How to best sell old collectables?
The 90’s were a really bad decade for collectibles. I currently have over 500 lbs of my husband’s 90’s baseball cards and collectibles stored at my house. They are worth pitifully little. We are saving them though. If peak oil hits, we might be able to burn them as fuel or build a hut out of them.
When I was in college I made my living working for a guy who sold stuff on eBay (seriously, it was like that store in 40 Year Old Virgin). We sold Beanie Babies in giant lots. There just wasn’t any money in it any other way. For every valuable Beanie there are 20 that sell for less than the cost of shipping. Also Beanies without tags or in less than excellent condition are essentially worthless. Pile ’em all up, take good pictures, list every single one in the ad, put the more valuable ones in the title, and hope you get lucky. Anyway, the great thing about eBay is that it’s easy to look up past auctions and see how they did. Take notes on what keywords worked best, what categories worked best, what style of pictures worked best, and just in general emulate the listings that worked best.
I’d echo what MegoSteve said. What you’ve got to ask yourself is, would your life be worse or better with those collectibles out of the way? I’d venture to guess your life would be better. So whatever you can get for the least amount of effort is worth it. Make sure you cover your shipping & handling costs in the auction, but other than that, just take a couple pictures of the lot of them and get them online! I did this once with my collection of Star Wars figures from the Phantom Menace movie. I found that by advertising the fact that I was liquidating the whole of my collection at no reserve price, and the auction actually did quite well. I didn’t take time to describe each figure or research prices or take detailed photos – I left it purposefully and overtly ambiguous. My assumption was that the casual or serious collector took me for a know-nothing chump just looking to dump his old toys, which kept driving the auction price up and up. “Surely,” they thought, “there are some real w
To be brutally honest, you may be better off either taking them and donating them to the Salvation Army or putting them out with your trash. The time it took you to think and type your question is probably worth more than the stuff you’re trying to sell. It’s disappointing, but such is the risk of manufactured fad collectibles… like pogs, baseball cards from the early 1990s, comic books from the mid-1990s, Avon bottles, Playmates Star Trek and Toy Biz Marvel action figures, and figural Jim Beam bottles. If you do decide to eBay them, just save yourself a lot of trouble and sell them in two big lots (Beanies in one, Hess trucks in the other).
Ebay as a market does a very good job finding the fair market value for items like this. It’s cheap, easy, and fast, and if you list your items accurately, items will sell for a reasonable market value. However, looking at the completed item listings (you have to sign up for ebay to see completed listings), the bottom has fallen clean out of the beanie baby and hess truck market; most aren’t even selling at all. You might be interested in This post from 2002. It’s safe to say that Beanie Babies haven’t appreciated since then. It looks like there are a very few beanie babies that still have value, but that most, including dark blue peanut, the rarest beanie baby back in the day, are now
