How to start selling Pokémon cards: a real seller’s guide to your first 100 cards

Start with the cards you already have

The fastest way in is the cheapest one: open your binder and pull out every card you don’t want to keep. Doubles, pulls you don’t care about, the trade binder you’ve been hauling to events. That’s your first inventory. You don’t need to buy a collection to start.

That’s how I started, I had a trade binder I’d brought to a card show in Frankfurt, traded a bunch there, and came home thinking I could probably list the rest online. List that first batch end-to-end before you spend money on more inventory. The first batch teaches you everything: photos, pricing, fees, shipping, packaging.

Pick singles or bulk first, not both

Pokémon sellers split roughly into two paths. Pick one to start.

• Singles. Higher margin per card, more work per card, requires identification and pricing skill. Cardmarket and eBay are the natural fit.
• Bulk. Low margin per card, low work per card, sold by lot or per-thousand. eBay and local sales work; Cardmarket doesn’t take bulk.

Most sellers end up doing both. Start with singles from your own collection, it’s easier to learn the workflow on cards you already own than on a 5,000-card lot you just bought.

Pick the right marketplace for your situation

There is no single best marketplace. Pick based on what you’re selling and where your buyers are.

• Cardmarket. The default for Pokémon singles in Europe. Strict product matching, transparent pricing, big audience. See the Cardmarket workflow guide.
• eBay. Strong for both singles and bulk lots. Global audience, less strict on product matching, more competition on price visibility.
• Shopify. Your own store. More control, more brand, much more work to drive traffic. Best as a complement once you already have buyers, not as a starting marketplace.

Set up your seller account properly

Boring but high-leverage. Take an hour to set this up correctly and you save days later.

• Business policies (shipping, returns, payment), set these once at the account level so each listing inherits them.
• Shipping templates per region, domestic, EU, rest of world.
• Payment method connected and verified.
• Tax setup, including VAT registration if you’re in Europe and approaching the threshold.
• Storefront name, profile image, and a short “about” block. Buyers do read these.

Photographing your cards

You don’t need a studio. You need consistent, glare-free, sharp photos. The non-negotiables:

• Soft, even lighting. Daylight near a window works. Avoid direct sun and avoid the ceiling light directly above the cards.
• A neutral, non-reflective background. A sheet of dark paper is fine.
• Hold the camera roughly square to the card. Phone cameras are more than good enough.
• One photo of the front for each card is enough for most listings. Backs only when there’s damage to disclose.
• Multiple cards per photo (a binder page) is fine if your detection tool can split them, it makes intake much faster.

Pricing your first cards

New sellers either price too high (because the recent eBay sold price was inflated by a hype week) or too low (because they’re anxious to get the first sale). Both are mistakes.

• For Cardmarket-traded cards, use Cardmarket Trend as the anchor.
• For eBay, look at the last 5–10 sold listings, not the active asks.
• Set a minimum floor for low-value commons, below it, shipping eats the entire margin.
• For higher-value cards, slight markup against the average is fine. Buyers comparing across sellers care more about reputation than 5%.

Listing the first batch

Don’t list one at a time. Batch the work, photograph 50 cards in one session, run them through detection together, set pricing rules once, export and publish in one go. Switching contexts between photographing, pricing, and uploading is what burns out new sellers fastest.

That’s the part NeoSatoshi automates: photo to detected, priced, ready-to-list cards in one workflow instead of five tools.

Don’t try to list every bulk card individually

This was the mistake that cost me months. After my first batch went well, I bought 50,000 bulk cards thinking I’d list them all as singles. The pile sat in my room for six months because the workflow wasn’t there.

The right approach with bulk is to sort, not single-list. Pull out cards worth roughly 20 cents or more and list those as singles. Sell the rest back as bulk. For modern sets, the cards worth pulling are mostly trainer cards plus a few set-specific rares. Print a list of the higher-value ones and learn to spot them as you sort. For older sets, watch for fan favorites and surprises; a vintage trainer card can quietly be worth $8.

What I learned in my first year

I documented the whole first year publicly, the bulk lot, the mistakes, the actual revenue and profit. If you want the long version, the real monthly numbers guide collects every recap video.

The short version: most months are unspectacular. The good months come from things you set up months earlier, better photos, better pricing rules, repeat buyers, expanding to a second platform. Don’t chase the viral month; build the boring monthly base first.