I was tasked with writing a weekly column about buylisting, but I thought that might be a bit of a dry well after a bit. How much is there really to know? Will our valuable (seriously, you guys are the actual best) Insiders be served by being told what they already know?

After all, someone paying for a Quiet Speculation Insider account is doing so because they want next level finance information. A large majority of you buylist with such regularity that occasionally I learn some things I didn't know from talking to you or scoping out the forums.

This may be something I do nearly full-time, but a lot of you are in the same boat and wouldn't likely benefit from me rehashing things you know already. I slowly got away from writing buylisting articles when I started to feel like there wasn't much 'next level' stuff to discuss.

However, something happened this week to make me realize that all of buylisting is 'next level' for some people. Maybe those people would never become Insiders, but we have new people joining all the time, and although I and some of the more advanced Insiders take some of this stuff for granted, there is real benefit to going over a few things that could save people a lot of money and hassle.

Accordingly, I'm going to highlight a case of an inexperienced buylister who had a very, very bad time; so bad a time in fact that he took to the internet to vent his frustrations. We'll discuss what went wrong and how you can avoid making the same mistakes the next time you decide to buylist your cards.

There are some real basics in here, but there is also some advanced stuff to discuss. It's a good refresher for everyone. Sit back and let's have a look at a situation that went badly and how it could have gone a lot better.

Just buylisted a bunch of cards to 6 different stores (not very efficient, won't do it that way in the future). 5 of the stores I had no problem with, and all had a mix of different conditions of the cards, but none of them had an option to mark "SP" for condition (actually I think one of them had the option).

5 of these stores, they got the cards, marked the ones that were NM and said "these are good", and asked me in an eMail if I would take a reduced amount for the cards not in NM shape.

Strike Zone, on the other hand, I got one eMail from them, the one saying "we haven't gotten your cards yet" (like 2 days after I submitted the buylist just before the 4th of July, of course they didn't get there yet, I shipped them the next day).

Then, suddenly, yesterday, my cards show back up in the mail. But not all of my cards. One was missing.

In the envelope it has a piece of paper saying basically "cards not in sufficient condition. Cards returned at your expense". I'm thinking "wtf do you mean at my expense?"

So I go through them, and realize they kept one of my cards, presumably to cover their shipping.

So I call them, talk to a guy who was nice, but said "hey dude, I don't do the buylist stuff, I'm not sure who did, but they probably weren't in NM shape". I explain that I'm looking at most of these that are NM... whatever...

So I send an eMail to them, and hear back from a guy, and he says "if there's too many cards not NM shape, it becomes 'cost prohibitive' to process the order, we kept a card to cover our cost of materials, postage with tracking, and time to process it".

SERIOUSLY? SERIOUSLY YOU BASTARDS? I was about to hit the roof. These people don't so much as send me anything besides an automated eMail, and then, when they get my cards, they don't say "Hey, some of these are a bit under NM shape, we'll offer X for it", no, they just mail them back, and KEEP ONE OF MY CARDS.

Spread the word around, these guys are terrible. Horrific customer service, horrible business practices... whatever.

I own a business, and we do a LOT of things that are "cost prohibitive", because it's the right thing to do. Heck, we just cost ourselves an extra five figures that we didn't need to because we felt it was the right thing to do.

edit: Here's the original eMail (eMails and personal info redacted, including his @domain so people don't spam him... and it's not @strikezoneonline.com) http://i62.tinypic.com/23jqvll.png 

edit edit: Also quick update, yesterday had some eMails back and forth with the owner, he started out basically "sorry it didn't work the way you wanted it to, have a nice day". a minute later he sent another eMail offering to paypal the cost of the card, and asked which card. I replied basically "dude, it's not the card I care about, it's how it was handled, etc... but thanks for offering anyhow, here's my paypal", and he sent the $2.75 that was on the buylist. Regardless, as you can see in the eMail traffic, customer service (at least from him and those who have to follow his policies) is beyond nonexistant.

Clearly the OP had a bad time with his buylisting experience, and he's urging anyone who will listen to join him in a boycott of Strike Zone. Let's ignore how hilarious and misguided that is, and focus on how we can avoid ending up in a similar situation.

Six Different Stores

This is a pretty common rookie mistake. The bigger the list you use with the more stores, the more likely you are to just ship to whichever store is paying the most. And why not? If a store is paying $0.10 more on a card, you're losing $0.10 by not shipping to that store. That's just science.

However, as it appears OP learned, you don't want to be selling to so many buylists. Every new store is a new order to ship out. It's a new order to keep track of. It's a new order to package. It's a new order to pay to ship.

When I ship buylist orders, I add cards to a list in Trader Tools until I have about $1,000 worth of cards and then I send it to trade routes to put it in the carts for various shops. I have four default stores, and I will usually delete one if a store is being sent under $200 in cards. Usually the difference in the total amount I will get is under $10. Still, it's not smart to lose $10 on a $1,000 order, right? That's 1% of the total value, and losing  1% to a "laziness tax" seems like poor value.

However, if I send to three stores instead of four, or two stores instead of three, I'm saving $12 each time. The medium-sized flatrate box will fit up to 4 800-count card boxes. Even if you ship $500 in nickel cards, it will only cost you $12 flatrate to ship the cards. I usually only include one or two boxes rather than the four that will fit, but if you wanted to ship 3,500 or so (the "800" figure is calibrated for thicker baseball cards) cards to a buylist, know you can get away with doing that for $12. Thanks, US Postal service! If eliminating a store from your list will only cost you about $10 and you're saving $12, congratulations. The "laziness tax" owes you a refund.

Not only that, your time is worth money. I doubt OP set sorted and alphabetized the cards that they shipped to those six different buylists. When you buylist you need to put the cards in the order specified by the store to which you're mailing the order. For each store, you need to go through all of the total cards you're sending and find the correct ones in the correct order and not only verify you have every card you said you're sending, you must verify that they are in the order specified on the order sheet because they need to check that to verify you sent everything you said you were sending.

Imagine doing that six times. Even though the pile of cards to dig through gets smaller and smaller with each store, it's still a chore.

The ideal situation is one store pays the best on everything and you send it all to them, but that's not always the case. Some stores won't take certain cards at all. My preference is to sell to three different stores using Trader Tools--ABU Games, Adventures On and Card Kingdom. They pay well, treat me well and they have a great reputation.

There are other stores in Trader Tools, though, and one of them is Strike Zone. So why don't I ship to Strike Zone?

Not Doing Research

The Original Poster of the reddit thread indicated they had sent to six different stores. I would be willing to bet money that they used bidwicket.com. Bidwicket is a very, very slow website but it puts you into contact with a lot of stores you might not have known existed, like Hobby Goblins, which is a great store and whose owner is very pleasant to deal with in person and to whom I've shipped cards for years.

Other stores I'd never heard of like Mox Diamond and Graveyard games did a pretty decent job, and I happily used Bidwicket for a long time until we put the finishing touches on Trader Tools. I feel like there are real drawbacks to Bidwicket and I don't use it anymore, but given a scenario where six stores were involved and Strike Zone was one of them, it's fairly obvious this was a Bidwicket order.

QS Insiders have a big leg up on someone like the poster of the reddit thread. Irrespective of whether they elect to use Trader Tools to buylist, they still have access to another valuable resource--the QS forums. the QS forums have a section dedicated to reviews of stores, and there have been a few Strike Zone horror stories in the past.

However, the result of those discussions wasn't a bunch of bedwetting, armchair litigators alleging things like, "keeping your card to pay for shipping is LITERAL THEFT and you should take them to small claims court," or attempts to start a boycott. Rather, the discussion usually turns to people saying, "Don't send jacked-up cards to Strike Zone.

Don't send jacked-up cards to Strike Zone. They don't want them.

Why am I not just condeming Strike Zone entirely? There's a very good reason for this. Anyone who does this professionally knows that Strike Zone is the literal tits.

When you go to a Grand Prix, any Grand Prix, you will see Strike Zone's booth with its large blue and white sign. You will also see a line to sell to them. Usually there is someone with a large duffel bag or rolling suitcase filled to capacity with box after box. You will see someone with a similar amount of cards next to them waiting their turn for actual, literal hours. If you come back, that person will still be waiting, and when it's their turn, someone else will wait behind them.

I make an appointment to deal with Strike Zone. But don't send them jacked-up cards. By now, most people know that, but every once in a while someone who doesn't know what they're doing tries to send them jacked up cards and when the order is returned, minus a dollar or two in cards to pay for return shipping, another internet shitstorm starts up. The resultant boycott never seems to have an effect on the 8-hour wait time to sell to them, though, which is too bad.

Do you have access to the QS forums? You should if you're reading this article. Take some time to check the seller review section. Buying from a store and not sure if they're reputable? Check them out. Going to sell to a store on a site like Bidwicket or on that store's buylist website? Look them up.

Sometimes you will get a story like "[Store name redcated'] didn't pay me for two months and when they finally did, they tried to pay $15 less for Scavenging Ooze because the price went down in the interim, so don't sell to them unless you hate getting paid." But sometimes it's more like, "Hey, make sure you print out an order sheet with your name on it when you send an order to Gaming Etc."

Let other people make mistakes for you and benefit from their wisdom. Using Bidwicket and you're not sure about a site? Ask before you ship. You may learn that Mox Diamond will send you a Cashier's Check in the mail instead of Paypal and that may or may not be a dealbreaker.

You may learn that ABU is slow to update their buylist on older stuff and there are great arbitrage opportunities because they honor their prices. You may learn that other stores do not honor their prices in this manner. As a speculator it's important to know who will ship a card that quintupled overnight and who will cancel your order without even thanking you for alerting them to the price increase.

Not Taking Responsibility

If you're new to buylisting, there may be a few lessons you learn along the way, even going in fully apprised by articles like this one and our superlative discussion forum. If you make a rookie mistake, own it.

I have made them. Everyone here has. What you don't want to do is throw the baby out with the bathwater and never deal with a good store again because you don't like what happened after you didn't follow their rules. You could be missing out to a greater extent than you'll ever be aware.

I'm available to answer questions here, on Twitter, via e-mail or however you decide to contact me. If you're about to make your first buylist order, or you're about to make your 900th but at a new store, use the resources in this community. QS Insiders are seriously the best online discussion community and there is literal centuries of combined finance experience to draw on. The alternative is having a bad time.