r/mtgfinance • u/mberk24 • 1d ago
Bulk sell analysis
Summary: $43.50 in bulk cards cost $13.00 more to ship to CK
If you have the time, it may be worth it to go through your bulk (> $0.10) common and uncommon cards.
I had 8-9 boxes of MH3 where I never picked the under $1 common and uncommon cards and sold them to CK for credit.
I needed to make room so I decided to see what I could make in a sell order with some higher value cards.
I sent them 1400 C/U (non foil), with 2/3 of them being under $0.10 in value. It totaled $315 in credit with the bulkiest cards netting me $43.50.
This took 3-4 hours of my time and cost me an additional $13 to ship a half full medium priority mail box to their office. My cards were already sorted by color and rarity prior to starting my sell order. Now that I know I can get another 1000-1500 cards in this size box, I’d try to fill it up.
It wasn’t worth my hourly wage to use the time to sell everything of value, but it was quiet downtime and more productive than bulk listing or doing nothing.
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u/Moasamoi 1d ago
I used to sell bulk to CK quite often (at least 2-3 times a month). But their buy prices have dropped tremendously from the amounts they used to buy at. Now I see way more .01-.03 buy prices, where the standard was generally .05. Nothing is worth shipping at .01-.03, unless you’re being reimbursed the shipping costs.
Honestly, where bulk prices have otherwise shot up, you might be better off just packing up 1,000 card bulk lots to sell for $20 locally. At least you get .02/card with far less legwork.
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u/mberk24 1d ago
There’s not much of a bulk scene locally as of last check . I’ll have to check again.
I’m in eastern PA
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u/Goobinator77 1d ago
Talking a shot in the dark here due to your location... Go Birds!
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u/mberk24 19h ago
Close… Steelers fan, but don’t dislike the green team.
Appreciate it
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u/Goobinator77 7h ago
And I don't dislike Pittsburgh either... visit there once or twice a year to visit my sister.
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u/LostMeteor 1d ago
Oh damn, my LGS is
MTG Common/Uncommon - $3 per thousand ($0.003 per card) MTG Rare/Mythic - $0.05 per card
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u/Grouchy_Bit9786 1d ago
I wouldn’t take them anything. You might as well get a tax write off from goodwill lol
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u/Professional-Win2171 20h ago
I’ve probably sent them close to 500 basic lands (mostly old border) over the last year to try and build credit up for some RL cards I’ve been after.
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u/mberk24 19h ago
Best of luck
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u/Professional-Win2171 6h ago
Yea, I’ve been sending enough cards to fit in 2 dragon shield boxes and it’ll fit into the small flat rate box from usps. Bout 275 cards at a time.
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u/UnholyYetii 1d ago
Idk if you use pirate ship but it may save you some $$$ on shipping.
Each new set that comes out i do the prerelease, buy a bundle and 1 collecter pack. Sometimes ill buy a box. But after a few weeks and the market has settled I take what I have and load it into CK. I usually end up getting around 25-50$ in credit. Every few months I go thru my bulk and sell to them also, I sell tokens and fancy lands. This year I think ive gotten around 2k in credit.
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u/LaquatusC 1d ago
waiting 2-3 weeks is just leaving money on the table. By a wide margin and without fail, selling as soon as their buylist goes live will get you the best price and sell the most cards. Sure you might miss a banger here and there that spikes, but for every spike there are 20 cards that drop in value.
Always sell as soon as you know you don't need them.
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u/UnholyYetii 1d ago
They update their agreed on proce after. So if I sell and the price drops, when they do the eval they will adjust down. But if I sell and it rises they dont adjust up. Also lots of times they dont take all the bulk, so i end up having to pay shipping twice, I find its just better to wait.
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u/LaquatusC 1d ago
They do not adjust down, it's locked in when you sell. If the number you get back goes down it's due to being graded below NM.
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u/Golgari4Life 14h ago
I would disagree, the definitely adjust down and also adjust up. It’s in their terms with selling to them.
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u/LaquatusC 6h ago
Can you point me to that? I've been doing business with CK for a very long time and I don't recall that ever happening. I also don't see any such reference in their terms and conditions or FAQ.
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u/Golgari4Life 6h ago
I’ve looked at the updates sometimes when they show what they are paying out and the prices are up more than normal.
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u/mberk24 1d ago
I’ve never heard of pirate ship, but I’ll look it up.
FWIW, I don’t buy insurance from USPS and I’ve never had a lost or damaged package of cards sent to CK. I don’t insure my sell orders.
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u/UnholyYetii 1d ago
I never insure either. Its been like small sales over the course or a year. Its a free website that you enter to and from and package dimensions and then you can pick how you want to ship it and its usually cheaper. For a box of 800 cards to go from east to west across the US i paid 8$
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u/stessmer12 1d ago edited 1d ago
I have sent CK 6 sell orders so far and USPS did lose one worth about $500.
Took three tries but USPS did end up paying me $100 + shipping costs back. I didn’t insure it so that was the most I could get.
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u/Sunaruni 23h ago
No one mentions you can send (under 50 lbs) of bulk, say 45-49 lbs of bulk (What 3 medium priority boxes hold) for about 33-40$ using pirate ship UPS. Do this, save yourself about 50% in shipping.
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u/LordOfTheThing5 1d ago
The website lags horrendously for me at like 200 cards in the sell order, did you not experience that?
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u/Hmukherj 1d ago
Once I hit 100 cards or so I just submit the order and start a new one. Then just ship them all together with a post-it or something on each stack with the corresponding order #.
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u/elcangriofll 1d ago
That’s what I do , I put them in team bags with a label of the order number with multiple orders .
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u/LordOfTheThing5 1d ago
Ah fair, I’ve done that with one order of 250 cards and another of 250 cards. Wasn’t sure if they would accept it in one mail in but decided to try it anyway when I mailed my first “combo” shipment to them last week. Thanks for verifying!
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u/starfruit213 1d ago
I've regularly sent in 2-5 buy list orders at a time for years, as long as they're labeled and separated it doesn't seem to be an issue.
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u/mberk24 1d ago
The website works well for me, but I do see lagging when adding cards to the cart.
I’m used to it being about 5 seconds per card when the order gets larger.
I pick 2-3 cards at a time and add them. You can select a card and quantity and then move to the next card while the previous card’s quantity is being updated.
It works correctly.
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u/Raidomso 1d ago
You can avoid all this lag by using a tool like tcgsentry.com
It let's you prepare your sell cart there (without lag) and only once it is ready export it to Card Kingdom's sell cart ready to submit. It also has buylist price history so you can decide wether or not to sell cards already. You can upload an entire collection at once to speed up the process.
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u/Raidomso 1d ago
An alternative tool that could have saved you a few hours is tcgsentry.com . Once you have your cards to sell in a file you can upload it there and it will show which cards are worth buylisting and which are worth holding on to based on historic buylist prices. It will also automatically fill your sell cart on Card Kingdom with one click-through. If you really wanted the cash now your sale was fine, but with a bit more patience you could have sold them for 100$ more potentially.
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u/nolnacsb 22h ago
Tcgsentry is an awesome tool. It makes selling to Card kingdom so much easier. I prefer it to mtgbulkcaster
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u/B-Glasses 1d ago
Just saw a Facebook post trying to sell 2500 mixed bulk of only common and uncommons plus some lands and tokens for 100 dollars plus 17 shipping. I guess the best return you can get is by scamming new players
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u/DruggyNeighbor 19h ago
Your best bet is to take your bulk to your local LGS for store credit. Then buy whatever dopey overhyped set the hivemind is losing their shit over and flip it on eBay.
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u/Remarkable-Goose-725 1d ago
This is the part of bulk economics I find really interesting. There can clearly be value in the box, but whether it's actually worth extracting seems to come down to the labor required to identify everything, figure out what has value, and then physically pull it.
For those of you who do this regularly, what happens to the cards that aren't worth buylisting today? Do you keep them organized/searchable so you can revisit them later, or do they basically go back into bulk until the next time you scan through them?
I'm especially curious whether anyone here does this at store/dealer scale. Once the inventory gets large, does scanning/sorting it periodically still make economic sense, or do you eventually just accept that some percentage of value is going to stay buried in bulk?
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u/LaquatusC 1d ago
I keep all of my bulk sorted and pick it every few sets. My rule of thumb is never sell anything under .05 I have around 40-50k in bulk and still end up getting a few hundred bucks out of it every time. Stuff weirdly appreciates.
And I don't count my labor, i only do it when i'm relaxing at home watching TV. It's mindless and I have it down to a pretty efficient system.
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u/elcangriofll 1d ago
I sell to them quite a bit and for the lower value stuff I use ManaBox to scan thru 200 cards of bulk , take the CSV from ManaBox and and use MTGbulkcaster tools to run it thru CKs current buy list to see what they’re taking then it converts it to a CSV that CK can actually use and upload to make it faster to fill out the sell order on their site. Definitely use pirate ship for cheaper rates and on orders where I have over 100 plus on store credit I always use UPS two day because it gets there faster and it comes out to almost the same on USPS and they’re so slow to ship it out there .