Burbank Sportscards hits eBay milestone

By Stephen Laroche | Beckett Media

For buyers of single cards, Burbank Sportscards has long been one of the most popular and well-stocked dealers in the hobby to pick up an elusive item from. With an inventory of more than 40 million cards, its staff spends long hours scanning and uploading card images to their Beckett and eBay stores and roughly 5,000 fresh items are added to their online inventory each day.

All of that hard work has seen them hit a milestone as they have just hit the two million mark by putting a 2002 Topps Stadium Club Photographer’s Proof of Keyshawn Johnson up for sale.

“It was a feeling of pure elation as it was a milestone that seemed impossible only two years ago,” said Burbank’s Rob Veres. “My team takes great pride in what they do and they’re telling me they can’t wait to hit three million as sales increase exponentially.”

Previously, Burbank had to react to a change in policy by eBay where every item for sale needed an image and Veres decided about 18 months ago that they were going to scan their entire inventory. To facilitate that gargantuan task, they bought eight high-speed scanners to obtain front and back images for every card and it is a task they work on daily — especially as new inventory is added.

“Our goal with our eBay store is to give the wider market sports fan that isn’t necessarily a collector an introduction to our great hobby by providing affordable cards that bring them back to their youth,” Veres said.

As Burbank’s staff continues to sort and scan at a feverish pace, collectors will also benefit as they soon will be able to search the store’s inventory by team as well.

“We’ve also been working on our customers’ ability to search our eBay inventory by team,” Veres said. “This is a grueling undertaking as we’re editing two million different titles to include the team name in the short description. We’ve hired a few folks to specifically work on this and we hope to have it done this summer. As an example of this a query for ‘1992 Red Sox’ yields 726 different results. This is great for the customer.

“Our next milestone, three million unique items that are team searchable, [is] targeting April of 2016. But knowing my team, it’ll be much sooner.”

With many cards in the inventory being duplicates, Burbank will be list many of them with their actual photo instead of using stock images. Veres noted that these cards stand out on their site due to a SKU number being part of the title. By doing this, sales have strengthened and staff have been able to pull these cards more efficiently.

“Jim Beckett gave me my best advice ever, ‘Do what’s difficult and do it better than anyone else’ [and] with our eBay store I think we’ve achieved that,” Veres said. “The market for single cards has never been stronger for us. If you’re willing to do the work and seek out the best selling venues, there are no limits to success.”

Stephen Laroche is the editor of Beckett Hockey and a contributor to other Beckett Media publications. Have a comment, question or idea? Send an e-mail to him at slaroche@beckett.com. Follow him on Twitter @Stephen_Laroche.