Are eBay Sports Card Sales Down This Fall?

Are eBay sports card sales down this fall? It’s being talked about a lot. This is the second time in a month or so that I’m using a Junk Wax Heroes (no relation) tweet as a prompt.

Here’s another:

I feel like we go through this every October and November. Sales are dying! The hobby is dying!

The more likely culprit is timing. Baseball is over, big card shows are winding down, and people are spending on Christmas instead of cards.

JD, the person who posted that above, refutes that:

Another viewer, Tim, sent me six months of records from his eBay sales, back in October. It showed very solid sales May through July ($5,000+ each month), then $3,700 in August, and sales in September came to a screeching halt at $1,200. His records show more of a story: declining buyers (down 53%) and average sales price (down 25%).

Of course, these are still small sample sizes, and possibly still relatively seasonal.

I asked Chris Sewall, Baseball Card Collector Investor Dealer, and he agreed:

“I haven’t really noticed much of a decline. Maybe a small one over the last few weeks, although nothing I would call outside of the norm.”

I asked him if he meant typical fall declines, and he replied, “Looking at my sales, the last three weeks (this was in early November) are a little down, but not anything I would have noticed. It’s the kind of ‘down stretch’ that happens naturally maybe five times per year, just as a random ebb and flow.”

Chris continued: “I don’t have any data to back it up, but I feel like November is typically a down month, perhaps the fall in general.”

Interesting anecdotes, but we’d need more data to draw any real conclusions. Feel free to send me your thoughts via the comments section or replying via email.

COMC 40% Off Cyber Monday Sale!

After last week’s 20% off sale, I’m doing 40% off sale on my COMC store just for Cyber Monday. I have a pretty wide variety of cards on there, and at the time I priced them, almost all of them were priced at the lowest listed.

Go buy!

🗣️ YouTube Comment Of The Week

Dan’s Vintage Baseball PC and I had a video discussion about Geoff Wilson not knowing who MLB great Luis Tiant was. Wilson, in fact, thought his name was Lewis Taint. It’s funny!

There were a lot of good comments, but Scott’s was the best and most balanced:

🎬 Upcoming Videos

• Another Attic Find Friday

• #74-70 of my ACE 100 list

• Big mail day

📩 Upcoming Newsletters

• Topps and the worsening collation

• I am still trying to get a quote from Andy Broome about the newly-discovered T206 card. Some net54 users are convinced that it’s a fake, so I am editing the original article to highlight their concerns. CGC reportedly had layoffs recently, so I’m not holding my breath for a response but won’t stop trying.

• And more!

🎬 Channel Highlights From the Past Week

In addition to the aforementioned Geoff Wilson video, which got 5,000 views, I had a monster week. (And no, I’m not going to do more like that one. I like to talk about a variety of topics and I’m not going to chase short-term views by hating on Geoff.)

Great conversation with Matt From Providence:

A really fun Attic Find Friday:

My latest ACE 100 video:

And I used some of your poll responses and shared them in a video:

And all that led into a…

Record-Setting Month

I went into November with the same feeling I’ve had since the spring: put out four videos per week, don’t burn yourself out, you don’t need to chase 100,000 views. I hadn’t gotten that many in more than 18 months, since April, 2023. I had been averaging about 69,000 views a month since the spring.

But then this video happened:

It has 44,000 views after just 9 days, my 2nd-most ever, chasing down my #1 video, which has 47,000. It’s funny because when I published this video, I didn’t feel great about it. I have high standards for myself, and I thought I might be better off just not publishing it. Then I decided to just publish it, and it blew up.

I ended up with 106,000 views for November, now my most views in a month.

Pretty fun!

🎁 My Pickup Of The Week

Mail day sneak peek!

👻 Brief Horror Movie Review of the Week

This is a fun one.

I was in the mood for a ‘90s slasher — they have a different feel to them — so I watched I Know What You Did Last Summer, knowing that another in the series is due out in 2025. It’s a fun movie!

3/5 stars

With about 40 minutes remaining, my youngest child, who turns 15 next week and has never had any interest in horror, came in and surprised me by watching the rest of the movie with me.

“I liked that,” my now-favorite child said. “Can we watch another?”

So I dialed it up a notch and we watched Scream together. We finished at around 9pm and then went to bed. When I woke up at 4am I discovered my kid, still awake, all lights on, terrified of a murderer getting in.

So we’ll take a little break from horror and maybe watch more in the mornings.

Scream: 5/5 stars. My all-time favorite horror movie.

We also watched Everything Everywhere All At Once during family movie night. It was sweet, weird, thought-provoking, and poignant. I didn’t understand all of it, but I loved it.

5/5 stars.

🔗 Links:

Is the $11 Billion Online Sportsbook Bubble About to Burst? I haven’t read all of this yet, but it’s relevant to the sports card world, and the first third of it or so is really interesting.

Could GameStop acquire PSA and become your local card shop? (This is the video I mentioned during this week’s Clearing the Bases. Interesting stuff.

Caitlin Clark Autographed Card Is Destroyed By Water, Still Sells for $512 (again, this is my latest for SI)

Morehouse to Auction House: Exceptionally Rare Babe Ruth Rookie Card Heading to REA

Panini May Have Just Leaked Their Next Big Card