Selling Your Collection
At SWCCG Cards we buy collections as well as individual cards (email us or see the bottom for more details). That said, we’d like to help you make the right choice about how to best sell your cards. There are many options available, and which one is best will depend on your situation.
For example, if you are preparing for a move and came across an old collection you want to sell quickly, you have very different needs than someone who just lost a job and has plenty of time to invest to get the most possible money out of the cards.
Understanding What You Have
If you sell your cards to us you won’t need to deal with this as we will assess the value and pay according to our fixed pricing structure, but any other way of selling will go best if you find the top cards in your collection to best market what you have.
To check if a particular card is valuable, search for it in the eBay Sold Listings. This is the best publicly-available source to see what people are actually paying for cards. Items currently for sale are often overpriced and won’t ever sell at those prices, but sold items–especially on auctions–show real market prices for cards.
If you have too many cards to look up, we recommend going through them and pulling out any that have a name and picture indicating it represents a main character from the Star Wars movies. Most of the top cards are characters, so you may miss a few but this will get most of them. Before going through the cards, glance through our most expensive English cards so you can be on the lookout for them.
While most people don’t have them, if you happen to come across non-foil Japanese cards it’s worth spending extra attention on these since some of these are surprisingly valuable. And these rarely come up for sale on eBay, so it’s easy to miss them. Compare the cards you find to the images in our Japanese section to see if you’ve struck gold.
The Main Options
eBay
eBay is a great place to buy and sell Star Wars CCG community uses, especially if you have found the top cards (see “Understanding What You Have,” above). You can take a picture showing your most valuable cards, another picture to indicate how many cards there are overall, and list it on eBay. This will generally get a reasonable price for the whole collection if you’ve correctly identified the best cards and taken clear pictures of them.
If you have any particularly high-value cards, or if you’re selling them separately, you should typically take a good close-up picture of the front and back of the card on a solid, dark-colored background so the buyer can see clearly if there’s any wear on the borders of the card.
You will likely get a little more money if you sell any particularly expensive cards separately and the rest as one lot, but it can also be hard to sell the bulk remainder if there aren’t any enticing top cards to motivate buyers.
Please note eBay charges about 10% in fees to sell, and Paypal charges around 3%.
Facebook Groups
There are a few Facebook groups that have a vibrant ecosystem of people buying, trading, and selling cards with one another. You could join Star Wars CCG (largest group), Star Wars CCG Trading And Sales (focused on selling), and Star Wars CCG Trading And Chat (also seller-friendly).
Each of these groups have rules you should follow, but they all allow posting about cards to sell. Importantly, please only make one post with everything you want to sell, even if you want to sell several individual or groups of cards separately. If you know the price you want to ask for that can help.
Once you’ve posted, be aware many people will message you with offers on Messenger. since you won’t be connected to most of these people on Facebook, you will need to look for incoming message requests since these do not generate notifications like most messages you receive to avoid people getting spammed all the time. You are advised not to take the first offer, but to give it a little time since some people will give offers that are too low. You are also welcome to post pictures asking for people’s opinions on the value of your cards, and helpful people often give a ballpark estimate from the pictures you provide.
This method for selling cards avoids the 10% eBay fees and (if you and the buyer trust one another) you can even save the 3% Paypal fees by using “Friends & Family” if your buyer is willing to tolerate some risk. On the other hand, you have to find people who want your cards and not everybody will see every post.
If you sell your cards in one large collection, the buyer will expect a discount. You will get the most money selling cards individually, and the top cards will generally sell reasonably quickly (e.g. minutes to a day) with a fair price. Be aware, however, that the less valuable cards can take quite some time to sell individually and they won’t all sell. Individual sales also means more looking for buyers, haggling on prices, and trips to the post office. You may find 3 months later that you still haven’t found buyers and have to resort to tricks like giving a free card if you buy another, etc. So you can make the most money by selling cards individually but expect a meaningful time investment.
You can often get a reasonable price for the collection in bulk and get paid before you send your cards. The biggest drawback to this is that if you haven’t included pictures of all the most valuable cards, you will get a lower price than you would if they were all pictured, so be cautious if you aren’t confident you found the best ones.
If selling as a whole collection in a group like this, you should expect to get somewhere around 50-70% of the value you might get from selling the cards in your pictures individually. Or another way of looking at it that also tends to be true, you’ll get about the full value of the most marketable cards with minimal hassle, but the lower-value cards go along for free.
Holda-Up
While the Star Wars CCG community is generally amazing and trustworthy, there are occasionally scammers and people looking to take advantage of you. While the worst of these are already banned in the groups listed above, if you post on less-widely-used sales channels like Mercari, Facebook Marketplace, etc. you may get hit-up by someone looking to get a great deal at your expense. We recommend using the more common sales channels both to have the largest audience to sell to and to avoid these scammers.
Sell Us Your Cards
We also would be happy to buy your cards! (As would other websites selling them.) Purchases like this are how we get all the cards we sell on this site. We’re happy to wait long periods of time before cards sell, handle all the packaging and shipping, and make all those extra trips to the post office.
Similar to the buyers of collections you might find in the Facebook Groups or on eBay, you should expect to get around half the full value of your cards sold individually. Note that when selling to us, you get about half the value of your cards rather than half of the value of the pictured cards.
The way this works is that you ship us your cards and we carefully go through each one, making sure all the valuable cards are included in the price and their condition is accounted for accurately. Once we have a price, we run it by you and, if you agree, purchase your cards. If not, we’ll ship them back to you.
So if you don’t want to go through all your cards, this is the obvious choice. If you’re nervous you will miss some valuable cards, this is also a great option since it gives you a fair value for all of your cards, not just the ones you take pictures of. While you can make more money putting in the effort to sell your cards individually, selling us your collection will give you a fair price for all the cards in your collection with your only work being to send us the cards.
If that sounds like a good deal to you, please email us! You’re welcome to ask for a ballpark of what we might end up paying if you’ve already done the work to sort out some of the good ones, or you can just send us the cards and we’ll do all the work. We look forward to hearing from you!