The Complete Guide to eBay Auctions: How To Win Profitable Cards

This post will also break down how to use the BCG Auctions Tracker.

This post is going to set a framework for winning profitable cards on eBay auctions. This will include a 5 step process for identifying potentially profitable cards, evaluating the condition of these cards, determining your Maximum Bids, and placing these bids to maximize your chances of winning.

It’s also going to double as an explanation of how to use the BCG Auctions Tracker, which is linked down below if you want to give it a try. Also note that this will be updated weekly, so I recommend bookmarking this page.

Note that we may receive compensation for completed purchases.

1. Create the Right Filter (BCG Auction Tracker)

There’s no one right way to create a good auctions filter, but the key is to take the hundreds of thousands of cards that are available for sale and consolidate them to about 1,000 listings that you actually are interested in. From there, you’ll find a handful of cards to bid on every day. You can read our Complete Guide to Ebay Filters here.

The first step to doing this is to set a minimum price threshold to clear out all the cards that are too low. For us, we only buy cards for about $75 or more. This alone will remove about 80% of cards.

The next step is to sort your results by “Ending Soonest + with bids”. The “with bids” is the key. For every card that gets bought on auction, there are 10 cards priced well above their market value that don’t get any bids. By only looking at cards with bids, you filter all of these out.

Finally, and this is optional, but if you’re doing market research and you know which players and Pokémon you’re looking for, you can search just for these cards. This is exactly what we do with the BCG Auction Tracker. By only selecting the cards we’re most interested in buying, we remove thousands of listings that we would have been unlikely to consider.

2. Prescreening for Interesting Cards

In the morning, I like to go through and glance through all the cards that are ending later in the day. I will look through the listings and look for cards with PSA 10 values and Gem Rates that are sufficiently high to be profitable (you can find our Complete Guide to Gem Rates and Multiples here).

I’ll also make sure that the condition of these cards is at least decent. This means just checking that all 4 corners are sharp and that the card is centered.

This is also a great time to ask the seller questions if you need to. In other words, if you need a closeup of a corner, or pictures of the card outside of the case, now is the time to ask.

Each of these cards goes onto my eBay watchlist before moving on to steps 3 and 4.

3. Determine Your Expected Gem Rate

In order to figure out what to pay for a card, you’ll first need to decide how likely it is to grade as a PSA 10 (we call this the Expected Gem Rate). This means after you’ve completed your prescreen, you’ll need to inspect each card more closely.

One of the keys here is to use the average Gem Rate of the card as an anchor. For example, if I’m looking at a card that has an average Gem Rate of 30%, I’m probably not going to assume the card I’m buying has a 70% chance of grading as a PSA 10.

I tend to keep my Expected Gem Rate estimate fairly close to the average, meaning that I usually won’t go more than 5-10% above or below the average. You can find the average Gem Rate at gemrate.com.

If you’re not sure how to evaluate the likelihood that a card will grade as a PSA 10, you can read our Complete Guide to PSA Grading here.

4. Calculating Your Maximum Bids

Once you have the Expected Gem Rate of your card, you can calculate your Maximum Bids. This is based on an Expected Value approach, so I highly recommend reading our Complete Guide to Expected Value now if you haven’t already.

Basically, at this point we input the following numbers into our spreadsheet: PSA 10 Value, PSA 9 Value, average Gem Rate, and Expected Gem Rate. From here we calculate the Expected Value After Fees of the card.

EV After Fees = PSA 10 Value x Expected Gem Rate + PSA 9 Value x (1 - Expected Gem Rate) - Selling Fees - Grading Costs

In other words, this is your average selling price net of fees of the card, based on how likely you think it is to grade as a PSA 10.

From here, we take this number and build in our margin. In other words, if we want to earn a $50 profit margin, our Maximum Bid is equal to the EV After Fees minus $50.

Maximum Bid = EV After Fees - Target Profit Margin

You can also try to earn a certain return on investment, instead of a specific dollar amount. In this case, the math looks like this.

Maximum Bid = EV After Fees / (1 + Target ROI)

In our case, we generally target about a $50 margin for cards under $200, and a 25% ROI for cards above $200. What you choose to target is totally up to you.

5. Place Your Bids

This is the easy part. Now that you have a list of cards you want to buy, and you know what you’re willing to pay, you need to place your bids.

There are two options for this. The first is to set it and forget it. Once you know your Maximum Bid, you can bid the card right then and there, and you’ll find out later if you won or lost.

The other option is to bid each card at the last second. You can set a timer on your phone and go back and make bids right as the auctions are expiring. Many people recommend doing this to have a stronger chance of winning, but for me I prefer the first option. It’s hard to say how much bidding at the last second actually helps you, but I do know that it takes a lot more time and planning, and as a result I don’t feel like the additional time is worth the benefit.

With this approach, you should be able to find profitable cards to buy on a daily basis.