Our set pages show market values, and if you total up a collection that way you will get a big number. No buyer — us, a local store, or a mail-in buylist — pays that number. This page explains the gap once, honestly, so that when you compare offers you know exactly what you are looking at.
Most cards by count are bulk. In a typical collection, 85 to 90 percent of the cards are worth pennies — below the cost of sorting, listing, and shipping them individually. They have real value only in aggregate, at bulk rates.
Sell-through is never 100 percent. A card "worth" $5 at market may take a year to sell, or never sell. Buyers price that risk in, because they have to.
Selling costs are real. Marketplace commissions, payment fees, shipping, and returns take roughly 13 to 17 percent off the top of every sale before anyone earns anything.
Ask every buyer the same two questions: which cards are you paying real money for, and what rate is the rest getting? A single blended number can hide almost anything. An itemized offer cannot. That is why ours come in two visible parts — the hits priced individually against live market data, and the bulk priced at honest bulk rates — with the card list shown to you.
And a promise that costs us something: if a mail-in buylist is genuinely paying more for one of your cards than our offer reflects, we will tell you. A seller who trusts the process comes back with the next collection; that is worth more to us than any single card.
Cash offers on whole collections generally land between 25 and 50 percent of aggregate market value depending on how much of the value sits in a few strong cards versus thousands of bulk commons. Store credit runs higher than cash everywhere, including here. Anyone quoting you a much bigger percentage is either only buying your best cards, or using a price list you should ask to see.