For a long time, fake cards being sold on eBay have been a major issue. Now that the hobby has been booming for 2 years straight, eBay has decided its time to institute a program to curb the issue on expensive transactions, similar to what has been done with handbags and shoes. The problem is, the handbag and shoe industries, though popular and valuable, arent in the same place as cards right now. I want to take some time to go through the good and bad parts of this new program.

The Good

Basically, there are a lot of people spending A LOT of money on trading cards lately. Over the first half of the year, many of the card sub categories are growing at a three digit rate. Gigantic growth. That also means a lot of new people, who dont have a fucking clue what they are doing, buying cards they know little to nothing about. Because so few people actually do homework before buying, or dont know how to do homework before buying, eBay wants to give some protection.

This means for people who are buying 750 dollar items and higher, ungraded, they will have to have the card authenticated by eBay’s partnership with CSG. Now, for cards that are REGULARLY faked, like Michael Jordan RCs, old Pokemon cards, etc, everyone will know for sure if the card is real before losing any money on buying a fake.

There is value in this, especially for vintage cards, who are prime targets for both alteration and forgery.

In about 200 words, I just explained the good. As you can imagine, there is a lot more to discuss.

The Bad

Take a look at your personal collection. How many of those cards have you acquired in the last 2 years? How many of them are now worth over 750 dollars? A few years ago, that percentage was quite smaller than it is now. If any of them are raw cards, they will need to be authenticated before being sold. That is a fucking huge amount of items.

Even though graded cards dominate the high dollar sales on ebay, right now there are close to 25000 raw cards over 750 dollars that will need to be authenticated – JUST IN THE NBA CATEGORY ALONE. 12,000 have sold in the NBA category recently. In the future, all of these cards will need to be sent to CSG and authenticated prior to being shipped to the customer who buys them. This begs a number of questions, most of which have expected answers on the FAQ, but are laughably vague about what happens when things inevitably fall behind. They are promising short turn arounds, but how likely is that to hold up with the sheer volume of cards that will now be headed their way? How will that impact the queue of backlog they have to get cards graded? Will they have to hire more staff to get this done? How educated and well versed will these people be? What happens when they undoubtedly make mistakes?

There are just so many giant fucking issues with the assembly line here, and I think its hilarious that eBay just decided without any warning that this was going to be a thing. I have heard that there are a number of sellers who are moving off of the platform knowing that they will have to deal with this shit show, especially after the threshold is dropped from $750 to much lower in the future.

So many conflicts of interest already exist with in the grading process and authentication process that are further exacerbated by this whole process. Was this the result of a lobbying effort to require grading before a card is sold on eBay all together? Given the state of the industry, the current grading process is slow, expensive, and requires a willing suspension of belief that there isnt a giant game that many submitters play to enhance their prospects of achieving a higher grade.

Now that grading your cards is going to practically be required, what happens when you dont have access to the fast lane process that some people have with PSA, BGS, and the like? We have already seen one major group sub king go down a very nasty path that has left a number of collectors without their cards and owing money to get them back.

Ebay knows that many are a captive audience to selling cards on their site, which has led to sweeping decisions like this in the past. Too many to list. However, they arent without major competition now. PWCC has opened their own auction site after being banned from selling on eBay due to shill bidding issues, and facebook has been growing to be one of the largest card markets on the face of the earth. Curious if a mass exodus starts with programs that make it harder to sell, rather than easier.

The Ugly

Since the early 2000s, eBay has made it a point to value the sanctity of their buyers over their sellers. Whether it was removing negative feedback capabilities on transactions, higher fees, to return policy changes, everything eBay has done favors their buyers. Massive changes have driven me from selling on their platform, mostly related to the ease of selling other places. This just solidifies my desire to never return, as I do not grade cards, nor participate in selling them.

More importantly, this policy may offer SLIGHT relief from the lowest level of informed buyer, but it does not do a single thing for people who use their platform to sell. In fact, it will delay shipments to buyers, it will increase time before money is received from sales, and more importantly add headaches for sellers to now have to ship cards to a third party who is already overwhelmed and understaffed.

For some that were running auctions this week, the policy now impacts all sales in scope – regardless of when the auction started. There was no warning or anything that was told to sellers ahead of time to determine if they might want to choose a different path.

Additionally, what happens when CSG is out of their depth in reviewing a specific card? Test prints, rare oddballs and other factors could potentially damage a seller’s ability to achieve full sale amount for their card. If a card cannot be verified by the authentication team, it looks like there are penalties for sellers. A simple mistake or miscalculation could have disastrous effects.

I havent even gotten into the thousands of sellers on eBay who make money buying and flipping cards on a quick basis. Buying a player they feel will spike given a certain circumstance, and then flipping the card when he does? All but inviting returns and buyer’s remorse.

Bottom line, there are only very small populations of cards that need this guarantee. Although it was successful with shoes, the need to authenticate a modern NT RPA of a mid tier player is worthless. If the card is up for sale from that part of the hobby, its almost assuredly real, and does not need a guarantee. This might not be the case for things like a 1986 Jordan RC, or a vintage gem, but that shouldnt dictate the rules for all cards that have no business needing authentication.

Overall, I think the grading business is a cesspool of manipulation, gaming the system, and giant conflicts of interest. Forcing sellers down that path with a backlog in the millions, extreme cost to get grading done quickly, and other factors is a complete fucking nightmare.