Flipping a $20 Baseball Card Purchase into a $200 Sale—Lessons In Comping for Profit
Not every flip is going to result in $100+ in profit, but sometimes one will. Here is how you can use comps to your advantage when scouting cards to buy and sell.
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This is not buying or investment advice. I’m simply reporting the data I’m seeing. Please do your own research and make your own decisions. Just because cards have increased in value up to this point, it doesn’t mean they will continue to do so.
I’m getting all of this data from the Market Movers platform. It’s not my platform, I’m simply a user and affiliate. If you want to do your own research, you can grab a free trial to Market Movers with code BALLCARDGENIUS. You’d also get 20% off of your membership forever if you wanted to continue once your trial has been completed.
Market Movers isn’t perfect; no tool is. I’ve seen instances where a graded card was being included in the raw numbers, which might cause a huge spike in value. So trust, but verify.
Not every flip is going to result in $100+ in profit, but sometimes one will.
I recently bought this Cal Ripken Jr. 2000 Fleer 3000 Club Game Worn Hat /55 for $20.75 shipped from, you guessed it, CollX.
Once I received, I threw it in the light box, snapped a few photos and listed it on eBay for $250. In less than a day I received an offer of $200, and accepted.
I netted $167.22 after fees, so when you subtract what I paid, the resulting profit is $146.67.
How do sneaky valuable cards like this fly under the radar?
1. Lack of Comps = Buyer Opportunity
I often hear people saying that comps are hard to find or that there are no comps.
For the buyer, that’s great!
That is, if you know how to research.
You don’t have to be an expert researcher—you just have to be better than the seller.
One of the best ways to get that leg up is to utilize eBay Product Research, where you can find up to 3 years of sales data—3 years! You can pretty much find any card you want in a 3-year window.
To access the free tool, on the eBay app, go to “Selling” and then under “Jump to…” select “Research. On a computer, go to “My eBay” and then “Selling.” Hover over “Research” and select “Product Research.”
Now, back to the Ripken.
If I were to search the “normal” 90-day completed sales filter on eBay - like everyone else does - I wouldn’t have found a comp for this card. I also didn’t see any for sale.
Most people might stop there, including the seller.
But if I were to take that extra step…
Here you see one sale in 2022 for $157.50 (BGS 9.5) and another in 2023 for $189.98 (Raw). $150-$200 makes a $20 price tag pretty enticing.
(Just as a side note, if this were a modern card and a current player, I’d be more concerned with how much the market has changed from the last sale in August 2023. But since this is a rare card of a HOF player, the market shouldn’t have changed much from then to now.)
2. Checklists Can Be Helpful
Second takeaway here…
The card I bought was listed as:
Obviously, that’s not the right card. This was a single Ripken memorabilia card, and not one featuring Bob Gibson and/or Dave Winfield.
Beyond that, though, the card was listed to be /100.
Now, I’ll be honest, I didn’t catch this when I was looking to buy the card, but if you were in tune with the 2000 Fleer checklist - or at least knew to Google it - you’d see the Ripken Hat card had a print run of /55.
From baseballcardpedia.com:
So, the scenario is, you (or other potential buyers) might have been searching for this card as “/100” and might not have had any luck. But, those who knew the single hat cards were actually /55 might have found the comps where others didn’t think they existed.
3. Related Cards Help When All Else Fails
Last, if you absolutely cannot find a comp for a card, try your best to find a comp for something similar. This includes searching for the:
Same player but a different print run
Different player on the same checklist
For example, as shown above, Ripken not only had the /55 hat card in this set, but also a Bat /265, Jersey /825, Bat/Jsy /100, and so on.
So, when comping, start specific with your queries and move to general.
Meaning, your search for this card might have started as something like “Cal Ripken 2000 Club 3000 Hat /55.” But, when that card wasn’t found, the next step is to check for the other versions.
Thus, a more general query would be something like “Cal Ripken 2000 Club 3000.” Starting with the current listings, I’d search this and then sort by highest price because this card exists as a base insert, and I’m not interested in those.
In doing that, I’d see:
So $300 for a Bat/Jsy /100 PSA 5? Not bad.
But it could be overpriced.
Next step is I’d check how many watchers the card has, and if it has more than 1, it usually gives me hope.
This example had 4 watchers. That bodes well.
From there I’d check the 90-day sold lists, again, with my general query. Unfortunately, nothing there, so let’s move on to the next step:
Different player on the same checklist
Meaning, if we can’t find a Ripken /55, who can we find?
Now, this doesn’t require going through the entire checklist searching from player to player. Instead, it usually suffices to simply search something like “club 3000 2000 fleer 55.” No player name is needed, but I am starting specific with that /55 since I know other players on the checklist have hat cards /55 as well.
Lo and behold:
Another positive signal.
Find & Flip!
Hopefully this all helps educate on just how valuable this particular set can be, along with how to correctly comp cards on your way to buying undervalued cards and repricing them at the “going rate.”