General Forum

Medium or Large Prority boxes seem to be the common way to go..You can typically fit 2 or 3 thousand cards into them...

How "safe" the seller wants to pack the box varies though..

It's a crap shoot - Hit and Miss. But you can get lucky: or really lucky - like I did. When I first got back into the hobby, about 25 years ago, and had no clue what I was doing, I spent over 5k on the types of lots that you are refering to.  Probably got over a quarter million cards of junk.  But, and this is a big but, - out of that quarter million cards of junk - I received 3 cards that made me a small fortune.  A prestine 1954 Topps # 250 Ted Williams, a prestine 1958 Topps #62 Jim Brown Rookie card and the Diamond in the Rough - a 1911 T205 Gold Border Ty Cobb, that I thought for sure was a reprint.  After grading, these 3 cards netted me over 40k. Needless to say, I was back into the hobby,  Have never seen the Williams or Brown cards since - but about 4 years ago the Ty Cobb card sold on Heritage Auctions for over 120k.  Kept trying my luck and I,m now sitting on over a million cards that probably aren't worth the cardboard they're printed on.  It was fun while it lasted, but now it's just a head ache.  Be carefull, very careful.

I know a couple of guys that hit it big on their 1st big purchase.    They went wild on buying .  At one time they had over 2.5 million cards and do not know for sure what they really had.  They just went through and only looking for high dollar stuff.    The last time I talked to them they had about 1 million cards and was still in the hole about $5,000.00.   Even when they sold the high dollar stuff.  They wanted me to buy them as they were payiing storage fees.

All my bigger buys it has taken me a long time to make just a little money on them.    As far as my nephew's collection has done.   I'm way short of his value of $25K that he had noted they were worth.  Still 140,000 cards to go.  Way to many commons now.

The bigger lots I've purchased I picked up locally because I find that the shipping on large lots is often as expensive as the cards themselves.  Once in a while, you can find someone selling a massive box on eBay and you can tell they underprice the shipping.  Makes me feel a little bad that they are most likely losing money but I've been on the side of losing money once in a while too when I underestimated shipping costs.

Back in the day 1998-2000 - Before I knew what I was doing and purchasing huge lots on Ebay 90% of the quality cards I received - icluding the Ted Williams card and the Jim Brown rookie card (the Ty Cobbs a whole different story), came out of the same lot.  And it was a huge lot - Shipped UPS or FEDEX.  Came in 4 very heavy boxes. each box contained five maybe six 5,000 count boxes ( I still have most of them to this day).  The lot wasn't cheap - I paid exactly 950.00 for it.  800.00 plus 150.00 shipping.  This was before Ebay was adding sales tax.  The starting bid was 800.00.  I  bid 1000 and ended up being the only bidder.  It was listed on Ebay as "50 YEARS OF SPORTS TADING CARDS 1940's - 1990's HUGE LOT". It contained every sport imaginable, but 90% of it was late 80's and early 90's baseball and football.  I think ther was a handfull of very poor quality 1940's Boxing cards.  I thought I was getting a super deal on it because it was listed in the wrong catagory, the seller had mispelled the word TRADING (TADING) and the auction was ending on a week day at 3 in the morning.  The quality vintage cards that I did receive made it well worth the price.  This was just one of the many huge lots that I purchased - most of which amounted to next to nothing.  I still by huge lots today, but I always know exactly what I'm getting.  If anyone is interested; theres a seller on Ebay that I've purchased from several times - He goes by the tag "misterinvester" and always has several quality lots available.  His prices are very negotiable - I've gotten lots with best offers for better than half off the Buy It Now prices.

OK, wow, so just loose cards packed into the box? Are there tricks a seller can do to make sure they make the journey safely? I was thinking card boxes in a priority mail box, but you wouldn't be able to fit many cards that way. 

Correction to my previous thread - The Ebay sellers tag is "misterinvestor" not "misterinvester".

The four boxes i mentioned were safely packed with styrofoam pellets. Mostly raw cards in the 4 row shoebox type storage boxes (I think there 5,000 or 6,000 count).  Most of the quality vintage cards were in penny sleeves an top loaders.

Back around 1995 or so, I won an Ebay auction for 25,000 Topps baseball cards from the mid 70's through late 80's. The auction ended at $275.00 shipping included. The seller worked for Fedx or DHL. It was all good as the auction described. The cards were all in excellent condition or better. I knew it was all commons which was ok with me. I wanted to build sets card by card. There were a lot of duplicate cards which I used for trading. It took for ever to sort them all though.