Selling, fees & tax
Bulk vs Singles Calculator
Listing singles returns more per card and costs a great deal more time. This finds the price point where a card stops being worth listing individually — below it, everything belongs in the bulk lot.
The break-even price per card
A single is worth listing when what it nets, after fees and postage, exceeds what the listing costs in your time. That produces a hard floor:
That number is higher than most people expect, and it is why dealers sell commons by the box rather than one at a time. Twelve minutes at thirty dollars an hour is six dollars of labour, and no four-dollar card survives that.
The two things that move the floor
- Listing speed. Bulk-listing tools, saved templates and photographing twenty cards in one session cut the per-card time from twelve minutes to three, and the floor drops with it.
- Sell-through. Listing a card that never sells costs the full time and returns nothing. At 65% sell-through, a third of your listing hours produce no income at all — which the calculation above accounts for and most sellers do not.
Questions people ask about this
Is it better to sell cards individually or in bulk?
Individually for anything above roughly $8–10, in bulk below it. The floor comes from time: at 12 minutes per listing and $30 an hour, each listing costs about $6 in labour, and a $4 card cannot cover that plus fees and postage. Sellers who list faster — templates, batch photography — push the floor down to about $3.
How long does it take to list a card on eBay?
Ten to fifteen minutes for a card listed properly: photographing both sides, checking recent sold prices, writing the title and description, and setting postage. Sellers with templates and batch workflows get it to three or four minutes, which is the single biggest lever on whether singles are worth it.
What percentage of listed cards actually sell?
Highly variable, but 50–70% within a few months is a realistic planning figure for mid-range singles. The unsold remainder still consumed the listing time, so a route that looks profitable at 100% sell-through can lose money at 60% — which is why the sell-through rate is an input here rather than an assumption.
Where these numbers come from
Rates on this page were last checked against the published price lists on . Grading companies change fees and pause tiers without notice — confirm the total on the submission form before you pay.