Why You Should Buy Hockey Cards on COMC for Value Boxes
If you are unfamiliar with COMC (Check Out My Cards), it is a sports and trading cards marketplace. However, COMC operates differently than traditional online marketplaces, like eBay, because to sell a card on COMC, the card must be in COMC’s possession at its warehouse. This lets buyers ship home one package of many purchased cards instead of paying shipping fees for each card they buy. Buying low end cards becomes more feasible on COMC than eBay since you can average out shipping fees across many cards. In essence, COMC is a vault.
With COMC’s uniqueness of being the only current vault to offer low end cards, opportunity lies for buyers, sellers, and flippers. One lucrative opportunity is hockey cards. Why? Upper Deck partnered with COMC when they launched e-Pack — an online platform to buy and trade Upper Deck products. When e-Pack users transfer cards to COMC, there is no consignment or insertion fees where, normally, sellers pay a minimum of $0.50 per card to consign with COMC.
Upper Deck e-Pack users’ instant access to products, combined with the fee-free COMC integration, means a huge supply of new hockey cards on COMC. So much so that tons of inserts sell for as little as two cents (turn on advanced selling mode)!
One of the best money-making opportunities in hockey cards on COMC is flipping Young Guns. Young Guns are considered NHL players’ true rookie card. Even low end Young Guns typically sell for $1–3 on eBay or at a card show. Though Young Guns are usually liquid, newer Upper Deck Series 1, 2, and Extended products have more liquidity for lower end Young Guns than older products.
Here is an example of a low end Young Gun you can flip:
Lets say you send 100 cards home from COMC. Here is a breakdown if you flip the Frederic Allard Young Guns card above:
If you sold on eBay, congratulations! You made a $0.01 profit! This analysis tells us flipping low end hockey Young Guns from COMC to eBay may not net any profit. However, variability of demand of different low end players’ Young Guns means there could still be opportunity to flip from COMC to eBay. To ensure a profit, you will have to recreate the above analysis using the steps above (and this eBay Fee Calculator).
As for card show sales, the flipping profit is great. Even if the low end Young Guns become stale inventory, you can almost certainly unload them at cost.
This isn’t a get rich quick strategy and the margins can be very thin, but you could make some extra money by adding low end, current Young Guns to your next COMC order.
