Listing the cards you already have
Nearly every guide to selling Pokémon cards online is written for somebody doing it once: here is where to sell, expect 60 to 80% of market, meet in a public place. Useful advice, aimed at a person with a shoebox.
A dealer has a different problem. The stock changes every weekend, the same card can be listed and unlisted three times before it goes, and the post that sells it might still be up when somebody buys the card off your table. This is about that version.
In this guide
1. What belongs on Marketplace and what does not
Marketplace is local, free for local sales, and its audience is not a card audience. That combination decides what to put there.
- Good fit: mid-value raw singles, sealed product, and lots. Anything where the buyer is nearby, the price is low enough to pay cash for, and nobody needs convincing about grading.
- Poor fit: high-value slabs. A PSA 10 in front of an untargeted local audience gets lowballs and tyre-kickers; it belongs where people are looking for exactly that, which is eBay or a card marketplace.
- Surprisingly good: bulk, as a lot with a flat price. "Roughly 500 commons and uncommons, mostly Scarlet & Violet era, $40 the lot" sells to somebody starting out, and sells fast, and clears a box off your floor.
Shipped orders carry a fee; local pickup does not. If you ship, that fee is a cost of the sale and belongs in your books like any other — see the bookkeeping guide on why a sale without its costs is revenue wearing a better name.
2. The fields Facebook actually asks for
The form is short and two of the fields do most of the work. Knowing them in advance is what makes listing a card take a minute instead of five.
| Field | What to put |
|---|---|
| Title | The card, the set, the number, the condition. See the next section — this is the field that decides whether anyone sees the post at all. |
| Price | A round number, set slightly above your floor. See below. |
| Category | Toys & Games, or Collectibles. Pick one and use it every time; your own listings cross-promote each other. |
| Condition | New for sealed, Used – Like New for a NM single. Do not stretch this. A buyer who drives across town for a "like new" card that is edge-worn does not buy, and does not come back. |
| Description | Set, number, condition in your own words, and whether you will meet locally. Three lines is plenty. |
| Photos | Front and back. Section 4. |
Price slightly above your floor, in a round number. Marketplace buyers message to haggle; that is the culture of the place and arguing with it costs you sales. If $45 is the number you are happy with, list at $50 and let them win $5. If you list at $45 and hold firm, you get the same money less often.
Know the floor before you post. Deciding it in a message thread, with somebody waiting, is how a card goes for less than it cost you.
3. Writing a title people search
Marketplace search is literal. It matches words, it does not know that Charizard ex and Charizard EX are the same card, and it has no idea what 199/165 means unless you type it.
So put in what a buyer would type, in the order they would type it:
| Weak | Better | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Charizard card | Pokemon Charizard ex 199/165 151 Near Mint | Catches the name, the number, the set and the condition. Four different searches land on it. |
| Pokemon bulk | Pokemon bulk lot 500 cards Scarlet & Violet commons uncommons | "Bulk" alone competes with everything; the count and the era are what somebody actually searches. |
| Sealed ETB | Pokemon Prismatic Evolutions Elite Trainer Box sealed | Nobody searches "ETB". They search the product name. |
Write "Pokemon", not "Pokémon". It is the wrong spelling and it is what people type. Use the accent in the description if it bothers you.
Do not stuff. A title with eight card names in it reads as a scam listing and gets reported, and Marketplace is quicker to hide a post than to explain why.
4. Photos: two, and what they must show
Front and back. The back is not optional and it is the one most sellers skip — it is where edge wear, whitening and bends show, and a buyer who cannot see it assumes you are hiding something.
- Plain background, even light. A kitchen table in daylight beats anything else, including a lightbox under a lamp.
- No flash. It blows out the holo and hides exactly what people are looking at.
- Fill the frame. A card photographed from a metre away is a card nobody can assess.
- The actual card. Not a stock image, not a photo of a different copy. A buyer who finds out at the meet does not buy, and a dealer who does this twice in the same town stops getting messages.
5. The one that costs you: selling it twice
A card sells at your table on Saturday. Its Marketplace post is still up. On Tuesday somebody drives forty minutes to meet you for a card you no longer own.
That is the mistake with the longest tail in this whole guide. It is not a lost sale — it is a wasted trip for somebody who is now telling people about it, in a local scene where the same thirty buyers turn up at every show.
It happens because the shelf and the listings are two separate things that both change:
- A card sells at a show and the post stays up
- A card sells on Marketplace and goes to the table anyway, because nobody pulled it from the case
- A card gets listed twice, from two different sessions, at two different prices
There is no clever fix at the Facebook end. The fix is that one place has to know both — what is on the shelf and what is posted — so that taking a card off one takes it off the other. If that place is your head, it works until the weekend you do two hundred and forty transactions.
A rule that works without software: when a card sells at your table, pull the post before you hand over the card. Not after the show, not that evening. While the buyer is still counting out the money, because that is the only moment you are guaranteed to remember.
6. Listing thirty cards without writing thirty posts
The real cost of Marketplace is not the fee. It is that every card is a form, and thirty cards is thirty forms, and so the cards that would sell for $20 never get listed at all — which is most of a dealer's inventory.
Three things cut that down:
- Decide the shape once. Title format, description format, category, how you word conditions. Write it down. After that each listing is filling in blanks rather than composing.
- Lot the tail. Anything under about $5 is not worth a form. Three cards for $20, ten for $50, the whole box for $40. One listing, one meet, one transaction.
- Photograph in a session. Twenty cards in one sitting, same spot, same light, is twenty minutes. Twenty cards one at a time across a week never finishes.
7. One link instead of thirty posts
There is a version of this that avoids most of the forms: post a few cards on Marketplace, and point at everything else.
List the handful most likely to be searched for, and in the description — and in your Instagram bio — put one link to the rest of your stock. Buyers who were going to message you about one card browse thirty instead, and the cards that were never worth a form are suddenly visible.
It also changes the conversation. "Do you have any Umbreon" is a message you answer forty times; a link answers it once, and keeps answering it while you are at a table.
Where the software comes in
Everything above works with a notebook. The parts that do not scale are the two this product exists for, so here is plainly where it fits:
Clody writes the listing from the card already in your inventory — title, price, condition, category, description and which photo to attach, as the fields that form actually has. It invents nothing: no grade you did not record, no price you did not set. The same text comes out as one block for Instagram or Whatnot.
It also keeps the two sides in step. Mark a card as listed and Clody knows; sell it at your table and it tells you which post to pull down. That is section 5, handled by something that does not forget on a Saturday.
And the link in section 7 is a feature rather than a workaround: publish a selection of your stock as a public page at your own address, put that in your bio, and the rest of your inventory is one tap from every post you make.
Free to start, with 14 days of Pro on the house. But the method above is the method either way — a dealer who pulls the post while the buyer counts the money is ahead of one with a subscription who does not.