Before you set up

What to price your cards at for a card show

By Justin Willmon · WTX Sports Cards · Updated September 2026

Your tracker tells you what a card is worth. Standing behind a table, that is the beginning of the problem, not the end of it.

A buyer picks up a slab. He asks what you want for it. You have about four seconds before the silence starts costing you something — and in those four seconds you need three numbers, not one.

The three numbers

What it is worth. Card Ladder, Market Movers, recent eBay solds — wherever you get it, this is your anchor. It is not your price.

What you ask. Above value, because a haggle starts here and you need room. How much above depends on the card: a $20 card cannot carry the same markup as a $4,000 one, because a buyer will not pay $24 for a twenty dollar card but will happily pay $4,150 for a four thousand dollar one.

What you will not go below. The walk-away price. This is the number that decides whether the card leaves the table, and it is the one almost nobody works out in advance.

Price the case before you go

Not at the table. At the table you are tired, there is a line, and somebody is talking at you. Every number you invent under those conditions is worse than one you worked out on Thursday night with a clear head.

This is the whole argument for doing it in advance: not that the math is hard, but that the conditions under which you would otherwise do it are terrible. Price it once, read it all weekend.

Come down from value, not from your ask

Here is the mistake that costs the most money, and it is subtle.

Somebody offers low. You want to move toward him, so you knock 10% off your ask. But your ask has markup in it — that is the point of it. Discounting off the ask just hands back your own markup, and you have moved less than you think you have.

Measure every step down from what the card is worth instead. A buyer haggling is pulling you toward the card's real value. Knowing where you are relative to that value, rather than relative to your own opening number, is what stops you giving away three hundred dollars because you were tired.

What you paid matters, for a while

For roughly the first 90 days, a card you are underwater on should not be sold at a loss just because somebody asked. Hold the price up and get your money back.

After 90 days that stops being a plan and starts being a story you tell yourself. A card you paid $300 for nine months ago, still marked $340, is not an asset — it is a brick, and the money in it is doing nothing. At that point the price should start coming down toward what the card is actually worth, on purpose.

Pick a number of days and be honest about it. Ninety is a reasonable one. The exact figure matters less than having one at all.

Cash across a table is not eBay

Two completely different questions.

• At the table: what will you take, in cash, today, with no fees and no postage and no waiting. This number is clean.
• On eBay: what do you list at so that after the fee, the per-order charge and the postage you still clear card value. That is a meaningfully higher number — the fee comes off the shipping and the sales tax too.

A dealer who quotes his eBay list price across a table is scaring off cash buyers. One who quotes his cash price on eBay is losing money on every sale. Keep them separate.

Hide the numbers that end a negotiation

Whatever you price with, remember that people read your screen. What you paid, what you are up on the card, and the lowest you would take are the three things that end a negotiation the moment they are seen. Have a way to hide them, or do not have them on the screen at all.