General Forum

I'm trying to figure out this Sportlots website, most things I search for say "No results found for search/criteria." Any advice on how to search for things?

Also, Any advice on selling on Sportlots in general? Seems like a better option for selling some cheaper cards than eBay. 

Sportlots is a great spot to pick up some cheap cards, but with the overhaul they just did to the website it's a little bumpy right now. Players or sets are the best ways to search (they haven't fully implemented the ability to search by team yet) but occasionally it'll drop your search and pull up nothing. They also don't always have a massive selection, so if you're searching for one card in particular there's a chance they won't have it listed.

Are you, as a seller, able to get a card listed?

I'm not personally a seller, so I cannot answer with all certainty. I can say from a buyers side that cards are only listed if at least one person on the site is selling it, and that I have seen cards that I have not seen previously each time I go to make a purchase.

Interesting. I'm curious to hear from someone who is a seller on Sportlots if you can list an item not yet there and how your experience was selling on there. 

I sold on Sportlots for about three years from 2016-18 or so.  I did pretty well some months.  Other months I worked my butt off for a minimal profit.  The key to doing well there is volume.  If you just have a couple of boxes of cards to sell, you probably won't do very well because monthly fees are based on sales.  The fewer sales you have, the higher percentage you have to pay.  If you sell less than $10 in a month, 75% of it goes to Sportlots.  The percentage goes way down as you get higher sales, but that's not a guarantee.  I had about 28,000 cards listed.  I had months where I had $300+ sales, but I also had months where I was barely breaking $25.  I never lost money, I stopped because I no longer enjoyed selling.  It is possible to do very well there though.

The best tip I can give you, other than listing A LOT of cards, is to set up your shipping costs where can become a blue or red discount seller.  More eyes will see your stock if you offer cheap box shipping.  There are no specifically laid out rules that I could find.  You just have to play around with shipping costs until it changes.  With the site change, this is even more important because it is now possible to only search blue sellers or red sellers. 

Oh not too thrilled about a monthly fee. Was just looking to list a few lower cost items here and there, wasn’t really going for volume which unfortunately sounds like the key to selling on there. Any recommendations for selling websites where you could still benefit from just selling a few lower cost items here and there? 

The fees are paying for the eyeballs. I've bought with success from Blowout Forums. You might have luck with some Facebook groups. Twitter/X is fine but you have to market yourself a lot, people will open B/S/T threads where you can post a picture. I have heard of people having luck selling small dollar lots on Reddit where there are of course no fees but I'd rather burn my collection than sell on that site.

As a seller on Sportlots I can concur with what Hiflew wrote that you need to have a lot of quantity on the site, I'd say minimum 25,000. The other option is to have stuff there that not a whole lot of other folks are selling.  So that means either more obscure inventory or something that has just been released.  I've had luck with the latter.  If you're one of the first listing 24 Topps Series 1, you'll make sales until everyone else starts listing the same product.  Eventually there will be hundreds of copies of each base card listed and by that time it's too late.

I have about 40,000 cards listed and my monthly net payout is anywhere from $50 to $150 a month after fees.  Certainly not a lot of money but it's a good way of getting rid of unwanted base cards and helps pay for more inventory.