Buy/Sell/Trade Forum

Hello TCDb forums!

I'm a new baseball card collector with a small collection (especially compared to some of you veteran collectors) with not very many cards that I'm willing to part with yet. I was wondering if there were any suggestions folks had for how to get into trading when you don't have a lot of cards to trade. I'm buying more cards, of course, but mostly just to fill my collection without much interest in then trading any of them. I'm very willing to buy cards that people have for sale, but there's something about trading that you don't get with buying/selling. Any advice is welcome!

Hi,

You could buy a card lot with different Baseball cards. Keep some of them and use the other cards as trade-bait to get cards you want. You could buy packs of new cards or boxes and keep what you like and trade rest. 

You need to expand you list of wants and list of sale/trades.

Right now for me it's HOME 1 VISITORS 0.

But in looking at your collection you have lots of sets in need of cards but show very few wants.

DM me your address and I 'll work you up a PIF. 

A few years ago, I was in a similar situation as you; new on the site, most of my collection entered, some basic needs/wants identified, etc. I realized also that I needed to have some skin in the game, something worth offering in exchange for my wants. So you start with what you have.

Easy #1a: Check your collection for duplicate cards. Do you need more than one of any of these? (Some, sure! All, probably not.) Sort through and pull out duplicates as traders.

Easy #1b: One of the tools in each collection is an option to "Move all duplicates to For Sale/Trade list." This both helps you find the dups by highlighting them. Then you can go through and pull them, or at least drop them in a penny sleeve for later. Then if it's a card you really need more than copy, you can move the individual card back to the collection. (Don't worry that you have 2 or 3 stacks of the same card in your collection, there's also a function to bundle cards back into a single stack.)

Easy #2: Check your collection for cards or sets that seemed a good idea at the time but now aren't interesting or realistic.

Easy #3: Buy the occasional repack box from stores. Whether it's a couple random packs or a mixed box of cards, repacks are a pretty economical way to pick up trade fodder from different eras. Truthfully, there's a lot of the junk wax era and an increasing amount of current era. But I've picked up a bunch of traders from these boxes, particularly oddball cards and things that I'd never pick up on my own (read Bowman anything).

My hardest decision was putting a bunch of my vintage cards on trade, but I could also see that they were in demand and could be used to fill my own vintage and other goals.

The other tip I have is to take the time to view people's profiles and get a feel for different people's trading approaches. For instance, some will trade only the same era for the same era; others may be more flexible. Aside from helping you determine the right approach for trades, you'll get an idea for how you can make trading work for both parties.

Best of luck!

I did some searching on eBay and found some promising lots— do you have any suggestions for how to best find good lots and make sure I'm getting a good deal for the amount I'm paying?

My way of collecting and eventually trading is to go for sets I like. If there are any particularly newer sets within the past few years you should be able to pickup boxes online for a decent price.  Then put all the dupes you don’t want for trade towards the cards you want to fill holes in your sets. There are a good amount of set and player collectors who may want to trade with you.

As for trading, your FS/T list doesn't have to be comprised of just duplicates, but also any card you don't want. One thing I do often is I list a card on ebay and if it doesn't sell after a while, I list it on my trade list here. There are quite a few different strategies of trading and buying- that's the beauty of it!

All it takes is one generous member to start that first trade with you and once you get that "100% positive feedback" mark to your name, that opens the door for MANY members to want to trade with you. I promise you that this is the best trading card website and community out there. 

Oh yeah - welcome to the database!

I'm not sure if there are in card shows in your area in the near future, but that's where I picked up the bulk of the items on my trade list.  I worked with a couple of dealers who had a bunch of base cards they wanted to move and bought a couple of 5000 count boxes of base cards from the last five years.  It was a mix of Topps, Bowman, Heritage and other base cards they had from opening packs or items they acquired in collection buyouts that wasn't really worth their time to sort and set out for card shows. I organized them and then loaded them into my For Sale Trade inventory.  It got me started until I started. If you don't have a card show near you, you might look on FB marketplace in your area to see if there are any smaller lots of cards you can start with.  Watch the condition of the cards as you organize them...there is nothing worse than pulling cards for a trade and finding that a card or two have condition issues...so weed those out as you go. 

This

What the heck, I sent a trade offer.