Business is funny. The initial investment always hurts. The good news is that once you start making profits, you can run a business off of profits. Back when I started selling warhammer bits on ebay, I went about $100 in the hole before I started slowly climbing out. Eventually, I broke even and starting running off of my profits. When I hit $0, I had about $70 worth of inventory laying around. I still have quite a bit that I’m going to start selling off, but all-in-all it took me about 2 months to break even.
That’s when I branched off and my friends convinced me to play magic the gathering. And that’s worked out well for me because I’m able to turn a profit on that, too. I wrote about luck last week and I’m still seeing plenty of that same luck these days. Just a few days ago I pulled a Cavern of Souls, a rare land that’s only going to go up in value once Ravnica rotates out. Same with my Ral Zareks, those didn’t sell at $23/ea., but prices are rebounding around $19/ea. and that’s not bad.
I recently purchased about $80 worth of removal spells for $55, auctions that ended either at 3AM or some other terrible time that not many people are around. And I’m going to turn around and sell 3 of those cards to turn back those $55, returning myself to $0 on those, despite having 6 cards that are worth a lot of money (relatively speaking).
This is a lot of fun, buying and selling and yeah, it has it’s risks, but if you take every precaution you can, and make every effort to please the customer, you’re going to end up better than you started, and I’m okay with that.