It did not take long for me to discover the wonders of COMC after I fell hard back into sports cards in early 2019. I placed my first order on the site in March, 2019, consisting of 63 New York Rangers O-Pee-Chee retros from 2008—2019. I bought every one that was listed for under a dollar. The concept of “flipping” cards on the site crossed my radar pretty early on, but I had no interest in that element at first.
But as my experience on the site and time spent watching the card market expanded, about six months after that first purchase, I took the plunge and started buying a few non-PC cards when I noticed something that looked a little underpriced. I had no expectation of making substantial money, but I enjoyed browsing cards anyway, and the chance to use flipping as a means to off-set even a small percentage of what I was spending on PC cards was appealing.
My initial plan for COMC flipping was to hone in on my passion for modern O-Pee-Chee hockey cards by learning the market for them backwards and forwards and hyper-specializing my flips in that small, lower-end realm. So on October 26, 2019, I came in hot with my first buys that were specifically meant to flip: I splashed down 65 cents per card for four 2019-20 OPC retros, re-listed them for $1.30 a pop, and fired up a new spreadsheet to track my flips. Six days later, none of them had sold, but I noticed one seller slashing prices on a handful of Alex Ovechkin OPC cards, and I spent another $14 on eight of those.
I was now $17 in the hole with 12 cards for sale and zero sales. I’m naturally a low-risk, cautious kinda guy, so I pumped the breaks on purchases for a couple of weeks and waited for the money to roll right in. On November 2nd, one of those 2019-20 retros sold for $1.30. After COMC’s 5% cut, I raked in $1.24, for a profit of 59 genuine United States cents!
Sales overall were sluggish though, which made me even more cautious to make additional buys. By mid-December, about seven weeks into this flipping experiment, I had purchased only 15 cards at a cost of $17, and had sold five that had put $7 back into my account. I quickly realized that focusing so narrowly on a lower-end product like O-Pee-Chee was going to be an even bigger limiting factor than I had expected, and I started to broaden my scope a bit to include low-to-mid range hockey in general, plus I started dipping my toe into baseball.
In mid-December, I was browsing Henrik Lundqvist cards with my PC in mind when I saw a 2015-16 UD Black Sixes Relic Booklet featuring Lundqvist and five other Rangers priced at $6.75. The card could have been a decent buy for my own collection, but jersey cards are not a main interest or focus of mine, and my gut told me it had solid flip potential. Looking back, I have to laugh at myself for how much I wrestled with the decision to drop what felt like a large sum on the card, but I figured if flipping did not work out, at least it was a card I would enjoy keeping, and I pulled the trigger. The purchase put me around $19 in the hole on COMC flips.
I am typically quite conservative when re-pricing cards because I prefer for them to sell quickly, but I got out of my comfort zone and put a price tag of $17 on the booklet. After a week or so went by without a sale, I was convinced that I had blown it and was about ready to put an end to this flipping thing because I obviously wasn’t cut out for it. I dropped the price to $15.00 and almost entirely stopped looking for new cards to flip.
But then 10 weeks after I bought it (during which time I had spent all of $1.48 on two cards for flipping), someone did snatch up the booklet for $15.00, which meant a net of $7.50 for me, and even put me $5 in the black for COMC flipping overall, with five cards still in my inventory for sale. OK, maybe this flipping thing does have some potential after all, I decided. And maybe I could learn to exercise a modicum of patience.
I still only slightly picked up my pace. In the eight months since the booklet sold, I’ve bought 109 cards for flipping at a combined cost of $246. At times I’ve overall been as low as -$30 and up as much as $19, and at the one-year mark of flipping, I’m down around $11. Not great. I do still have 41 cards for sale though, so if I look at it like I’ve spent $0.27 per remaining card, that’s not so bad, especially since there are a handful of cards still for sale with some decent value. And if I only look at the 91 cards that have sold in the last year, I’ve pocketed $60 on those. That’s an average of just $0.67 profit per card, but I’ll take it for now when I remember that I’m new to this game, how cautious I’ve been, and that I live mostly in the lower-end world of one smaller sport.
And now, at no cost to you, I will reveal the tricks and lessons that have allowed me to lose $11!
- Sales are not the end all-be all: My main strategy has been to
obsessivelyoccasionally check the “on sale” listings, sort by recently posted, scan the most recent 10 or so sales for ones that are marked as at least 65% off SRP, and click through those to look for hockey deals. I’ve found a few winners this way, but I’m realizing that the time spent searching compared to the results I’ve seen do not make it worth keeping as my go-to method. - Turns out current rookie cards are popular! Of the 18 flips I’ve had with a profit of at least $1, half of them were on 2019-20 NHL rookie cards. And I haven’t had any substantial misfires in the same category. The higher dollar amounts swirling around the latest rookie crop often scare me off, but now seeing the bit of success I’ve had there will give me confidence to jump in that end of the pool more often.
- I don’t like not having the lowest price on a card: Another limiting factor has been that I have bought to flip only when there is a significant gap between the lowest and second lowest priced copies of a card so that I can bump up my purchase price a bit and still be the cheapest option. But with so much competition on COMC, I don’t see that significant gap very often, so I just haven’t ended up buying a ton. I might need to start thinking a little longer term and not always need to be the cheapest option right away.
- Weird results on relics: Surprisingly, my two biggest flips have come on jersey cards, to which I ordinarily don’t give a second look! In addition to the Rangers booklet I mentioned, I also flipped a Connor McDavid 2019-20 SPx jersey card for a net of over $7. I have since sunk $25 into two more copies of the same card that are yet to move, so memorabilia card results remain a mixed bag for now.
- If you’re newer, the “watch-and-learn” approach might be best: Since my full-on return to the hobby was fairly recent, I’m still learning important lessons about cycles in the modern market. For one example of many, when O-Pee-Chee Update cards, which are inserted into Upper Deck flagship series two packs, started hitting COMC, I was surprised to see what I thought were low asking prices of around $1-$5 on top rookies. I knew there was a bit of sustained value in the regular O-Pee-Chee release on rookies like Quinn Hughes and Cale Makar, and I was looking for comparable cards for the likes of Jack Hughes and Kappo Kaako to follow suit. Thankfully, my cautious approach kept me from buying in too heavily on any update cards, because before long the site was absolutely saturated with them and asking prices bottomed out. I think it’s possible the print runs on OPC Update cards are significantly higher than the OG version, but even if not, I learned that tons of people opening up Upper Deck series two consider the OPC inserts to be annoying filler to be dumped.
- Don’t bet on small sample sizes: I already knew this, and it is usually an easy rule for me to follow, but I let three games in August convince me that Andrei Svechnikov and the Hurricanes were about to break out. As a Rangers fan, I watched closely as the Hurricanes suffocated my team in a three-game sweep and decided there wasn’t going to be any stopping the ‘Canes in the playoffs. I bought three Svechnikov rookie auto cards and waited for Carolina’s march to Stanley Cup glory. Turned out Boston did not have quite the same troubles with them as the Rangers did, and Svechnikov and company did not survive the next round. I still have all three cards for sale.
- You’re mostly only going to hear about the wins: Naturally, COMC users and the company itself regularly post about impressive flips made on the site, but remember there’s little to no incentive for anyone to bring attention to their missteps and losses. I’m always up for a little self-deprecation, so I don’t mind spelling out my first year’s underwhelming results as a cautionary tale that it might not be as easy as it looks.
- Only take on flipping if you’ll enjoy it: There might be a handful of people so good and/or lucky at flipping that the monetary awards alone are worth the effort, but my advice would be to only give it a go if it’s going to be enjoyable. I like the hunt, learning the market, and occasionally finding deals on cards for my own collection while browsing for flips, so I don’t have to make a bunch of money doing it. (Though I do have a feeling I’ll need to eventually make some money for it to remain fun! And it remains my longer-term goal for flips to cover PC purchases.) I could expand my potential by focusing on more sports than just hockey and baseball, but I know diving into sports that I’m not as passionate about would feel more like a chore than fun, so I’m not interested.
Do you flip on COMC? Why or why not? If yes, how has your experience been?
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