Red Rookie Redemption and Backyard Fails Again

Hey everybody, Season 5, Episode 13 of the Ball Card Show, The Esports Podcast. Or The Esports Collector. I'm Jason Otero. I'm Gary Lemaster. And we're tired. What a great intro, man. We are. We're wiped. Yeah. It was a long weekend. Well, like, let's back this up. We finished up the Pittsburgh show, which we'll recap here in a little bit. Three day show, 700 tables, really big regional show, right? Yeah. One of the biggest in the Midwest. Yeah. Biggest regional shows. A lot of traffic. It's in an older mall. It's humid like a greenhouse in there, and a little warm throughout the whole weekend. I am just finishing up my daughter's club volleyball season. So I haven't experienced a weekend off since January, I don't think. It's been a while, yeah. With us ramping all this up on top of it and not letting off the eBay. I got back, crashed last night, woke up, just finished five hours of shipping, and time for us to start this an hour late. Yeah. That's all right. We're good. That's where we are. Yeah. You got a big week this week. I do have a big week this week. My baby girl. It's a different type of fatigue. Yeah. My baby girl is not so much a baby anymore. She's getting married on Friday. So we're heading a few hours north on Thursday to start the rehearsal process and all that. How you doing? I'm doing okay. I imagine it's going to be a lot like when my son moved out of the house, where I think I'm really in good shape. And then when it happens, like in that moment, it's going to be bad. If you thought about as you're walking down the aisle, just being like, nope. No, because we really like the soon to be son-in-law. Well, you know, but just selfishly for you, it has nothing to do with ... He could be a great guy. Yes, but you know my daughter. She's expensive. I'm okay with her being somebody else's expense. I'm okay there. Okay. Love you, kiddo. Love you, kiddo. Love you, Liz. Congratulations. Leslie and I will be up there. Wife and I will be up there celebrating too. Looking forward to it. Yeah. Appreciate you guys coming. Big week. Yeah. All right. You have a big week this week because tonight ... Oh, yeah. Whatnot by yourself. Running Whatnot solo, everybody. It's going to be great or it's going to be awful, but it's happening either way. I'm looking forward to it. I think it'll be fun. If you've jumped in our Whatnot streams, you haven't really heard Jason on the mic too terribly much because he's usually running everything off to the side and elbowing me and telling me when to go faster and when to shut up and when not to say things. And when to stop because we don't ... Guys, listen, if you were there for the last show, we had a moment where it almost all came crashing down. We have a sticker system. I'm really ... Process oriented. Yes. Yes. Process oriented. Because I think when you think about scaling a business, that's the stuff that's going to fail and you're going to really be like, what do we do? What do we do? So we got a number out of order and then I was like, we're not even halfway through this auction and then it's going to be a horrible ... So we figured it out. We figured it out. It was a late night. Jason was very stressed. And then once we started- There may have been a few choice words out there. Once we started actually getting stuff shipped, which unlike a lot of folks on Whatnot, we literally end the show and we start shipping and everything is in the mail the next day. So when we started the shipping process, we were a little panicked because we were like, we're going to have to go literally watch every video receipt. And we started spot checking and we were like, wait a minute, I think we're good. We picked up a lot of new stuff at the show for Whatnot. Some really cool early 2000s game use patches. A lot of ultra modern football, cool inserts, a lot of numbered stuff. Some cool hockey stuff. I don't know how much of that will be requested. That's something we could do well or get murdered on with Whatnot. We're not exactly sure. But yeah, join us tonight. Giveaway for the buyers tonight. We will have packs. We will have all the usuals. But we do have a JSA certed Jamal Charles autograph. That'll be one of the buyers givey. So make sure that you're joining us tonight. This is Thursday the, what is it? The 8th. 8th. Yes. Because we're recording this ahead of time. But you'll see it on. But you'll see it on the 8th. Thursday the 8th. So join us 7pm every Thursday night on Whatnot. It is a cool one because a lot of people just hang out. Yeah. We have a lot of fun and it's literally just us doing this. And then being like, here's some cards. For three hours. We sell a few cards at the same time, but you get the podcast experience through that. So yeah. Yeah. Good times. All right. Let's get rolling with a little bit of hobby news up first. I want to address something that we've had a lot of messages about in the last 24 hours. And I don't know if you're going to like my answer, but eventually you will. So eBay had this updated user agreement. I know that there's a video or two on TikTok that have kind of been going viral. A lot of card sellers are wondering what this means. There were some changes in the legal agreement notices. And essentially, are you agreeing to go directly to arbitration if you have an issue with eBay? The easy thing for me to do is to tell you, don't do any of it. You know, opt out of the user agreement. But without thoroughly diving into that, I don't want to give you shortsighted advice. Correct. There are some people that are concerned that if they opt out of this user agreement, will they be somehow impacted in their metrics with eBay? Now, I do think there are a lot of goofy things that eBay does with their metrics, but I do not think that they are deeply concerned with the average person with 500 cards online or even my low end store with 40,000 cards. This is such a small piece of their market that I'm not too worried that they're concerned with that. I want to make sure it's the right thing to make advice on this at all. So I will be diving in really deeply on this. From what I understand, we have until May 17th to opt out of the user agreement. I will do my best to get all the information I can for the next episode, like to thoroughly go through it, to understand what's happening and to show you with what I see, so that you have plenty of time to make a decision on that. But the last thing I'm going to do is just give you a click baity answer that isn't like thoroughly thought through. Yeah. We saw that this was something that was coming up. We wanted to make sure we at least threw it out there, because so many of you have really seemed to have gotten a lot of value from the eBay related content that Jason provides. We want to continue to provide that value, but like Jason said, we don't want to give you wrong information, but we also don't want to ignore something that could potentially be a thing. And then just a quick reminder too, while we're talking about the eBay stuff. For the last week, whenever I've been shipping, not every day, but just about every other day in the morning, I usually start about seven Eastern time, sometimes a little sooner. I pull my orders and then I've just been going live on TikTok, hanging out, answering any questions you have about eBay, particularly high volume, low end eBay stores. So if you're somebody that works from home or you don't have anything going on and you want to hang out in the mornings, we may be live on TikTok in the morning. There's been a lot of back and forth Q&A type of stuff. So feel free to jump on. I'll be hanging out there. I will not commit to what days, when, how often, how frequently, or how long I'll be on there. But you may see us go live. That's probably what's going on is I'll be shipping orders and answering any questions you have. Yep. Let's talk about Veriswap now. A platform many loved, administration many loathe. Yeah. So if you haven't- It was so cheesy. No, it was a little cheesy. That's okay though. Corny. Yeah. If you don't know what's going on in a nutshell, first, what is Veriswap? We've talked about Veriswap on the podcast before. Veriswap is a platform that allows you to trade with people around the world. And the way it works is Veriswap, the company, acts as a middleman. You send your cards to Veriswap, your trade partner sends their cards to Veriswap, Veriswap opens the packages, makes sure that what you agreed to is in each package, then they repackage the cards and ship them back out to you. Part of that process is that they are supposed to insure the cards properly. Well, over the last week to 10 days, there have been some really ugly things start to pop up on this front, where packages are not being insured at all. Just the, not small packages, $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 packages, not being insured properly. They go missing. When somebody reaches out to Veriswap, they're being told, deal with the post office. It's not a good look. What does the post office say? Deal with Veriswap. Yeah, the post office says it was insured for $100, so we'll give you $100. And Veriswap is ghosting people. They finally took care of one issue that I'm aware of after being completely dragged through the mud. I want to say I saw it there. Was it Boston Card Hunter that started that process and then it got real ugly in the scammer room on Facebook and people were hitting the app store and reviewing their app, because this is all app-based, and just blasting it with one-star reviews. It wasn't pretty. It was not a good look. And what stinks about it is, it's a concept that certainly seems like a good idea. MySlabs, who we've talked about before, has a similar thing with their Unlimited program, where they offer a very similar service. I can't imagine that they're going to repeat these same mistakes. At the end of the day, it's not like Veriswap does this for free. They charge pretty high fees. I want to say right in line with eBay fees. So if you have a $5,000 card that's getting sent in, you're paying a few hundred dollars to have this service, and it only costs like 40 bucks to add a few thousand dollars of insurance to a package. So you've got a situation where a company is trying to squeeze every possible penny and screw over their customers. That's such a short-sighted way of doing things. So if you use Veriswap and you've had nothing but good luck, congratulations. Be prepared for the fact that you may eventually not have good luck, and if it goes bad, they may not have your back. Yeah. I'm going to take a bit of a detour, but on the same topic. Any market for collectibles that has a tendency to have high volatility, meaning there could be a huge upside, there can be a big swing, people can make a lot of money, it's going to attract all kinds of people to the market. Nothing surprising that I'm saying here. Card market is no different, and the card market has a large segment of people who have enough money to get a business going that have been able to make money, but not necessarily respond appropriately to customer service issues or allegations especially. In any business, when you screw up, if you're unable to take responsibility, I mean it's just so ironic. We're literally talking about things that we were taught as three and five-year-olds mattering when we grow up, and this is why it matters. You own a company, the scale of that company, I cannot imagine that $15,000 would bankrupt them to take care of that customer. Or hey, there are creative solutions over time or credit, but to not address it at all and to point fingers at the post office, you and I were having a discussion and I won't get into too many details, but a sizable LCS that is very well-known nationwide has an employee caught on film doing horrible, illegal things, criminal things, and the shop owner does nothing to address it publicly. What are we doing here? It keeps the person around. It keeps the person employed, right? What are we doing here? How many times do we see stories of people that have these repacks or these breaking groups? I do this because they've never ran a successful business for more than five minutes, but the scam is still going for that first year until it's not. Step one, if you feel unsure about a seller, don't even bother. If you are okay with a seller and they screw up and they don't respond in a timely manner, doesn't mean five minutes, but within a day, especially if they completely drop the ball. Move on. Be done with that seller, but if they are defensive and treat it like it's you against them and don't even make an attempt to make amends, that business is not one worth counting on. Is that fair to say? Yeah. For sure. It's just not fair worth counting. I'll give you an example. We'll talk more about the Pittsburgh show in a minute. I had a bulk lot walk up to me. Maybe a hundred cards, a lot of ultra modern football, tops chrome, prism, lower end, maybe some variation rookies, but it had a lot of the quarterbacks and that stuff in there. Nothing crazy. Nothing crazy. I buy it an hour and a half later. I called him a kid, but he was probably 22 years old with a full beard. Comes up, was there a Caleb Williams pink optic in there? Not a huge card, but probably would have been the biggest in the stack. I hadn't even gone through. I mean, I'm thumbing through. We do a quick deal, whatever. I'm buying in bulk, so I'm getting it at a pretty cheap rate. He's devastated to find out that that Caleb Williams in there said, yeah, it's mine. We both kind of stand there because he's an adult and he understands that he just sold this to me and we agreed upon the price and blah, blah, blah. He starts walking off pouting. Hey, come here. Here. Oh my gosh, thank you, blah, blah, blah, blah, but why? There's a banner behind the table. There is a brand with the podcast. We care that we have a growing and successful business. We care that people want to come back to the ball card show. We care that things are done the right way. We care about training people. I was completely right. Yeah, that's not the point. Completely in the right. You being right isn't the point. I had a similar situation. I did a trade with a guy, nice enough guy. I even offered him a little bit of cash on top of the trade to even it out and he went, no, no, no, no, no, it's fine. I have these cards. Cool. Thanks, man. An hour later, the guy comes back and he goes, hey, you were going to just buy those cards from me instead of trading this to me. Would you just let me give you this card back and I'll take the cash? At first I was confused because I was like, I didn't even remember what was happening. It was busy. Then he was like, no, no, this was ... I was like, yeah, okay, that's fine, I guess. Well, he's lucky you were so slammed you didn't have time to put out what you bought. Yeah, because if I had already sold it, he'd have been SOL. And again, I'm in the right. I could have very easily within my right said, hey man, sales and trades are final. There's nothing I can do. But like Jason said, we want to treat people right. We want people to feel good about doing business with us always. And in some cases, you're rewarded. I can't remember if I mentioned this to eBay or just talking with you, but I have noticed if I ever get a negative feedback of somebody that hasn't messaged me and I'm able to message them, there's no problem I can't try to solve with a refund and keep the card or I'll send like I will lose money on the transaction and a card at the potential of gaining a repeat customer. Yes. It is math. And I said, you know, so when I've converted a negative to a positive feedback, it's like all of a sudden within the next three hours, you're hearing ching, ching, ching, ching on the eBay app. Like you're rewarded for it. If people do shady stuff, it doesn't matter if they're with the biggest company or not. They should be exposed. They should be given the opportunity to respond and make things right. And then if they don't, don't do business with them. Yeah, it's that simple. And then when the response is going through and deleting the accounts on your platform of everybody who had bad things to say about you or tried to hold you accountable, also not a good look and a waste of energy. Huge waste of resources to do that. Anyway, let's talk about the Red Rookie Redemption. Yes, we'll go through those quick. We talked a couple of weeks ago about how we are seeing fanatics respond to, oh, people seem to like this. Let's do a bunch of it. Yeah. With the WWE redemptions, which, you know, helped us out last week with some buyer givey stuff. But everywhere we turn, they're beginning to put more and more rewards into these products. I like this, but this Red Rookie one's kind of interesting. It's a little different. There's some strategy involved in it. Yes. There's a long-term play with it. Why don't you break down and explain, in case people have not heard anything at all about this, how it works. Yes. So 2024 Bowman baseball releases in, from the time you guys hear this, will have already released. It releases in two days from the time we're recording this. Yes. I'm excited. Okay. Yeah, you seem excited. They are short printing. There was a rumor going around that these were one-of-one. They are not. No. If they are one-of-one, this is the worst thing that Fanatics has ever done, so I don't see them doing that. They just said they're short printed. How short printed, who knows? But the rookies, not the Bowman first, the rookie cards in the set, there is a short printed version of them where the rookie logo, the rookie card logo, is stamped in red foil. If you have one of those cards, and that player eventually wins rookie of the year this year, you will have a window where you can redeem that card, unlike the other redemptions, it's not going to be through your LCS. It's going to be directly through Fanatics. And all the LCS owners are so relieved. Yes. It's going to be directly through Fanatics, and starting, I believe, for Fan Cash, Fanatics Cash. I believe November is the date that you'll be able to start using that for sports card related things through Fanatics, from gear to breaks to singles to boxes and packs directly through Fanatics. So if you have the card of the player who wins rookie of the year, the red foil one, you can send that in and get $100 in Fan Cash. Now, if for some reason somebody pulls an Ichiro, and they win MVP and rookie of the year, well, now you're going to get $400. Which is cool. The things stack. It's $300 for MVP or Cy Young. Now, here's where it gets interesting. If you have a rookie of the year, and you think, hey, this guy's not just a Kyle Lewis rookie of the year kind of rookie of the year, he's a Corbin Carroll kind of rookie of the year who may have a shot to win an MVP or two. You may say, hey, I don't want that $100 right now, I'm going to hold on to this card. And in two years, they win an MVP, now you can go back and send that card in then and get the $300. You may go, hey, I think they're going to win two MVPs. Well, if they win two MVPs, it's $500. So you hold the card. A third MVP goes to $700. And then last but not least, if you hold the card for the player's entire career, and they end up making the Hall of Fame within 10 years of their retirement, so within five years of eligibility, you'll be able to redeem that card for $1,000 in fan cash. So there's some strategy and long-term thought process here. What it will do- Long term. I think that it will be a lot harder to find these things in the wild, because people will just kind of stash them, because people pop off in baseball and have one-off years all the time that turn into MVP years. Javi Baez won an MVP. Oh, you know what I just realized? What's that? All these super high volume Bowman breakers are going to actually have to go through the paper. Yeah. Are they only going to be in the hit stack in the middle? They've got to be- Well, they've got to look for the red foil is what they're going to have to do. So that's going to make Bowman breaks take- Way longer. Two to three times longer. Yeah. Yeah, that's funny. So anyhow, really cool concept. Some long-term play to it. Okay, so let's play this out. This year, a hot rookie takes off, right, and you have their red rookie card. How long of a career does someone need to have, like on average, how long is a Hall of Fame career? 10 years? I'd say a minimum of 10 years. A minimum of 10 years. I think you have to have 10 years accrued to be even eligible for a Hall of Fame. So 10 years accrued, and that is a short-sighted objective. Yeah. So let's call it 10. And then how long until- Five more years. Okay, so 15 years from now, if it is a no-doubter, a no-doubter first ballot Hall of Famer, you could redeem that for how much? $1,000. Okay. Get your $100 or $200, reinvest it, you'll get paid back a lot bigger that way. And if you can find a few of them, maybe hold one. It's kind of cool because it's going to give value to parts of the market that maybe didn't have it as often. Yeah. I'm interested to see what the red foil rookies are, red stamp rookies, that aren't big names, what that market demands. Again- In like six months, or a year from now. Well, it really boils down to, are they getting regular playing time? I will tell you this, if everybody starts ignoring them, and it's a rookie card of a guy who gets every day at bats, and they're in dollar boxes, I'll be piling them up. Because again, it takes one solid year from somebody to win an MVP out of nowhere. And all of a sudden, you've got $300 for each one of those things. I wouldn't pay up too much on this. No. I wouldn't pay up too much on this. You really have to be convinced. But I do love another reward format, Fanatics. Please listen to me. Fanatics, are you paying attention? I know you watch our podcast. Please do subset rewards. Create a couple set platforms. It could be a simple $20 redemption that's cool. And then you can build out the redemption set through the year. But allow for the set builder of the lower end retail space to have a chase as well. The red foil will be obviously in the retail, because Bowman is retail, right? There's not a hobby skew of this one out. Oh, that's Chrome. Chrome. What am I talking about? You're thinking of draft. Draft. It's hobby only. Draft hobby only. Everything else has retail. The red foils are going to be one where you can hit them in retail, but a subset would be fantastic. You build a set, you turn it in, maybe it's timeline within a couple months of release or whatever. It's the top 100 set. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever it is, build this set for a reward. That's I think the next step for a lot of it. And set building will encourage more WACs being opened, which will only boost the singles market. More interactivity that is introduced into the market, the better for everybody. Yep. Yep. Yep. All right. Is that it for news? Oh, we got the Backyard Breaks lawsuit. We got one more. We got one more. This was a fun one for me, because I like nothing more than seeing people sleep in the bed they make. Maybe that's petty, but it's how I feel. Backyard Breaks got sued last week by a gentleman who never received about $15,000 worth of cards he bought over the course of a week. They were lost in the mail. Can you say that? Wait. Dollars worth of cards? Yes. Okay. $15,000 worth of cards. They were lost in the mail. Backyard Breaks initially said, yes, we will make this right, and then proceeded to not make it right. Shocker, I know. They danced around with it, tried to blame it on the post office, then they tried to blame it on whatnot, and long story short, the guy finally said, okay, I guess we're going to have to go to court, because you all owe me. You're the seller. You have a responsibility to make sure that the package arrives to me. That's how this works. It did not arrive to me, and you're telling me that I get $300 from the post office? No. The next question we have to ask in regards to that is this. We sell on whatnot, and we don't even know the answer to this, because it's never been something that's come up before. Whatnot requires sellers to print their shipping labels through their platform. It's how they track everything, make sure everything gets delivered where it's supposed to. It makes sense. But I'm not 100% certain that there's a way for us to individually go into a package and insure it for more than the base amount that whatnot calculates based on the weight of the package. There may be a way to do it. We're new to this. There may be a way. We don't know. If there is a way, and a platform like Backyard Breaks that is selling hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars worth of cards a week is not utilizing it to ship high dollar packages, then shame on them. If there's not a way to do that, then shame on whatnot for encouraging people to sell hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars worth of product without a way to insure it properly to get where it's going. Back to the basic customer service principle. That dude probably spent $30,000 to get that $15,000 worth of cards. I bet he spent more. Unless he just got insanely lucky. They're not designed to be a win for you. So here we have somebody spending tons of money. Let's back this up. This should have ended when those dudes in crop tops didn't give away their giveaway years ago. When the gold kaboom or whatever it was, we can't give this away. We can't give, bro, bro. We all knew that crap sucked. We all knew it sucked. We didn't like it then. We don't like it now. How many highlight reels do we need of the same company with horrible customer service, with horrible behavior, with horrible human resources? My God, you guys are terrible at managing your employees. You have terrible policies for navigating people. Like get sued. I hope you do. I hope you lose. I love grumpy, angry Jason. We already know who they are. They've shown how many times they have to show us. Fanboys, just do a meetup at the casino and hand them your money and let's be done with it. Yeah. That's what's happening with Backyard Breaks. But I hope that if it's true that they have the opportunity to insure. Yes, and we don't know. I gotta think there is. I have to believe it is possible. I gotta think it's possible. And they didn't do that. Was it an oversight? Possibly. It's kind of hard to believe that they haven't had any issues like this happen before with the bajillion packages that have been sent out through this business. It's hard to believe that it's an oversight and it just took one person having the resources to say, okay, I'm going to hold you accountable. And again, let me say this, Backyard isn't just one or two people anymore. There's a whole team of people that work there. It's a corporation. In any company, there are people that you like and people that you don't like, but there are people in charge making terrible decisions and telling you as the buyer that it does not matter what you think should happen. It does not matter how you believe you should be treated. It does not matter what you believe is inappropriate content. It does not matter if you see someone assault a coworker on camera. It does not matter if they've been banned from their channel and they pop back up the other day. It does not matter if they care to insure $15,000 worth of packages. It does not matter if they give away their giveaway, which is worth thousands of dollars being that cheap when they are charging two and three times the product value on products. It doesn't matter. You keep spending money on them. You're an idiot if you're the one doing that. I like it. Am I wrong at all? No, you're not wrong in the least. You're an idiot if you keep buying with them. Normally, I'm the one that gets that spicy. I just don't understand. I love it. I don't understand the love for it. The conversations and the comments we'll see is, you're just jealous. You're salty. You're this. You're that. I have no desire to have your problems in my business, and there are Fortune 100 companies that have fallen over way less. That's not an exaggeration. Nope. It happens all the time. Some of them didn't even do things, but they understood the optics of it. You all could care less, and that's a problem, and everybody's going to be seeing you all at the National, and I cannot wait to see the parade. You all will be hiding in the corner of the Whatnot Breakers booth. I guarantee you're going to have security because you're such a big name, and you want to protect the brand, but I'm telling you guys, when you're around other humans and the majority of us think that you're treating people poorly, it's going to reflect your business. At some point, people are going to vote with their dollars, and it may not happen yet, but it's coming. Yeah. All right. Yeah. That's your story. I didn't even want to get that part of you, but I got fired up. That's okay, though. I'm glad you got fired up. It makes me happy. All right. You get rolling with it. You ready for the value box? All right. I need a cigarette, and I don't even smoke. So, the value box. Last week, we talked about some of the worst. advice we were ever given was we were getting into the sports card business and the sports card hobby. This week, we just got back from the Pittsburgh 700. It's actually in Washington, Pennsylvania, which is about 30 minutes southwest of Pittsburgh. It is, as Jason said earlier, one of, if not the largest shows in the Midwest from a table standpoint. I think there were 750 tables at this show. It's at an old mall. People are parking across the highway and walking across the highway to get to this show. It is absolutely packed. We thought to ourselves, you know what? One of the things that I heard at least, no exaggeration, at least 100 times throughout the course of the show is, this is my first show. The first thing I thought was, what a show to pick for your first show. Talk about overwhelming. You might as well just pick the National as your first show and see what happens. We thought, hey, let's talk about in the value box this week, how can you, as someone attending a card show, whether it's your first one or whether you've been to a few shows or you go to shows all the time, but you sometimes walk away going, man, I could have done better at this or I didn't have a plan. I went over my budget. What are some things that we can tell you guys about how to best prepare yourself and to enjoy the experience of going to a card show? That's what we're going to do today in the value box. Let's talk about how to best enjoy a show when you're going there. The first thought in my mind is, what's the purpose of going to the show for you? Are you going to just sell stuff that you have? Are you going to buy new stuff? Are you going to do a combination of both? Do you want to do a little bit of trading? Kind of have a plan. I will say this, as a full-time dealer, if you are going to a show and the only reason that you are going to the show is to sell stuff, then you need to do what I do and you need to pay for a table and sit your rear end down and do the work and sell stuff. Or, you need to be able to buy right enough to have enough margin to make sense for a dealer to buy your product. Correct. Dealers are not buying your stuff at 100% of comps. I'm sorry, we just aren't. Not even buying them at 90%. I can't tell you how many people walked up over the course of three days wanting to sell me stuff that either were on a different planet from reality as far as what it was worth or they knew what it was worth, but they wanted 92 to 97% of the value of it. I would just, hey guys, I don't know what to tell you. I'm not buying this stuff to store it and collect it. That's not purposeful. Stuff to sell. If you're somebody that opens a lot of product and you have a lot of the newer stuff, take it in there and sell it, but don't expect it to be at 100%. You're going to realize that the people on the other side of the table are there to have margin to profit on that. There is nothing wrong with people going to shows and selling and I have seen some folks that do that all day and they seem to do well. They tend to have really nice stuff. They tend to have scenarios where they're sourcing things like a dealer throughout the week, whether they're able to snipe stuff through Facebook sales at 50% and then turn around and sell it to 75 or 80 or maybe they have a large disposable income and they do higher end products and they have a lot of hits and they're in some cards, right? So yes to what you're saying, but also there's nothing wrong with selling to dealers. We think that it's a good thing to go in there with that strategy. It's just really interesting the mindset that you can have when you're rolling into that. If you're going to sell primarily, what Jason said is this, have an expectation. We've talked about before what my bands are and what I pay. Dealers on the whole are going to want to pay somewhere between 60 and 80% on the whole. On lower value stuff, they're going to want to be on the lower end of that. Higher value stuff, they'll go up. Some guys are going to pay 90% for case hits. I'm not one of them. If you see this banner at a show and you're bringing up downtowns, just know before you walk up, we're not the guys to buy them if you want 90% plus. That's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with that. There are people making a lot of money doing that model. They bring five figures to buy inventory. They have repackers that they can count on for shows. Many times they're setting up those deals before the show has even started, giving them a little bit of assurance of how much is going to move through there. They know that they need to have a ton of it out and be firm at the price that they need. They're going to have to sell at 95 to 100%. There's no other way around that. We do know some people that are pretty effective with that, but that's the margin that they're going to be buying at. If you're intending to sell, just have an expectation and understanding that most of the dealers at the table are trying to make money off of whatever they buy from you. I ran into several situations in the last week where the comps that were given were like, I'm asking this, we're talking double comps, triple comps. Then I just follow up, oh, okay. Did you pull that up recently? Where did you see it? Was it on a certain app? What was the date? Is it the same card? As I'm pulling it up and you just see people, well, what happened was it's got to be worth it. It's just like, okay, so here's what we're looking at. If you're looking to sell to dealers, a couple of things you want to do. Know the type of stuff you have. Before you ask a dealer if they want to buy your stuff, don't scatter shoot. It's going to take a lot of time. Look at the type of stuff they have out on their table and see if in your brain, if you have the same type of stuff that they seem to have on their table. If you do, you should walk up and say, hey, are you guys buying? That's a great thing. If you see a table that doesn't have a single card out on the table with a price tag lower than $20 on it, and all you have in your box to sell is base rookie cards from the most ultra modern sets, there's no point in asking that dealer if they want to buy. If they do, they're going to offer you a Nicola card. Yeah, I mean, the caveat is if you came up to my table, I don't have any of that stuff out, but I have an eBay business where I do that. The best way to save your time, because the key to selling is you need to hit as many tables as possible. If you get a no from the first five tables, it doesn't mean anything. There's 700 tables at the show. If I'm selling low end to a dealer, I'm going to walk up and say, hey, are you buying any low end bulk? What I'm doing is I'm acknowledging that beautiful word that we love to hear, bulk. I'm acknowledging a bulk price of some sort. We haven't stated the price. We haven't debated the price. We here just want to know if there's any interest. Before I even present that, that would help you a little bit not to waste your time, because your time will matter. Somewhere around 50 tables in, if you're going to the wrong tables, if it's taking a while, you're going to just be like, screw this. Just take them or I'm out of here. It'll be frustrating to you. Be sure to maybe start with that. Hey, are you buying low end bulk? I have other people where, and I've used your line a couple times this week, where really somebody comes up, they're really sharp, they have really nice high end case hit short printed stuff that's hard to find, stuff that's hard to comp, and get two or three cards in, you realize where they're at, and I say, hey, this is all really nice stuff and a little bit on the higher end of what I have out in the showcases. I don't want to waste your time. Before we get any further with this, do you typically have a percentage that you're trying to land at? You say it even a little more forward. Are you looking for 85%? Because I'm not your guy. I'll say, do you have a percentage you're trying to land at? Just to give them another opportunity to be in the driver's seat of that conversation. Depending on their answer, if they say 85, I'd say, oh, it's going to have to be something with a lot of data to get there. It's going to have to have a lot of comps, or it's going to have to be something pretty liquid for me to get there, but let's take a look. I don't completely shut it out, but if you're like, oh yeah, I'm not giving these away, and all you said was what's your percentage, you're going to waste your time. As a dealer and for you as a seller, there's nothing worse than having time wasted. A couple little quick ones that I don't want to get too deep into as somebody walking a show and selling. If you're walking a show and selling, don't monopolize the entire table and spread your stuff out all over the showcases for half an hour so that potential buyers can't come and see what's there to buy. That crushed me over the weekend. It really can hurt the dealer. What we mean by that is quite literally covering up two or three showcases with stuff. With you and your four friends that are all around, none of you are wanting to buy anything at all. You just want to sell us stuff, and that's okay, but be cognizant and respectful of the fact that we're actually there primarily to sell things. Yes, we want to buy things, but we are primarily there to sell things, and if you're keeping other potential people from seeing the things we need to sell, that's not great. Last thing that I will say on that front of things, if you're selling something, have an idea of what you have and what you want. As a buyer, I can't buy and sell your cards for you. When I pull a few things out of your box and I say, hey, I'd be interested in these, do you have any idea what you're looking to get out of them? I try to feel that out. Have a rough idea. You don't have to have a dead number on it. Say you've comped these last night and they're worth 300 bucks. You might say, yeah, I was really kind of wanting to be around 250 or so on them. That gives me an idea to go, okay, you have a reasonable number in your head. I'm probably going to want to be a little bit under that. You actually probably want to be a little bit over that, but there's at least a conversation worth having. Know what you're looking at. If you're newer, the best thing you can do, if you're not sure, is to just be brutally honest. Hey, I'm kind of new to this. If you're interested in that card, I think this is where it is, but by all means, show me how you comp this. If it's a nice dealer, they're going to probably take a minute to kind of show you how they came up with the value, what software they're using, all that kind of stuff. It's okay to say, I don't know, but please, one of the things that we do is I started doing this whenever somebody hands me a case because everybody's got the little Zion cases or two or three row cases and I just say, hey, is there anything in here you don't want me to look at? Is there anything in here that's not for sale? That gives me an idea if they're actually detached from this or if there's an emotional attachment to certain cards or the collection. When they're like, there may be some in there, I'll be like, okay, well I'm going to go through these and try to buy them and I sure don't want to go through all these and then all the good ones are the same ones you want to keep. I had three transactions over the weekend where I had that conversation. They said, no, everything's for sale. Then we get down to the wire. They go through the value. I had to ask them, so based off of these last three, if we try to average it out, what do you think the value is? Especially somebody that's new to this to show them how to do that because that's a great tool to learn and because we want to teach and be a value to all of you collectors getting started. They would say the number and I said, I would agree. Here's the percentage that would typically pay on that. They'd say, oh, that seems fair. I said, okay. I owe you 85 bucks on this card. Okay. Sounds good. Actually, I think I want to hang on to it. I kind of like it. It happened three times over the weekend and I was like 20 minutes into talking and explaining and all that, so just be mindful. If you're not really ready to sell it, there's nothing wrong with that. We are happy for you keeping your collection, but just maybe split them out. Like if you have two rows and one's for sale and one's not, put a divider in and stuff to stay away from. Tell the dealer, hey, you keep grabbing cards. I already told you that I'm not selling. Be forward with them. Yes, there's definitely pushy dealers out there. They're going to try to talk to you like all of your cards suck. You should just let me buy them for nothing. Get them out from underneath you. You hate them. Just be forward. Be honest. Be consistent through that. Yep. For sure. All right. Next, when you are going to a show and you're primarily there to buy, I'm going to just hit a few things that as a dealer, I like to see when somebody's trying to buy from me and it makes the transaction smoother for me. I'm usually much more generous to the buyer and everybody walks away happy. First and foremost, recognize that you're buying from somebody who likely knows what they're doing. Come into it with a mutual level of respect. Secondly, if you wouldn't sell me your cards at 80%, don't offer me 80% for my cards. Right? It's a mutual thing. There's a gentleman that also runs on Whatnot. He buys stuff from Jason and I all the time. Really good Whatnot seller. The flip side of that is he sells us nice stuff at really good prices too. The last Pittsburgh show, he sold me multiple Patrick Mahomes rookies at like 70%, which is unheard of. When he walked up this week at Pittsburgh and pulled $460, $450 worth of stuff out of my value boxes, I gave it to him for $330, $340. Scratch each other's back, everybody wins. But if you wouldn't sell me your cards at 80%, why would I sell you my cards at 80%? If a card is in my showcase, chances are I paid close to my max for the card. So me turning around and selling it to you for what I paid for it certainly doesn't make a lot of sense. You can also get better deals from dealers if you will bundle a few things together because some cards we have a little bit more room on than others. Not everything is set in stone. So you can bundle things together and do that. Another one that is a huge pet peeve to me and will make me shut you down fast is if you go through my value boxes and you are like a feral animal with them, just slapping stuff back wherever you can, bending the boxes, dumping cards upside down. You just don't care at all. I'm not going to care at all when you ask me for a deal. I feel like this is becoming the don't piss off dealer segment, which is not what I'm... No, not at all. But if you want to, do you get better deals from somebody you've pissed off or from somebody that you haven't? Yeah, no, I hear you. So a couple of tactical things I would say with buying. When you see a card you like, the question I get a lot that just doesn't get you anywhere as a buyer is when you say, what's your lowest or what's your... The one I really don't like is what's your real number? That implies like, to me, that sounds like you're implying that I lack integrity with my pricing. To which every single time I'm going to say, well, I've got a sticker on it. I mean, that's what I think I'd like to sell it for. Are you wanting to make an offer? So now, what's happened? By you doing it this way, you've created a tug of war. There's a sales dynamic called power struggles. So if any of you work in sales, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Once you've created an environment where it's me against you, not us working towards this thing together, it subconsciously creates this area between us. It's a win-lose, right? Yep. A good negotiation probably ends with both of us being as uncomfortable as possible, but still agreeing this is the right spot for us to land. So if you're buying and you see a card, but you don't like the number, maybe you've comped it there at the table, I would say it like this, hey, I love this card, and maybe say something you like about it, right? Don't do this if you're doing a big stack, but why do you like the card, right? And I'm just curious, are you open to offers? Just open to offers. Just open. Because if somebody's a jerk or somebody's in a bad mood or somebody's firm, you're going to find out right away and you don't waste any more time and you've been nothing but gracious the whole time. Yep. And that's better for you. If they say they're open to offers, then make your offer. If you offer 50%, expect a 50% response. If you offer 70, 75%, realize that you're asking for probably close to what most dealers have purchased the card for. Right. And you can even say, I'm not sure what you're in it for. I like the card. Maybe it's a player that's been down a little bit this year. And so I know that that card was this or that a year ago, but I'm just wondering, would you accept this? And if they don't counter with anything, just say, okay, thanks. Sometimes walking away is the best thing. Maybe you're okay jumping up and be like, one more attempt at this, but it's important on the front end that you start with that. I wouldn't recommend with what's your best. Yeah, it's terrible. It's just kind of a waste time. It's implying that we didn't comp our cards. It's lazy negotiating too. It's the assumption that the dealer is immediately going to cut their own throat. You know what I mean? Well, I had a dealer at the show that was really interested in the playoff contenders Erlacher with the autograph. And it's a card that it's a PSA eight. There's comps as low as 100 in the last 10 years. Are there ever more than one available at any given time? No, when I comp this card, was one available at $600. Is that a $600 card? No. Okay. I think I have it listed a little over 200. That's a little aggressive. I'll negotiate with it, but it's just, it's freaking 2000 contenders auto. It's the set, right? It's Erlacher. It's not nobody. Well, this dealer asks what I have on it. I explain I'm open to offers before he even starts comping. I say, now the comps are going to be all over the place. Well, he's like a 20 something kid and he just starts talking crap about the card. Like knocking on the card or he went, there was one low comp. The lowest comp was just under a hundred dollars. And I don't know if it was in the last year or 10 years, but there's not that many sales of this card. He just kept going, going, going, going and finally I was like, I guess just don't buy it is what I said. End of the day, go find another one. But once that dynamic is created where it's one of us have to win and we're both pushing at each other, the odds of you both landing somewhere are really slim. So don't create that dynamic. You as a buyer, by being polite, by asking for permission to make an offer, even though that seems like you should be able to do that regardless, it may position you in a better place to buy. The other thing I would say is, hey, if I put a little stack together, so make sure you see some stuff you like, not just blindly walking up to a table, but hey, I see a few things I like here. If I bundle them together, are you able to work with me on price a little bit? You're just trying to cage the temperature of the deal more than anything. Another thing when you're going to a show to buy, because I see people leave shows sometimes either with full boxes, but their heads are down a little bit or empty boxes and their heads down a little bit. Go in with a budget. It's really easy to overspend in this hobby and put yourself in a bad spot. Most of you are functional adults who don't struggle with that, but there are plenty of people in this hobby who are probably financially not in a place where they should be going and spending $2,000 at a card show on a Saturday afternoon. I would say most people aren't. Yeah, and they're chasing something to land somewhere. Give yourself a budget, make a list of some of the things you're looking for. If you're a collector, sometimes you're not going as a collector, sometimes you're going as a flipper. That's cool, nothing wrong with that, and you're going to buy anything that makes sense that you think you can resell. Congratulations, that's awesome. But if you're a collector, have a rough idea of what you're going to look for. We have people come up to the table all the time, do you have this, this, or this specifically? As a dealer, I love that question, because if I have it, I can go, yes, it's right here, or I can go, hey man, I'm sorry, I don't want to waste your time. Remember the Jose Ramirez guy? Oh, yeah. There was an older gentleman, Jose Ramirez, PC, super collector. He had a booming voice, table by table, Jose Ramirez autographs? No. Basically, he would say, okay, but it was almost like, screw you, next one, Jose Ramirez autograph? No, okay. He'd made a lot. He knew within an hour if anyone in 700 tables had what he was looking for. Yes. That's kind of cool. Yeah, so have a plan. Have a plan. I think it's important, one final thing I would note about this. I think we ran into a lot of this, people that were newer into the hobby, that had seen videos of people going to a show and starting with a card, taking in some stuff they have, and flipping it up to a $1,000 card, thinking that that's just all that it takes. That you don't need a depth of market knowledge to be able to do it. You don't need the resources to be able to comp different platforms. You don't need to understand what aggregates are respected by dealers. You don't need to understand why a comp from three years ago is much lower now, and you're still trying to get that comp from three years ago. This is a complex, nerdy hobby. Yep. There's a lot of variables. There's a lot of math in it. I'm still learning, three years into dealing cards, what will and won't move. Glad you said cards. Yeah. I'm still learning all that. There are still bad buys that I make. There are still bad buys that Gary makes. Yeah, and I've been doing this for a long time. We just acknowledge it, and over time, you're going to shrink those margins down a little bit, but it's always going to happen a little bit because sports cards represent the performance of humans. Yes. It just is what it is. Take some time. Don't shoot yourself in the foot selling everything off. Have a game plan going into it. We probably need to hustle through this. I'll tell you what. If any of the stuff we've talked about has tickled your ears, if you have questions about stuff like this, hit us with those, and we'll maybe touch base on a few other things in this subject into the next coming weeks. We've had a real long weekend, so this might not be our longest episode ever. Low end liquid. Yeah. We're hustling through this one. I'm still coming off of that backyard brakes rant. A little aggressive, but we got there. You encouraged that. I did. I loved every second of it. All right. Low end liquid. This is kind of a weird one for me because I typically stay away from this stuff, but this particular purchase was I bought, I think it was 30 to 50,000 cards, almost all low end, but there was a lot of football rookies that I liked and weird sets from the early 2000s in football, which tends to do well for me. There's a little teaser before the teaser, right? There was a hockey box. I'm going to be the first one to tell you. I don't know hockey. We bought a bunch of hockey this weekend. We did. We bought some cool hockey stuff this weekend for whatnot, but I do understand some basic principles of low end liquid. There were several newer sets that I spent some time comping out and I was like, I don't know if it's worth listing this stuff. Then I stumbled onto this. This is 2006, 2007 Parker's hockey. Then you have images. It's just basically the greats from days gone by. Some of these are black and white photos. I love the old school goalie gear. That stuff's terrifying to me. It looks like it hurts to play a goalie. But these have actually been a pretty liquid set for me. I want to explain why. And hopefully for those of you that are doing high volume low end, it will help you make some more educated guesses. So one thing that I've learned across the major three sports is there are low end sets that focus on all time greats that are priced at a lower price point. A great example of this would be the Fleer greats sets. The Fleer greats sets, baseball and football have hall of famers, superstars. They have a vintage stock feel to them. What they are though is a PC person's favorite type of low end card to collect. Absolutely. Literally calling them iconic, a superstar and you're in it for two to three bucks. So this Parker set has tons of the superstars. It has commentators, broadcasters from hockey and it's sold pretty well for me over the years. The factors that I'm looking for, does it have a lot of stars? Am I getting it in bulk and cheap? And then take a chance on it. I think I've listed a few hundred of these. I would guess that I've sold through 30% already. They've probably only been up for a couple months. So Parker's hockey 06, 07 has been an okay low end liquid card for me. Cool. There we go. Low end liquid for this week. Last but not least this week, as we've been going through the baseball season, we'll keep going. The lookout last week was a fun one. This week is one that I think is going to be another really quick call up. That is Colby Thomas from the Sacramento slash Las Vegas slash Oakland athletics. We don't know where they play, but it's in a minor league stadium somewhere right now. Colby Thomas was a third round pick in 2022. He's now 24 years old. He's in AAA and he has just been a really solid hitter ever since he got drafted. There was talk that he might get the call at the end of last year. He did not. And then this year they brought Nick Kurtz up first. And Kurtz has held his own since he got called up. But Colby Thomas so far this year, let me give you the slash line. It's 296, 364, 504. So he's got an 868 OPS. He's hit five home runs. He hit 31 home runs last year. The batting average is up a little bit so far this year. Power output's down a little bit. But here's the key with Colby Thomas. That stat line I just read you is within about 15 percentage points of every single stop he's made in his career. That level of consistency is something that big league squads look for. And the A's have not gotten the production that they would really like to have out of their outfield so far this year. It would not be in any way, shape, or form a shock to me if Colby Thomas got that call relatively soon. He is in 2023 Bowman. Bowman baseball. 2023 is his first Bowman. He has autos, color, obviously paper, all that type of stuff. Power swing, but not a pure power hitter. He goes oppo a decent amount. He does strike out a good bit. He's a career 27% K guy. So there's going to be swing and miss. But he's also going to hit for power. I mean his ISO for his career is like 218, 220. Anything over 200 is a strong power bat. If you don't know what ISO is, it's just isolated power average. So what's his batting average on things that are doubles or better? That's what that means. And anytime it's over 200, it's a positive, positive number. Keep an eye out for Colby Thomas. His stuff is still very, very affordable. Again, I don't think he's going to be a guy who's a rookie of the year contender, but a lot like a guy we talked about a few weeks ago, Tim Elko, when he does get the call, there might be a nice little week or two window where you could double or triple a small, small dollar amount. Like it. Yeah. Hey, don't forget tonight, seven o'clock, every Thursday night at seven o'clock, we'll be live on WhatNot at the Ball Card Show. All one word. Buyer's givies, brand new inventory. We bought several boxes of stuff for WhatNot to introduce tonight. Join us there. Like and subscribe. Thank you so much for your continued support. Let us know what you'd like to hear us talk about in the future. This has been the Ball Card Show, The Esports Podcast. For The Esports Collector. Bye now. Peace.