Thank you for your input and insight Mr. Ben!

Hey Mary!

I have sold to just about every country in the world at some point or another, so long as it is not currently sanctioned by government figures. Ebay’s Global Shipping Program takes care of everything automatically — all you have to do is ship to their international shipping center and they’ll take care of collecting taxes, duties, VAT, and anything else that needs to be collected. Easy peasy!

– Ben

The buyer’s premium + shipping fees can be a bit steep, but where their auctions get fewer impressions than other enormous markets (like eBay), there is a good opportunity to snag deals from time to time.

They’re very established, so no sweating that — like trading stocks, set a stop loss (or in this case, upper limit) for what price you want to buy at and don’t go over it. I’ll favorite dozens of items in each of their weekly auctions, and will generally snag a few underpriced items and miss out on some others. Sometimes I’ll keep an item for my personal collection, others I’ll just flip the item on eBay/Facebook groups to lock in a profit.

Hey Craig!

As you alluded, grading cards, at least for the foreseeable future, is likely to add a premium over raw for virtually any modern or vintage card. (It may not always be this way, but will it take the market shifting dramatically for that to change).

And like you also alluded, the 4 companies that you named by and large garner the highest premium over, say, some of the smaller, less established companies. While there will always be anomalies, generally speaking, PSA will hold the highest resale value on the market. This is followed by CGC and BGS with very similar values, followed by SGC (at least for Pokemon, not sports).

If you’re going to be a volume submitter, PSA is probably going to be the way to go — the $100 membership fee + tiers between $15 (with specials) to $40 for the bulk stuff are going to be hard to beat. PSA can just get more volume done than any other company, for a reasonable (even if it is slightly higher) price and the highest resale value.

If you anticipate being a low-volume submitter, go with the case that you like best.

My personal criteria are a bit nuanced, but where the pricing has become similar across the board, you can go wrong with just about any of them.

If I feel a card has a shot at a BGS 10/BL 10, I’ll go BGS.
If I feel it won’t get either, I’ll go PSA as it’s a little easier to hit one.
If I feel PSA will give a card a 9, but BGS may give it a 9.5, I’ll send it there.
If I feel a card will grade 8-9, I’ll go PSA.
Anything lower and I go BGS because they’re generally easier on the mid-tier condition cards.
I’ll occasionally go CGC for the above category if they have some sort of good special.

I don’t have a post written on the site for this in particular, these are just my two cents,

I found your article very informative and a great read. I’d like to get your opinion on the grading services (PSA, BGS, CGC, SGC, etc.) that are out there right now and they compare when it comes to getting the best monetary return. I’ve done my due diligence and much like everyone else, have found that PSA is the way to go.

However, they seem to have become overpriced and are lacking in what should be a better grade than offered. I’ve been finding BGS to be very good so far, but finding a lot more other grading services getting a better turnaround on profits much like PSA, but without the overpricing for cards. Bottom line, is there an article that I can read here in regard to trading card grading services? While I know that everyone has a preference would be greatly appreciated to get others’ input.

That’s tough. I don’t know of one personally and can imagine that anything more detailed than Excel would actually be more time-consuming (purely because entering even more details would require intricate fields/drop-down boxes that take even more time to leverage).

(I’ve yet to find anything better in the last year or so even since I wrote this article, so if it exists, and you find it, let me know, hah).

Thanks for reading!

Ben