Sell Vintage Postcards on eBay

Uploaded 18th January 2009 - More to Follow

Introducing A Four Letter Word Postcard Sellers Swear By On eBay

That four letter word is ‘topo’, short for ‘topographical’, and it represents the most popular of all postcard collecting types, and regularly fetches double and triple figure sums on eBay, often breaking price records for similar items sold previously on eBay.

Topographical postcards (sometimes simply called ‘view cards’) depict geographical locations like towns, cities, villages.

There’s a very easy living to be made selling vintage topographical postcards on eBay, especially if focus on buying low cost  topographical postcards at flea markets and boot sales, and resell those postcards on eBay.

This does not mean you should ignore other postcard types that crop up inexpensively at auction and flea markets. But I suggest you put those to one side while you learn the simple process of selling their more profitable topographical counterparts.

Look at these wonderful prices for proof of sometimes staggering profits fetched on eBay for view postcards that are not unique and not all that rare:

*  1903 EALING Singapore to Hong Kong & Hainan Postcard - £170.35

*  MONTANA Marsh School, Evelyn Cameron c.1910 RP Postcard - £165.34

*  RPPC New Salem Kansas Santa Fe Railroad Depot Postcard  - $424.95 (at the time of selling approximately £216.18)

RP and RPPC in two of those listings stand for ‘Real Photographic’ and ‘Real Photographic Postcard / Post Card’.  Real photographic postcards are among the most collectable and expensive of all, in fact some collectors seek purely RPPC cards.  You’ll learn soon just why real photographic postcards are so valuable, it’s all down to rarity, and these are usually the rarest of all postcards, but not that difficult to find, keep reading to understand why.  I always spell out ‘Real Photographic’ in my listing for people unused to the many abbreviations used for the phrase, including R/P, RP, RPP, R.P. and, of course RPPC.

Two Words are All You Need to Sell Your Postcards on eBay

Two words guarantee virtually everyone interested in buying your postcard will find you on eBay.  Those words are ‘Postcard’ and the topographical location depicted.  Most postcard collectors use eBay’s search engine to find items to buy, very few search through eBay selling categories for reasons you’ll hear about soon.  I dare suggest a good postcard will always sell, and attract a high price, even if you choose completely the wrong category for your listing, and you misspell every single word in your title and listing, but you spell those two vital components correctly, namely ‘postcard’ and the geographical location.

Good Reasons to Sell Postcards, Mainly Topographical Types, on eBay

They're among the most collectable items and they virtually sell themselves.  Postcards rank third most collectable item worldwide, just behind coins and stamps.  They’re not the bits of worthless paper many people imagine, in fact some amazing prices can be fetched for postcards, notably on eBay, where items flea market visitors consider overpriced at a few pennies can fetch double figure, sometimes three figure sums. 

*  In the early days of postcard collecting – called ‘deltiology’ – almost every family had its own album, sometimes several.  These heirlooms were cherished and passed through the generations, postcards were rarely destroyed or lost.  Consequently many very early postcards remain in undamaged condition today, usually still in their original albums   So you can buy hundreds or thousands of postcards in just one day at specialist postcard auctions and non-specialist sales, especially complete household clearances from elderly deceased collectors.  You can actually buy hoards of postcards in just a few minutes, where traders in other antiques and collectibles take weeks or months to acquire stock to even contemplate the kind of money you'll soon be making.

*  Postcards are usually very small and can be stored safely, close together, side by side in boxes, boxes stacked high one on top of the other.  When I traded at postcard fairs, my entire postcard stock, once the biggest in the North of England, occupied a tiny corner of a spare bedroom.  Compare this to space needed by sellers of larger, more fragile, unusually shaped antiques and collectibles which need to be stored separately, surrounded by bubble wrap and plastic chips, in varying size boxes which must be placed separately on the floor, not stacked one above the other.  

*  Postcards are usually all the same shape, roughly the same weight, making them extremely easy to pack, very inexpensive to post.  You won’t have to waste time looking for boxes of varying size to pack and post your products, as happens to eBayers selling oddly shaped items.  All you need are a few cardboard backed envelopes or you could make your own from empty breakfast cereal boxes.  Postcards also fit into any local post box so Post Office visits are few as happens for larger more fragile items that need to be individually weighed and postage calculated.  Be aware you will have to visit the Post Office to Register or Record Deliver your postcards which is usually quite rare.

*  Because so few listing details vary between postcards – usually just location, age, publisher, postmark - you can create a template to suit every postcard you ever list from now to forever, where only title and illustration need changing each time.  This assumes you only list postcards in relatively good condition, otherwise faults must be highlighted in your listing.

To illustrate, imagine you have ten postcards, all in relatively good condition, all the same size, all the same weight.  Inside your listing you can say ‘Old postcard, not a reprint, no major faults, postally used’.  That suits every topographical postcard where no other important feature exists, good or bad, such as rare postmark or publisher, stamps torn off or corners bent.

If you are using listing software like Turbo Lister type this in the title space for your template:

PLACE NAME  Postcard  DATE

Set up all the other variables inside your listing, such as whether you’ll use a Gallery Picture, cost of postage, preferred payment methods, and so on.

If you are uploading directly through eBay you can list subsequent postcards where it says ‘upload similar item’ using your first listing as the template and make changes to subsequent postcards’ title and illustration as you go alone.

If you are using Turbo Lister, all you do now is duplicate the template, in this case ten times – keep the original safe for later listings.  Using Turbo Lister you can upload all items together and save even more time compared to listing items individually through eBay.

It takes about ten minutes (a bit less using Turbo Lister) to create ten listings this way where condition remains the same, namely without major faults such as creases, stamps torn away, heavily scribbled messages showing through to the front.

Turbo Lister users do it like this. Open the first template.  Change the title to such as:

Middle Street BLACKHALL COLLIERY Postcard 1909

The description is fine, ignore that box.  That is very good news because it takes thirty seconds or so to open the box to edit the description.  Change the illustration, again no box to open so no time wasted.  Change the price for each postcard if you wish but I tend to stick to £2.00/$4.00each for fairly common cards (I never list really common postcards), £4.99/$9.99 for rarer items.  Save your listing.  Open the next template and start again.

*  People who collect one postcard, typically collect lots of postcards, so you could develop a huge customer base of people who will watch your listings closely and buy from you again.

*  Listings are easy to keep track of even over several months for items that go unsold first time round.  While people selling books and prints, pottery and toys, must be continuously sorting through huge piles of stock to find recently sold items which were listed months before, you can organise the whole process using one of those modern plastic postcard albums with acid-free plastic pockets usually six to a page.  Make very certain your pages are acid-free and do not leave the album in a warm or moist location, all cause damage including foxing which depreciates postcards or ruins them completely.  Place the first postcard listed in the first pocket on the first page of the album; second card goes into the second pocket (horizontally or vertically, it doesn’t matter much).  Now when auctions end, starting first product, second product, and so on, you can open the album and begin removing cards in order they are placed in the album, leaving unsold cards in situ.  Once all sold cards are removed, move unsold cards forward to fill the empty spaces.  Now you can relist all the unsold items which will continue selling in the exact same order they feature in your album and you can begin adding new listings to spaces freed at the back of the album.  Cards that remain unsold after a few listings can be moved forward, as before, and listed in bulk with each album page having its own illustration in your listing.

Know a Card Is Valuable Even Before You Buy It

Ask this question before you buy any postcard to resell on eBay!

How often could this view have been created since postcards first appeared about 1870 and up to 1939? (At the advent of the Second World War postcard collecting fell into decline and only in the past thirty years has it regained popularity).  Most collectors consider 1939 the deadline between what should be called ‘old’ or ‘vintage’ and what is better called ‘modern’.  In time that 1939 deadline will shift, to the 1960s, or 1970s, but with a wealth of really fabulous postcards still existing from the late 1800s and early 1900s I recommend you stick to that 1939 deadline at least until pre-1939 cards run dry.  If they ever run dry which is very unlikely!

Here’s that question again:

How often could this view have been created since postcards first appeared about 1870 and up to 1939?

And here’s the answer:

*  If the view could be captured hundreds of times, even thousands, the postcard is not rare and could even be worthless.  So churches, parks and beaches that look almost exactly as they did in the late 1800s will not fetch high prices unless some other profitable factor exists alongside.

It’s an altogether different matter if the view could be captured just once, because this picture depicts the day the church caught fire, or it shows the Royal Family who visited there once, or it shows police arresting an infamous criminal or an eminent suffragette being released from prison.  In reality a really rare view may have existed for minutes or seconds only and few artists and photographers were likely to be present to record the event.  On occasion you'll find the card is very rare, even unique, as where something unusual and very unexpected happened which only photographers close to the scene may learn about and record the event.  Good examples are railway accidents, colliery disasters, tram crashes. 

Other Factors that Determine Rarity and Increase Value

*  Oftentimes a topographical postcard has some other feature, such as a postmark, postage stamp or autograph that makes it more valuable and likely to interest more than just postcard collectors. 

*  Real photographic postcards were created individually and required constant attention during the development process, unlike most printed postcards that emerged from machines in their thousands and were often poor quality compared to real photographs.  So a good real photograph of an unusual event could be very rare, possibly unique, and fetch hundreds of pounds if just two people are desperate to have it.

Tips

*  Generally speaking, the older the card, the more valuable it might be, although some modern cards are valuable for other reasons, because they are autographed, for example, or belonged to a famous owner.

*  Avoid unnamed locations except for really unusual cards or where clues exist to their location.  A postmark, for example, or a sender's address, might feature the location of the topographical view. 

*  Postcards go under ‘Collectables > Postcards’ in the UK which further divides into subject and topographical categories.  You can list topographical postcards under their appropriate UK county BUT be warned, this can cause more problems than it is worth.  This is because county boundaries have changed significantly over the decades and many UK towns, cities and villages exist in completely different counties than was so when these early postcards were printed.  So you might find a card, of my collecting area, captioned ‘High Hesleden Durham’, Durham being the county High Hesleden actually existed in all those years ago, the county in which it still exists.  But look in postal directories or other popular location guides and you’ll find High Hesleden listed under Cleveland purely because Hartlepool, in Cleveland, previously in Durham, (are you getting confused yet?), is our local postal area. 

Which eBay county category will likely buyers choose to find cards of High Hesleden, or hundreds of other places with similarly confusing county boundaries?  Don’t ever guess, just be sure your topographical area is spelled correctly in your title and your postcard will always be found by search engine savvy buyers.

So unless a topographical area is, was, and probably always will be in the same county it has existed since the postcard was printed, I suggest you avoid specific topographical sub-categories altogether on eBay and list your card under ‘Collectables > Postcards > Other Postcards’.

On eBay.com postcards go under ‘Collectibles’ (notice the spelling difference between .co.uk and .com sites), sub-category ‘Postcards & Paper’, then ‘Postcards’, followed by individual categories representing all the American States.

*  Keep listings separate for postcards from the same or nearby geographical areas.  This is because some people will be making last minutes bids on several items which, if selling too closely together, could find them missing some auctions and become disappointed and harassed and even losing interest altogether.  Five minutes between listings is enough time for people interested in consecutive items to move between bidding on one card to bidding on the next. 

Five Scams and Mistakes to Avoid at Auction

*  There’s a trick worked at offline auction which also works well online and it’s designed to con busy people out of their cash for albums of postcards which are potentially 95% worthless.  At any busy offline auction, with say three or four hundred postcard lots and just a few hours viewing time, many potential bidders will view just a few pages of most postcard albums, make a quick buying decision, then move to study another lot.

The con is where vendors include good quality cards in those first few pages and pack the rest with low value or even worthless cards.  Much the same happens on eBay and other online sources and in printed catalogues for many offline and online sales, where the first few pages of an album will be photographed in all their glory and the rest – the grot – left to your imagination.  Be very careful, check thoroughly at online and offline auction.  Ask questions and, if in doubt, it’s always better to study a handful of albums thoroughly and bid on these and pass on albums you haven’t studied from start to finish.

*  Old fashioned albums designed for inserting postcard corners into cut-out hinges can present a major and very unexpected problem for novice postcard buyers.  The problem can be caused innocently by past owners or deliberately by recent sellers. 

Postcards newly acquired by our Victorian ancestors were often manoeuvred and sometimes manhandled as they were placed beneath hinges, and corners often got cracked or creased in the process.  So today hundreds of cards may look in spectacular condition in an album that has not been touched for decades but in fact many cracked corners lie hidden and torn beneath those hinges.

*  Try always to attend auctions in person, not only to view but also to bid.  Opinions vary and it's not unusual for an auctioneer to describe something as 'old' in the catalogue which in collecting terms is better called 'modern'.  You can't always afford to bid on items you haven't viewed, and you must not trust another person's opinion no matter how qualified that person is.

* At offline auction try to check lots immediately before bidding starts.  This is because lots are sometimes tampered with, often mistakenly, usually deliberately, and what you viewed yesterday may be totally unlike the lots you'll bid on today. You’ll often find postcards you viewed yesterday have since been stolen or damaged.  More often postcards are moved between lots so an album that contained rubbish yesterday is packed with high value collectibles today,  Consequently that previously rubbish album will go for next to nothing, and those once quality albums, now worthless junk, will be a big disappointment to someone who viewed yesterday and buys today.   In cases like this you must contact the auctioneer right away, voice your concerns, suggest you should not be charged for the item.  Most will agree if the lot no longer compares to their catalogue description but it’s vitally important you check at least some of the expected contents while auction staff are present and see the problem first hand.

*  Sometimes high price items are concealed in old fashioned hinged albums behind less valuable postcards so all most people see is rubbish and low value pieces and bids will be low.  It’s hard to spot this sort of scam unless you look very closely.  It usually happens in albums packed with low value cards, which in itself means this is unlikely to be a genuine collection, namely one that was compiled decades ago.  That’s because virtually all genuine early collections contain at least a few better specimens; they will also reveal little difference in recipient and delivery address.  An album with lots of grot, lots of recipients, lots of delivery addresses, is more likely to be a dealer’s rubbish stock, placed in a vintage album to look like a genuine collection and tempt inexperienced bidders.   Those concealed high price postcards have been moved from better auction lots and replaced behind poor quality cards in low interest albums.  The album will fetch little and might include several high price gems.