Baseball Cards - The Collection of Purpose

Several years ago, my boys started collecting Baseball Cards. At the time, I figured it was an innocent pass-time. They'd enjoy the cards, eventually their cards would wind up in the toy box, tossed aside and probably tossed out ultimately. Big deal! I could deal with a few baseball cards scattered over the floor. At least they weren't legos I was stepping on in the middle of the night.

Then... It happened. One of my friends shared with them the value of trading baseball cards on ebay. Whoohoo! They're entrepreneurs. It's a great idea, and I actually loved the thought of them trading on ebay, it would teach business skills, advertising, and other skills for real world learning. I encouraged it.

Then along came the rules of the process and they must be 18 to trade on ebay. Okay, we can do that. I'll just sign up and do the actual trading and let them have the cash, etc. from their trades.

One step at a time, we had to actually begin making profits first. That's done. Here come the profits and we're off. The race is on. We sold remarkable numbers of cards, and I seriously thought that was the end of the collection. Out came the next box...

Five shoe boxes later, I finally take a breath and ask how many more cards we have to trade... "Oh, just another three or four boxes, Mom."

My deep breath became a sigh. "Go get them." I suggest, thinking we'd have three or four SHOE boxes. No such thing... There were three or four shoe boxes in EACH box of baseball cards, and there we had it... Boxes, and boxes, and more boxes of baseball cards they'd collected at every fair, every police holiday, every parade, and every time they'd had an opportunity to gather up Baseball cards, they'd collected the cards and began organizing them into groups of cards. Some for teams, some groups for All Star Players, and other various groups of cards. We'd been selling cards for more than six months and there were TONS more to sell. In fact, I could literally see us selling baseball cards for the next eleven years and still having more to sell. The collection was unending.

So, then the thought came to me... I wonder if we're under-selling any of these cards, so... I started searching for valuable baseball cards. Don't you love the Internet. It's so easy to search out this kind of valuable information.

We had many cards that were worth way more than we'd been selling them for, and I thought we could do better than we'd been doing with the cards. So, I proposed a different marketing strategy to the boys. They liked it.

I'm not about to disclose that strategy here, but I am going to tell you that within the next several weeks, we'll be presenting some interesting sales techniques for marketing Baseball Cards. And I'll be sorting through those cards to find out how many of them are Baseball cards, how many are Beanie Baby Cards and how many are some other kind of card that hasn't yet hit the hot market --- who knows, we may be able to create a NEW hot market....

It's all in the marketing strategy, baby!