Card Collector Universe

You’re looking to sell baseball cards, huh?  Want to make some money from your baseball cards or your whole collection? Well, where are you going to do it?   

These days you have a few places where you can actually sell your cards online.  eBay is of course one of the most ubiquitous locations for baseball cards to be sold.  At any one time you’ll find thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of cards for sale. 

Another very popular online auction site with collectors is www.naxcom.com.   NAXCOM (don’t ask me where the name came from!) has been gaining ground over the years as a premier auction site.  They currently have over 200,000 registered users, with almost ten million user listings!  One of the cool things about NAXCOM is that there are no listing fees associated. 

In 2007, Naxcom launched another site, www.naxcomauctions.com (or auction.naxcom.com).  The risk of no-payment or no-shipment seems to be lower with NAXCOM.  As they state on their site, “The main attribute from NAXCOMAuctions will be the exclusive Buyer/Seller Protection with the winning bidders payment made directly to NAXCOM, rather than paying the seller directly. With other auction sites struggling with fraud, it is this unique Buyer/Seller protection that will make NAXCOMAuctions the safest venue for buyers and sellers.”

At one point, there was competition for both eBay and NAXCOM, in the form of www.thepit.com.  The Pit was owned by Topps, and had a real cool design in black and yellow colors, reminiscent of the Pirates.  (Association?)  Well, NAXCOM bought The Pit.  So…..The Pit still exists, but it is now owned by NAXCOM and in direct competition with eBay.  In my opinion, The Pit had one of the cooler website designs in the industry, although it has changed a bit. 

If you’re looking to sell more than one or two cards at a time, you can also sell your cards through www.beckett.com, the site affiliated with the popular Beckett card collecting magazines.  If you go to Beckett’s site, and mouse over the collecting tools header, you will see the “sell your collection” drop-down menu item.  Click on that, and it will take you to a list of dealers who may be willing to purchase some or all of your collection.  The caution here is that you will probably not get top market value for you cards.  The large dealers are in business for a reason, and if you’re just looking to unload your cards for some cash, they may be a place to start.  However, if you’re looking for top-dollar, and you have some quality cards, you’d be better off auctioning the cards online.

Those are really your top online options.  Now, if you are dealing in high-end, high-priced (usually old) cards, then that is a different story.  You may do better with an auction house.  We’ll save that for another post though. 

If you’re just starting out, take a look at those sites (you’re probably familiar with eBay already,) and see which one might suit your needs.  In an upcoming post, we’ll talk about some of the basic details of selling baseball cards online. 

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