Frequently asked questions

Most lots are scanned, priced and posted for payout within 1–3 business days of arriving with us. If yours is going to take longer, because it’s an unusually big lot or because we’re backed up, we’ll tell you rather than let you wonder.

The clock starts when your box lands on our bench, not when you file the ticket. How long the carrier takes is out of our hands, and we’d rather not quote you a number that depends on it. Your lot page tracks the shipment either way, so you can always see where it is.

From arrival, we scan every card front and back, price the lot, and post the breakdown to your lot page. You get an email the moment it’s up. Nothing is paid until you’ve looked at that breakdown and accepted it, and accepting is also what closes your 72-hour window to ask for cards back.

We pay by PayPal, Venmo or Cash App, whichever you prefer. You pick your method while you’re packing your lot, and we save it to your profile so you only ever have to enter it once.

Nothing is sent until you say so. When your cards have been scanned and priced, your lot page shows the full breakdown: what we’re paying for the cards we’re buying, anything deducted for cards you’ve asked to have sent back, and the return postage if any applies. You confirm your payout details, accept that figure, and only then do we send the money.

Accepting is also what closes your 72-hour window to request cards back, so pick out anything you’d like returned before you accept. Once we’ve sent your payment it’s recorded on your lot page with the method, account, amount and date, so you always have a receipt to point at.

We don’t take anything out of your payout for shipping your cards to us. That label is on us, and it stays that way whether your lot is worth $20 or $2,000.

Because market value and money in your hand are two different things, and the gap is bigger for bulk than almost anyone expects. Market value is what one copy of a card sells for to a buyer who specifically wants that card. It is a real figure, and we show it for every card we scan. What it is not is a total anyone could actually collect, because it quietly assumes each card finds its own buyer, one at a time.

The first reason is sheer volume. Most of a bulk lot is worth a few cents a card, so a lot with a large combined figure is usually thousands of cards averaging well under a quarter each. Selling those yourself is not a smaller version of selling one good card. It is thousands of separate listings, envelopes and trips to the post office, and below roughly a dollar a card the postage and fees cost more than the card brings in. Those cards have a market price but no practical way to realise it.

The second is that a sale price is not what a seller keeps. Marketplace commission, payment processing, postage and packaging all come out of the sale before anything reaches you, and what remains is taxable income. By the time a modest card has been listed, sold, packed and posted, a meaningful share of its market price has gone to somebody other than the person who owned it.

The third is that not every card sells. Market value assumes a buyer exists, and for a great deal of bulk none ever turns up. Some of it will still be sitting in a box years from now. When we buy your lot we take that risk on: you are paid for every card, including the ones that will never find a buyer, and including the cheap ones we pay a minimum on precisely because they could not be sold individually at all.

That is also why our rate climbs with value rather than sitting flat. Cards at or below $1 pay 10%, and the rate rises steadily from there to 70% on anything worth $10 or more. On a genuinely good card your payout lands close to what you would have kept selling it yourself, without listing it, packing it, or waiting months for the right buyer.

What we will not do is hide any of this behind a single number. Every card is photographed front and back and priced individually, with its market value and your payout side by side and the links behind that price, so you can check any line of it. If a card is worth more to you than the payout, say so during your 72-hour review and we will send it back. We would rather show you the whole picture and have you decide than quote you one figure and hope you do not ask.

For most trading card games we identify and price every card through CardUploader. The market price it reports comes straight from the platform into our systems, so the figure you see on your lot is the one the platform produced. We don’t mark it down or adjust it by hand.

Some cards don’t have enough sales history for CardUploader to show a price, and now and then its aggregated price is clearly wrong. In those cases we enter what we believe the market price to be, and we tell you which ones they are. Any manually priced card is flagged on your lot, so you always know where the number came from.