Buying at 70% Isn’t a Strategy

“What percentage are you paying?”

If you buy cards, you’ve been asked this question. Maybe your answer is 60%. Maybe 70%. Maybe 80% on the right stuff. Maybe you have a chart: cards under $20 get one percentage, $20 to $100 get another, higher-end cards get another, cash gets one number, trade gets another.

There’s nothing wrong with any of this. Percentage-based buying is fast and understandable, it gives employees boundaries, it gives sellers some idea of what to expect, and when you’re evaluating hundreds of cards you need shortcuts. The problem comes when the shortcut becomes the strategy.

Because buying at 70% does not mean you have 30% margin. The card still has to become money, and what happens between those two moments determines whether you made a good buy.

The easiest deal in the world

A customer walks in with a card. Recent sales are consistently around $1,000. They want $700. It’s liquid. You sell this player constantly, and you have two customers who’ve asked for the card.

You buy it. Before the seller has even left the parking lot, you text one of your buyers. “Got one.” They respond: “How much?” “$950.” “Done.”

That’s a fantastic buy. You paid 70%. You sold at 95%. Almost no processing, almost no holding time, almost no selling cost, almost no uncertainty. This is exactly the kind of transaction that makes buying at 70% look brilliant.

Now let’s buy another $1,000 card at 70%. This one is a low-population parallel of a player with a small collector base. There are two recent sales. One at $900, one at $1,100. You split the difference and call it a $1,000 comp. You pay $700.

All it ever told you was the relationship between two numbers at one moment: your purchase price, and your estimate of market price. Useful. But we already know what else matters. Channel. Time. Labor. Risk. Expected Profit.

A purchase percentage is one input. It isn’t a business model.

Buy to sell

Card dealers love a good buy. I love a good buy. There’s something deeply satisfying about buying a collection for substantially less than you know you can sell it for. It’s one of the games inside the game. You know something, the seller wants liquidity, you take risk, a deal gets made. Nothing wrong with that.

But businesses don’t get paid for buying inventory cheaply. They get paid when inventory sells.

That sounds obvious and it has enormous consequences. You can build an entire warehouse full of amazing buys and go broke doing it. The inventory may genuinely be worth twice what you paid. Your landlord remains inconveniently interested in cash. Payroll tends to have the same preference.

So here’s the shift I want you to make: don’t buy because it’s cheap. Buy because you understand how it becomes money. The discount still matters — of course it does, a larger spread gives you more room for error. But the discount should support the exit. It should not replace one.

The 50% collection you should pass on

Let’s make this uncomfortable. Someone offers you a collection with approximately $20,000 in realistic sellable value. They want $10,000. Fifty percent. This is the kind of collection people brag about buying.

Then you look inside. Thousands of cards, mostly lower-dollar, lots of duplicates, some condition issues, a few nice cards carrying most of the headline value, categories that don’t perform particularly well for you. You estimate $20,000 in potential sales but maybe $17,000 in realistic Net Proceeds once the inventory actually moves. Still good on paper: roughly $7,000 in Contribution before broader operating costs.

Except it might take two years. And hundreds of hours. And you already have a backlog. And the $10,000 represents most of the buying cash you currently have available.

Now imagine what that money can’t do. Taking this collection means saying no to ten smaller collections over the next month, because your cash and your processing capacity are both tied up in a pile of commons.

The cheap collection can be the most expensive thing you buy all year.

The 85% card you should buy all day

Now the opposite, and this is the argument I most want to survive this chapter.

A customer offers you a card with extremely consistent recent sales around $2,000. They want $1,700. Eighty-five percent. A dealer standing nearby hears the number and nearly chokes on their drink. But you know something they don’t. You have a buyer. They’ve been looking for this exact card. You send a photo. They offer $1,900. Direct. You accept.

You deployed $1,700 and generated $200 in Contribution with almost no selling expense and almost no holding time. Would you do that again tomorrow? I would. Would I put my entire business into deals making roughly twelve percent? Different question. Would I risk $1,700 for a theoretical $200 with no identified buyer? Very different question. Context. Always context.

Now scale it up. A collection worth approximately $10,000 at realistic selling prices. Buyer A offers $6,500. Buyer B offers $8,000. Buyer A looks disciplined. Buyer B looks reckless. But Buyer B knows the collection: half of it matches active customer demand, another portion fits inventory that performs well in their store, several cards can be moved directly, and the remainder is liquid enough to sell quickly through established channels.

Buyer B isn’t overpaying. Buyer B knows more about the exit.

That distinction is worth more than any buying rule in this book. The best buyers are not the cheapest buyers. They’re the ones who understand what they’re buying: what moves, what doesn’t, who wants it, where it goes, how long it should take, what selling it costs, where the margin actually comes from, when to stretch and when to walk.

And that knowledge is worth money at the counter. If your operation can process inventory faster, price it better, reach more relevant customers, choose better channels, and turn inventory faster, then you can consistently extract more economic value from the same cards than your competitor can. Which means you can share some of that advantage with the seller. You can pay 75% while the shop down the street pays 65% and still run the better business.

Now who gets the collection? You do. Every time.