My First $30K Month Selling Pokemon Cards Part Time

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Last month, I sold $30,000 worth of Pokemon cards. And I did that all while doing this part-time, while having a full-time job, while having a wife and kids and a life outside of this. And so, if I can do something like this, I think that you can, too. In this video, we're going to go over those numbers, the systems that I have in place to make all of this happen and the time that I think it took in order to pull this off. And one quick caveat before we get going, $30,000 in sales is not $30,000 in profit. So, this is not saying that I made 30 grand. We're going to cover, like I said, all the numbers and those things, but that's a good thing to just note off the get-go. But like I said, I have a full-time job. I'm a pastor. I uh work at a church. I've got a wife, three kiddos, so life's busy. And this has all been just a part-time gig that I do in the evenings after I take care of all of those other things. And then here on this channel, I make videos helping you guys get your store off the ground, documenting my journey into the trading card space. I've been doing this for about 2 years now. And every so often I make a video covering my uh month of sales or things that I've been doing.

[00:00:58]And so hopefully this is uh something that I'm putting together to give you some inspiration to hop into this space to let you know that you can do it. This is not me saying, "Hey, look at how awesome I am. Look at all these big numbers." That's not what this is at all. I just want to give you guys a little push uh to maybe dip your feet in the water of trading card selling. But let's take a peek at some of the main numbers and I'll show you exactly how this all works. So here is the May breakdown for numbers wise. Looks like I did an even 600 orders and a whopping Well, this is actually not accurate. So, $29,525 in sales on this channel. A couple things to note here as you're going through. You'll see right here, I had $2,800 in refunds. Uh that is true.

[00:01:36]However, one of those refunds that I did, this is kind of an embarrassing story. I sold uh 80 Gallerian Gallery Dittos to someone in person and forgot to take those off the platform. And the very next day, someone ordered all 80 of those. They actually ordered 90 of them.

[00:01:49]And so I had to message them quickly and refund them. Long story short, uh they weren't happy. Um but we got it all figured out. So that's some of this refund right here. So that's uh some of these are inerson sales. And then also I did a uh rip and ship on my actual website uh which just got launched outside of TCG Player. And so that actually puts me a little over $30,000 in sales. But uh for the purposes of this video, we'll say around 30 grand in sales and 600 orders. Um and so that is a lot of orders. Now, some of that is going to be from the Mayhem sale that TCG TCG Player just did at the end of May, but 600 orders is a lot. That ends up being about 20 orders a day of me sitting down and going through all of this. But, we're going to get out the trusty calc, which is short for calculator if you guys uh did not know.

[00:02:36]I'm just using slang. And we're going to figure out what our average uh value for every order was. So, we did 20, we'll just say $30,000 in sales. and we did 600 orders divided by 600, which means our average order was $50, which is fairly high. Now, I had some orders that were pretty bonkers this month. A couple orders to highlight. Uh, one of them was indeed that uh in-person sale where I sold uh one person uh 80 gallerian gallery dittos from Crown Zenith. And the story about acquiring those dittos was someone reached out on YouTube and said, "Hey, I want to sell a 100red gallerian gallery dittos to you at 70% market." And so I said, "Okay, that sounds good." And so I bought all of them. They sent them to me and then I sold a bunch of them in person. Another one uh was that I picked up a huge collection a while ago and in that collection were uh 49 of the Rayquaza Pixel Hollowos from the Sea and Sky collection boxes if you guys remember that product at all. Uh it was a Sam's Club product I think. And so I had 49 of these things and on the Mayhem sale someone came through and bought all 49 of those cards. That was like a $450 order or something like that. Crazy stuff, right? Uh, I also had a Mayhem order that was like over $600. And so I did have some pretty big orders uh that really offset this. But I would say like a $50 order average is, you know, pretty does make sense when I'm looking at this and I'm thinking about this. And what's interesting about uh thinking about doing 600 orders is back when I was in the direct program through TCG Player and I didn't sell and ship out all these orders myself, it was pretty common for me to have that many orders in a month.

[00:04:04]Uh, but this is the most amount of orders that I've had in a month for a long time. Especially considering that I am shipping out all 600 of me of these myself. That means I had to go uh to the post office and drop all of these myself. Whether it's uh plain white envelope orders, whether it's bubble mailer orders, whether it's sealed product that ended up going out. I had a couple big expensive sealed product uh orders that sold this month with a few booster boxes. And so uh lots of money.

[00:04:29]Uh and we're going to talk about the fees next. So, one thing to note here is that even though I sell on TCG Player, I really have two channels on TCG Player that I sell on. The marketplace is the regular place that people go to when they buy cards on TCG Player where I pay about 15% in fees. And so, right here, you see I've got marketplace uh specifically selected here. That's 419 orders and only 13,100 in sales. So, we'll go we'll do the math on that one.

[00:04:54]13100 divided by uh $419. This is going to be much lower. Yeah, this is only for $31 an order, which is kind of crazy.

[00:05:04]Uh, that still seems like relatively high. Um, yeah, I did that math right.

[00:05:08]Okay. Yeah. So, $31 an order. Still pretty high, but again, um, nothing bananas. Now, I'm going to pay about 15% on all of these orders, except for I price my cards significantly over market when people shop from me on the uh on the marketplace because it's a lot more expensive for me to ship them out and people are significantly uh all the time people pay above market for cards on the marketplace. Now, let's hop over to my proseller site and take a peek at that.

[00:05:36]So, this is a completely different ballgame. I did $16,000 in sales over 181 orders. And we're going to work out the math here. This is going to be pretty crazy. 16,423 divided by 181. The average order on my proseller site was $90, which is pretty high. So that's likely people picking up sealed product, people buying a lot of my uh singles on my platform. This is maybe from the rip and ship on Sunday nights where people would buy a bunch of packs at a time. So, this is pretty cool. Uh, because I pay a lot less in fees here. As you guys can see on this $16,000, I only paid $898 in fees. And let's go back to the marketplace. This is $13,000 and I paid $2,000 in fees.

[00:06:18]So, that is a stark contrast when we look at those things together. But, uh, those two combined to make the 29,000 or basically 30 grand that I sold in the 600 orders. That's kind of how the math breaks down in terms of fees. Now, uh, in terms of actual profit, let's take a peek at that because it's, uh, it's a little squishy, so you're going to have to like, uh, bear with me here as I estimate some of this. So, if someone buys a card from me on the regular marketplace and I pay about 15% in fees, uh, let's say it is a $20 card. For this $20 card, let's say I paid 70% times.7.

[00:06:50]Uh, so I paid $14 for that $20 card, right? So, we're just going to remember I paid 14 bucks for this card. Now, on the marketplace, I would have this marked up. So, it wouldn't sell for $20.

[00:07:00]I would probably sell it, well, let's say 20 and then I'll say I sell it 15% over market. Okay? Uh, so times 1.15 is 23. So, I sold it for 23. Now, on that $23, I'm going to uh lose about 15% in fees. So, we'll go times.085. So, that brings me down to 1955. And then minus my uh what it costs for me to ship, which is about 85 cents. So minus.85. So that means that I net uh or what I what I get paid out from that transaction is $18.70. Now remember I paid $14 for that card. So $1870 minus 14 and I walk away with $4.70. Now to figure out my percentage of profit margin on that card, we're going to divide that by the $23. And so that brings me 20%. That's a 20% profit margin on that card. Okay. So that's on the marketplace. Uh, that's how the math kind of breaks down for that. Obviously, not every card sold for $20. My cheaper cards I actually price more above market. My higher price cards I price closer to market. It just really depends. So, it's really really hard for me to give you an accurate uh breakdown of how much money I actually made. Let's do the math with that same card on my Proseller site where I pay a lot less in fees. So, uh $20 card. I spent $14 on it. Uh I actually priced this at uh 5% under market. So, we're going to say 20 times 0.95.

[00:08:24]Um, so, uh, I get paid out and then I still pay 5% in fees. So, we're going to, uh, times another 95. Uh, nope.

[00:08:32]Times 0.95 again. So, it's 1805. So, 1805, uh, is what I take home. So, I actually make uh, less money on the proseller site than I do on the marketplace, which I'm totally okay with because uh, that's building a brand. And as you guys see, a lot of people buy a lot more from me on the proseller site.

[00:08:52]So, it's not just the uh $20 cards, it's higherend stuff, too. It's sealed stuff, too. All of those things. So, it's significant. Like, I'm I'm never upset about making less money when people actually shop for me versus the platform because it ends up working out to my benefit in the end. So, still around 20% profit margin. Let's go. Remember, I paid $14 for this card. So 405 divided by 19 which was my sales price still is 21 uh $21 or 21% profit margin. So let's just assume a 20% profit margin on these cards. So that means that if I sold $30,000 worth of cardboard times.20 that means I made $6,000 this month. Now just hold your horses. Okay before you think that I actually made $6,000 selling Pokemon cards this month. I mean maybe I did. And again, uh, things range, uh, very different from price to price, from card to card. Uh, but all 6,000 of this got put right back into my business. So, it's not like I'm taking this money out and doing anything else with it. I'm buying another collection and another collection and another collection and another collection. I'm not really even paying myself. I mean, there are some instances where I've taken money out of the business account to do stuff for my family, like uh, uh, finish this basement that I'm sitting in right now or put like a, you know, maintenance-free deck on the or maintenance-free porch on the front porch because I do not want to stain my porch ever again. Holy smokes. That sounds a sounds awful. Uh so those are things I've done where I've like paid myself if you will, but uh yeah, it was a good month in terms of sales. Now, let me tell you about some of the uh systems that I've had in place to make it happen. All right, so I would say the two biggest systems that I've had in place that have helped me do this as a side hustle. I would say the first one is just refining my ability to like sit down and do orders. Obviously, when you're selling uh 20 orders a day or when I go to pack orders, that makes it uh 40 orders every two days. That means that um it's going to I'm gonna have to be efficient. When I put the kids to bed, when I spend some time with my wife and I get down here in the basement, I got about a two hour, maybe two and a half, three hour window to shoot a video and get all the cardboard together and get all the orders ready to go out. So, it means that I got to, you know, figure out how to make that happen. And so, that's where uh using some tools like Sortsw Swift, which is my inventory management software, which has been really helping me uh refine the way that I go of pulling orders. And we're going to talk about listing here in a second, but that's been super beneficial. Um, so I'd say if you are going to do this as a side hustle and you're wanting to scale, the biggest hurdle that you are going to run into is just time. You only have so much time. And, uh, that's something that can be eliminated if you ever want to do this full-time, which is something that I don't want to do. I'm totally cool with this being a side hustle thing. So, uh, that's just one thing to keep in mind as you move forward with this is you will consistently run up against the constraints of time because you can only do so much with the 24 hours that you have in a day. Another system that I have put in place to make sure that this happens all right or make sure that I can do this uh, and scale this and continue growing this. This is one of the best months I've ever had and the fact that this is outside of the direct program means that this is probably the best single month that I've ever had selling Pokémon cards is I've got a scanner. I've got the uh the Rico 8170 scanner. And so when it comes to listing inventory, I don't like sort them. I run them through a scanner. I use a program called Sortswift. It helps me identify them. I throw them into a a batch in my inventory and then that's that. Like it's it's really really quick. I've made videos on that. You can find them on my channel. It's very very simple. Uh, and it I mean there was one evening where I listed a thousand cards where I I bought a collection a big expensive like you know $12,000 collection and I uh scanned it all and got it all uploaded in one night with you know 100% accuracy which is which is bananas. Like the ability to do that make just makes me know that I still have some like ringing out of this sponge that I can do in this business even as a side hustle because of things like automation and and all that. So that's another system that has helped me do this. And then I guess the third system, and this is maybe the most important one, and maybe the question that you're wondering as you're watching all of this is you're like, "Yeah, but like where do you get the cards, man?"

[00:12:37]Well, I've been sourcing inventory in the area. I'm in the Minneapolis St. Paul area of Minnesota. I've been sourcing inventory in this area for a long time. In the local Facebook groups, I post quite often saying that I'm buying. And because I've been doing that for a while, people reliably uh know that I can buy their stuff. that if someone has a large collection of Pokemon cards, hundreds, maybe sometimes thousands of cards, and they see their value go up on their collector app or whatever, and they're thinking like, man, I do not want to go out and sell these all individually, they be like, "Oh, what was that weird like pastor dude's name?" Like, yeah, like he he buy he's buying cards all the time. Like, I'm just going to sell to him at 70% and I'll just take my cash right now and go buy a pontoon or go buy a motorboat or go buy a a dirt bike or a four-wheeler, whatever. Whatever people up here in Minnesota do, man, it's uh probably buy a boat. So, uh, someone wants to do that and I just go to the bank, I give him cash and and he gives me all the cards and I, you know, I do this and I make my 20% margin and I call it good. And so, I've just done that enough to where people now reach out to me and say, "Hey TJ, I've got this collection. Do you want to buy it? Hey TJ, do you want to buy this? Hey, do you want to buy this?"

[00:13:30]And the answer to that, I hope I try every time to make that answer yes.

[00:13:34]Like, I want people to know that I'm a reliable person in the area that they can come to. And to be honest, making content has helped me source as well because there have been like that guy with the Dittos that I mentioned earlier on in the video. There have been people who've reached out to me, sent me an email, said, "Hey TJ, I've got this collection. Would you want to buy it?

[00:13:48]Can I send it to you? Let me know what you think. Let me know what you'd give me for it." I do that all the time. So, uh, I would say that that's like a bonus one. And so, if you are wondering about this, uh, sourcing is a big part of the equation. I've made videos on that, too.

[00:13:59]But, uh, yeah, that's another system that I have in place. And then before we wrap up, just a little bit of reality behind this. While this is one of the best months that I've ever done in terms of sales on TCG Player, this is probably also one of the months where I've worked the hardest. There is nothing about selling cards or building a trading card business that is passive. Like this is all active work. This is all uh hard work. And again, this is not me saying like, "Hey, look at me. Look at how hard I can grind." I'm just saying this because I want you guys if you're contemplating hopping into something like this to have eyes wide open knowing that like you will spend a lot of time uh conversing with people trying to source inventory. You will spend a lot of time uh uploading cards. Whether even if that is like using a scanner, using a software, you still have to confirm everything. You still have to upload it.

[00:14:39]You will spend a lot of time like this.

[00:14:41]Like I got a big uh this is just half of the orders that have to go out tonight.

[00:14:44]Uh I got them all ready and all pulled and ready to go. Like that is that is part of it. That is the reality. And I absolutely love it. Like I still get giddy when I see like a big order like this of Galarian Gallery cards and it's like a couple hundred order going out.

[00:14:55]Like that's sick. I love looking at all these as they go out. I love knowing that this person shopped specifically from me and I get to help them, you know, master set the Gallerian gallery from Crown Zenith or whatever it might be. Dude, that that's awesome. And then I also, you know, through the channel I've been able to build uh relationships with people and have so many cool conversations. Like I still get giddy about doing all of this. So I love it.

[00:15:13]But I just want you to know it's not easy. It's not passive. It is very hard work. But for me, and I think for you, it can be lucrative. But if you are wanting to take a next step, I've got a playlist here about how I would start in 2026. This has everything from like where to what to start with, how to pick a platform, mindset, all of that stuff.

[00:15:30]So I would encourage you to go check that out. Also, uh I document everything. I document the the good of this business, the bad, times when things go well for me, times when I make mistakes, all of that stuff. So, if you want to stay up to date with that, uh, make sure you are subscribed to the channel. And if you're looking for yeah, any help, uh, I've got all the resources down below that I use to ship things out. I've got I I hope my channel can be a resource to you as you get rolling.

[00:15:54]But I always say this as I finish all of my videos. Thank you guys so much for being here, for watching, and I believe that Jesus loves you, that he's got an incredible plan for your life. I will catch youall in the next one. Peace.