Becomming a dealer for full time income.

[barrysloate]

After further thought: keep your day job no matter how much you dislike it, start a baseball card business that you can develop at night and on the weekends. Only try it fulltime after you've established you can make a living at it. My guess is you will make some money but not nearly enough to support a family. It's much tougher today than when I got in in the early 80's.

[kcohen]

For all of the reasons stated in prior posts, I'm loathe to see how one can actually make a living as a new entry into the market. I've been setting up at shows for 8 or 9 years and I recognized right off the bat that having to actually do it for a living would be exceedingly difficult and would totally suck all pleasure from the hobby. Once an avocation becomes a vocation, it's a totally different animal.

[Big Ben]

Originally Posted by barrysloate

After further thought: keep your day job no matter how much you dislike it, start a baseball card business that you can develop at night and on the weekends. Only try it fulltime after you've established you can make a living at it. My guess is you will make some money but not nearly enough to support a family. It's much tougher today than when I got in in the early 80's.

I very much agree! IMO Stating small on the internet and trying to exploit a niche in the market would be the way to go. That being said, I am not sure if there is a niche out there in the card market that has not been tried. I also have to wonder about the degree of disposable income that people currently have to devote to cards. I have been away from the hobby for a while though. I have known of two instances in which a person has purchased an existing card business. In both instances, I have seen the buyer not really able to recoup their initial investment and in one case, the buyer inherited the problems with the previous business. I think that it is safe to say that most of us have flipped cards for a profit. It is much easier to flip cards when a person does not have to worry about supporting yourself and or your family.
Best of luck to you on whatever you decide to try.

[alanu]

If it already hasn't been mentioned, make sure you factor the cost of health insurance into your business plan.

[buymycards]

Hi,
I normally have between 500-1000 items on ebay at any one time. (I am taking the summer off, so I don't have any listings right now) This requires constant work. Every morning before work and every evening after work, I am shipping cards, answering questions, responding to offers, etc. Every weekend I am scanning dozens of items and listing them in turbolister before I upload them to ebay.

Having a successful ebay store requires constant work. You have to be willing to let go of slow moving items at a loss so you can buy more inventory. It can be tough to find enough inventory, at the right price, to keep the store stocked. Most of my items are BIN with best offer, and I nearly always accept any offer that is 40% or more of my BIN price. If I buy at the right price I can accept 40% and still make a profit and the whole point is to sell the cards. I would rather make two bucks profit on a card and move it right away than let it sit for 2 years so I might possibly make $10.

When I think about quitting my job and doing this full time, I start doing some math. If you look at my salary, vacation, sick leave, life insurance, health insurance, retirement plan, etc, I take the annual total and divide it by 250 work days. ( Mon through Friday 50 weeks per year). Now I know how much PROFIT I need to make every day in order to match my current income.

Let's say that profit number is $250 per day. Now, I need to have enough daily ebay sales so that I can make $250 per day. That means that if my state and federal taxes are 35%, and my social security and medicare is %15 per cent, I have to make a before taxes profit of $500 per day. Now, if you figure the cost of the items that you sell, ebay and paypals cut, shipping expenses, utilities, ink for your your printer, and all of the other costs that come with it, I would probably need sales of $1000 per day in order to end up with $250 in my pocket.

If you are selling items at $10 each, that would be 100 sales per day, 100 invoices to print, 100 packages to mail, 100 cards to scan, 100 cards to list, plus you would need to be super organized so you could find the cards right away to prepare them for shipping. That is a lot of work for $250 per day.

Not only that, but if you are using BIN's rather than auctions you would probably need to be running 2000-3000 items in order to sell 100 items per day.

You can supplement your income on the weekends by setting up at shows. I have set up at shows when I didn't make the $35 table fee and I have set up where I sold every item that I brought, so you never know. In the past I was able to purchase a lot of inventory that customers brought to the shows, but that doesn't happen much any more. The nice thing about shows is that you can normally blow out a lot of junk that won't sell on ebay.

A brick and mortar store would be great, but the overhead would be a killer. The great thing about having a physical location is that you will get a lot of people coming through the door looking to sell their collections. The perfect solution would be to have a regular store, an ebay store, and set up at shows on the weekends, but it would be one hell of a lot of work.

Good luck with your decision, but make sure that you fully analyze your costs. The general rule for most start ups is figure what you think your start up costs will be - then double it, and you will still be short.

Rick

[steve B]

Another thing to consider is that every hobby business that I've seen be siccessful -defined as lasing more than a few years- Has taken advantage of a great deal of networking and making smart moves.

The stamp guy I did some work for aimed at turming most stuff quickly, hopefully in less than a month, occasionally in less than a day. As long as he had profit he was happy, even if he left a good deal of money on the table.

Closet full of stock certificates? Sold before he got them back to the shop.
Much postcard? Turned in a week for a nice profit, eventually sold through a couple other people and ended up going at auction for 10K! And he wasn't bothered by that. His customer had the one contact to get from $500 to $5000 and was a regular.
He also would buy a collection at a show and sell it before he got back to the table. That takes a lot of general knowledge plus mentally keeping track of who will buy what.

The local card shop sells lots of memorabilia too, current posters and penants type stuff.
But they also use internet contacts very well. The day Curtis Martin went to the Jets they sold their entire inventory of his cards to a NY dealer. Not for full price, but they unloaded what would soon be dead inventory and the NY guy got an instant inventory of what would be that weeks hot cards in his area.

More business happens at stamp shows before the doors open than after. Same for coins. I haven't seen that the couple times I did a show, but I was new and didn't have much money or inventory. (Always seemed to have the wrong sort of stuff. Just one reason I didn't get into it full time.)

Steve B

[bbeck]

I have had a brick and mortar shop for 21 years now. Prior to opening the shop I was a municipal bond trader at a large Investment banking house. I actually liked my job but wanted my own business, something I really would love. I still love it today but would not recommend anyone attempting to open up a collectibles store in this day and age unless they had a huge chunk of capital to fall back on. I think Charles Darwin had it right as it has truly been "survival of the fittest." Everyone around me has slowly folded shop. I deal heavily in vintage (I always have been heavily oriented in 60's and back material) as my customer base is 30-70 year old men. When I first opened it was 70% kids/30% adults. What few kids are around will buy autographed memorabilia but most disposable income is left for video games and the sort. I have picked up some customers from my website and ebay has been a great outlet when times are really slow. Finding vintage is tough and finding it in decent shape even tougher. But, you never know what may walk through the door and that keeps the excitement going. I am also a massive collector (a true conflict of interest) so I really love the stuff. The collectibles shop owner in the town I live always asks if I would buy his store(he survives but it is tough and he has been in business 25 years). He usually sells me the vintage that walks into his shop. He gets way more vintage walk-ins than I do as he is in a more rural area. So, in the end, as a hands on shop owner I truly love the business and it is still fun but I do not think one can make a living as a new start-up brick and mortar. I know I could not start from scratch again and expect to survive. I still do okay because of longevity and reputation. Hope that helps some-Bob Beck-Bob Beck Sports Collectibles.

[savedfrommyspokes]

In 2001 I started buying on ebay and buying out show dealers with the goal of finishing all Topps sets from 52-present. I purchased partial sets, lots, etc and began piecing together these sets. At this time I had some "extra" income and I used it to buy with. As I started amassing dupes, I began to use ebay to sell them off.

By 04, my selling evolved into monthly auctions of around 500 singles. I sold off larger groups of doubles also. I used the proceeds from selling to continue buying cards to fill holes and upgrade my sets. At this point, I realized when buying vintage cards in groups, I could make a profit by selling them individually.

By 06 I had finished all of my sets, except for half of the 52 hi #s. At this same time I began really disliking my job. I realized that the monthly auctions would not support my lifestyle, so I began to experiment with different selling formats on ebay.

In 07 I opened my ebay store and focused on buying (still upgrading my collection, but primarily for resell) to stock my store. Then in 08, I sold 10k singles, in 09 15k singles, and in 10 I sold 22k singles on a part time basis (evenings, weekends).

So in late 10 I decided that 2011 would be the year to go full time. The things I had in place were an established customer base, a system for efficiently listing and shipping cards. I felt that I had worked out all of the kinks and was ready for full time.

About 16 months ago, my long time boss was let go and I knew my time had come also. Last June I began full time. I had about 12k cards in my inventory with another 10k ready to list...so that is what I started with. I listed and shipped, listed and shipped 10-12 hours a day. I used my extra income to continue to purchase cards to ramp inventory. That was still not enough. Good thing my credit cards both had $20k limits and were both running 10 month interest free with no extra fee promos. I used all $40k of this free money to build my inventory. So far, I have built my inventory to over 35k singles with more inventory to still list and have completely paid of these two credit cards without paying a dime of interest. As far as sales, some months are busier than others, but I have continued to pay myself, every week, the same amount I was paid at my previous job, including the dreaded taxes and retirement funds. I put in 10-12 hours a day, but that is what I worked before. I have continued to improve my efficiency with listing and shipping so I am still listing (growing my inventory) more cards per week than I am selling. Currently I am on pace in 2012 to sell around 75k cards, which means I will turn my inventory 2+ times this year.

What have I learned from all of this is it is possible to make a comfortable living selling vintage singles by starting slow and developing an efficient system to sell/ship cards. Depending on how quickly you want to start and ramp your business, having access to capital to help grow your business is a factor. I am still constantly looking and listening for new ways to operate the business in more efficient and cost effective ways. However, the most important part of making this happen is to consistently treat other collectors as fairly as possible and quickly fix any mistakes. I have also worked to develop connections with various sellers to ensure a constant supply of reasonably price inventory. The best part, is I have not touched any of my own collection to start this business...it is there for severe emergencies only.

Many of the estimates of costs in this thread are quite accurate. All of my costs equal approximately 25% of my income (ebay, paypal fees, shipping supplies, shipping, etc). My COG sold averages out at 35%, in other words by buying in bulk, I pay around 35 cents for every dollar worth of product I sell. My wife has excellent health care so there is no expense there. It can be done.