wasn’t surprised the Super Rares had gone first but I was secretly hoping people would buy the Common Cards.  More days passed and there were no more sales.

With 3 days to go the listings started to get a lot more viewings, but yet still no one was buying.  Lots of things kept going through my head, had I worded it wrong, had a made a stupid mistake and people weren’t buying, was my offer of 15 Common Cards for £1 really just a crap offer.  I couldn’t understand why this was happening.

Finally the listings ended with just one more sale of the Super Rare Cards.  The other 2 listings sold none.  I was gutted.  My idea of making some money using something I love was shot down.  I spent so much time thinking about why they had not sold I gave myself a headache.

I came to the conclusion that perhaps because I only sold to the UK then I was missing out on the huge market in the US.  So I relisted just the Common Cards and included worldwide delivery options with relevant postage costs.  Submitted it for another 10 days and waited again.

The listing was getting some great volumes of traffic 40-50 visits a day but no one was buying.  As each day passed so did my optimism about the idea.  Only on the last day did I sell 4 items all from buyers in the UK.  The listing finished with almost 450 viewings and only 4 sales a less than 1% success rate.  Then to make matters worse due to me losing my job around the same time I had to change my email addresses on my Ebay and Paypal accounts.  This had not filtered into my listing and people weren’t able to pay.  In the end they had to send money in the post to me.  In return I threw in a non-mint super rare card and also ensured that one of the Common Cards was an Elemental Hero card.

Of the 7 items I sold during the month, all 7 offered positive feedback and were extremely happy with their purchases.  They received exactly what I had offered official out of the packet mint cards, well packaged and delivered promptly.

I scratched my head and wondered about why I didn’t sell more.

Even to this day I still can’t understand why people wouldn’t buy.  I know my listings wouldn’t appeal to collectors who are looking for those extra rare and special cards but I just thought that maybe those parents who wanted to buy cheaper than high street prices or newbies who wanted to boost their card pools quickly and cheaply might be interested.  I guess that many new players the game don’t consider Ebay as a way of buying cards hence the reason why I’m doing this 2 part article.

Even though I failed miserably, here are some of my tips when selling on Ebay:

• Try to appeal to as many customers as possible.  I focussed my listings on too small a market and as such didn’t sell nearly enough as I wanted to.
• Always offer the customer the option to refund or exchange if they aren’t happy.  It’s a small promise but stretches a long way.
• Don’t make your listing too complicated Ebay buyers want to know what they are getting and quickly.
• Don’t charge excessive postage costs, it is a big turn off to customers.

There are many other generic selling tips for Ebay that I could regurgitate here but you can get them from the Ebay site itself or from one of the many Ebay Gurus that now exist.  The one’s above being the main things that stood out for me.

Selling cards on Ebay is a great way to make that money you might need to pay for Tournament Entry Fees or even your trip to a major tournament (i.e. SJC or National Tournament).  However be careful and test the market a little first as Ebay fees can start adding up when you just keep putting more and more listings on.

The only positive thing that happened from my experience with Ebay is that I now have a huge card pool to start making my real-life deck out of, and I will start going out into the UK and duelling in some tournaments.

My articles are now pretty much up-to-date with present day.  So from now on I will be describing my experiences shortly after they have happened.  Its going to take me sometime to fix up my real-life deck and I want you the readers to help me do it.  I will be taking some time to collate a list of all my current cards so that you can all see what I am working with.  My current plan is to make a Chaos Deck.  Reason being the only decent tribute monsters in my current collection are 2 Chaos Sorcerers, plus I can mix and match random lights and darks that don’t particularly have much synergy for now until I get better cards.  In the meantime I will keep posting my turn-by-turn duels with Ilya and also some new opponents (some of them gave me a proper beating!!) so you can see how other deck types work and how I have been improving my duelling skills.

I have 3 really good online decks that I will be collecting the cards for over time.  This will be done partly through trading on Pojo, so you will be able to read about my trading experiences soon as well.  I’m not a collector so I will be trading Rare/Super Rare/ Ultra Rare Cards for Common Cards.  All I want now is a deck to duel with and take me to the UK National Championships 2007.

My email address is mofox9@hotmail.co.uk email me for any help or advice or even your opinions on my articles.  I would love to hear your opinions and if you have any suggestions to improve them then let me know.  I will reply to all emails that are sent to me.  Remember newbies no question is a stupid question.

Until next time fellow duellists!