Hello again party! Welcome back to more fun in the world of collectibles, comics, and action figures!
First note, I still haven’t opened Longbow Batman, I have a mental block that’s not getting released any time soon.
Back to the thread though, I figured since I explained how the grading and inventory process worked I should show you how I actually ship the items I’m going to grade. Which is fun, I know you all probably love shipping, but you should know that it’s pretty amazing, and since I do it professionally I have a somewhat behind the scenes appreciation for exactly what could go wrong when you ship something.
Which is to say that there’s an immense amount of things which could go wrong on any shipment, namely it could just straight up get lost. Other than that, it could get damaged in all manner of fun ways. I’ve seen boxes get crushed, ripped, stepped on, skewered by forklifts, and water logged. There’s literally any number of terrible things which could happen when you hand a valuable off to someone else, no matter how well it’s packaged. Welcome to my stress dreams!
So when I’m shipping what could amount to a couple thousand dollar payday I will absolutely never ship with the Post Office. I will 100% admit my personal bias here, I work with them a lot, I ship most of my action figures with them, but I will absolutely never put my prized possessions into their hands. Why? Well, because they kinda suck. They’re certainly getting better, especially after they lost an almost insane amount of money over the course of the rise of e-commerce and the loss of major customers. I should note that I’m not speaking about any instance in particular, mainly about the opportunity cost of being so terrible as to be a common excuse for not shipping something on time. Didn’t get that present out in time, or worse forget it totally? Welp, the post office must’ve lost it, those rascals. We’ve all done it, and it’s a totally plausible excuse, especially because you have no tracking number generally to search!
So when I need to get something delivered with a reasonable degree of certainty I will use either UPS or Fedex, depending on who will give me the better deal. I’ve worked closely with both companies in the past, and continue to do so now, so I wont say which one has the edge in my book, lest there be some repercussions.
But when you’re shipping valuables to be graded you’re going to want to protect them as much as possible. I’m going to describe my method for shipping cards here, but it’s reasonably similar to shipping comics, at least the principles are the same either way, and I don’t really feel like taking a bunch of pictures of the same things over and over.
So you’re going to start out with your card itself. It’s as nice and clean as you can make it and you’re about to somewhat roll the dice on a grade. Good for you, first thing you’re going to want to do is toss that slim piece of card stock worth a stupid amount of money right into a cheap plastic sleeve. Now, this isn’t just any plastic sleeve, it’s quite soft. Mmmm, yes feel how soft and supple it is. It’ll give some nice protection to the card from anything that could scratch it. But really, its purpose is to take the scratches that may inevitably come from the next thing you’re going to put it in, another plastic sleeve!
This time a more rigid plastic sleeve. It’s made out of harder plastic and provides better resistance to scratches, dents, and folds. It’ll keep your card nice and flat, and really limit any damage from scratching.
Next up is my own somewhat special trick. I stack my sleeved cards up on top of each other in just the way I’ve itemized them on the submission sheet to the grader, and then I wrap that whole thing in plastic wrap, several times in fact. Which might sound strange but is entirely common within my industry.
What I’m doing here is attempting to provide as much structure as I can to a bunch of different things that all want to slip and slide around. I want the people opening my package and taking inventory to see one whole stack of cards and not have to fish around the box, lest they lose some in the process. Also, shipping as one solid item tightly wrapped will keep the cards from getting bounced around the box while shipping. See, it’s win-win!
From there, I’ll tape my plastic wrap to itself, and then toss it (not literally) into a cardboard shipping box. Inside the box I’ll stuff a ton of butcher paper around the cards so that they don’t jostle around too much. This brown, crumply, paper is just awesome. It’s rigid enough to hold an item in place, crumply enough to be molded into any cavity I want to fill, recyclable, and (here’s the best part) extremely cheap! I can ship a bunch of packages nice and packed with a roll of paper which costs me something like a dollar. It’s awesome and I love this stuff so much. Personally, I think it’s better than the air bags you get from an amazon package, but that’s just me.
From there I’ll apply a couple bands of tape to seal up the box, and then apply my label and ship it off, usually the last thing I do is give the little soldier a kiss for good luck and a silent prayer to not get lost amongst the throngs of other packages running through the system that particular day. When I get home I’ll generally check the tracking details obsessively and sleep fitfully until I can confirm that the items got where they were supposed to go. When they get shipped back to me I’ll continue the same scheme of obsessive compulsive, stressed actions except this time I have the added anxiety of not actually knowing what the grades are for each item. Sure, I could know what they are without having to wait, but you never want to know what your Christmas presents are before the Christmas morning, the waiting is both the hardest and best part.
Ok, well that one’s a doozy! It’s time to stop the ranting for a while so that I can go check on some packages that I shipped. As always, if you’re interested in purchasing anything go take a look at my eBay listings, I’m rapidly depleting my inventory of action figures and I’ll be switching over to low grade cards and comic books, so keep checking to see if there’s anything you like and might want to pick up for a bargain.
Some of the higher dollar items are going to be sold with some auction houses which specialize in these things, so I’ll send out the details for those when they go live, specifically because it’s kinda fun to see how all of this works. Ok, enough now, thanks for reading, share with a friend! It’s dangerous to go alone.