There are four realistic places to sell Pokemon cards in the UK. A local card shop pays you on the spot, but it has to leave itself room to make a profit. eBay is free for private sellers, though every photo, listing, parcel and question is yours to deal with. Facebook groups and Marketplace cost nothing and carry the most risk. Consignment hands the whole job to an established seller in exchange for a share of each sale.
Which one is right comes down to what your cards are worth and how much of your own time you want to spend selling them. A shoebox of commons belongs at a shop or in a single lot. A few decent cards and a free weekend suit eBay. Graded cards, vintage holos and whole collections are where consignment earns its percentage.
Selling Pokemon cards to a local card shop
A shop is the quickest way to turn cards into money. You walk in, someone looks through what you have, and you leave with cash or store credit the same day.
The trade-off is the price. A shop is buying stock it has to sell on, so its offer has to leave room for its rent, its staff and its margin. That puts the offer below what the same cards would fetch sold straight to a collector. There is nothing wrong with that. It is how buying stock works, and it is worth knowing before you hand over anything valuable.
A shop makes the most sense for bulk commons and low value cards that are not worth photographing one by one, and for anyone who needs the money today. Ask whether the offer is in cash or store credit so you are comparing like with like, and if you have the time, get a second offer from another shop before you agree to the first.
If you found this page by searching for somewhere near you, the map results above it came from Google Business Profiles. Those are only for businesses that meet their customers in person, at their own premises or by travelling to them, and Google ranks them partly on how far each one is from the person searching. A service that works by post, like ours, does not appear there at all.
Selling Pokemon cards on eBay yourself
For a private seller in the UK, selling on eBay is free. eBay's own fee page says UK-based private sellers pay no final value fees and no regulatory operating fees when an item sells, with cars and other vehicles the only exception. Optional listing upgrades, international postage and very high listing volumes can still cost you something.
The buyer pays instead. On items from UK private sellers, eBay adds a Buyer Protection fee on top of your price, made up of 10p per item, 7% of the first £20, 4% of the part between £20 and £300, and 2% of the part between £300 and £4,000. On a card priced at £500 that adds £16.70 to what the buyer pays. eBay does not charge the fee on items bought from business sellers.
Free to list is not the same as free of work. Selling yourself means photographing every card front and back, checking what each one has actually sold for, writing titles a buyer will find, answering questions, packing each card so it arrives in the condition it left, posting it, and handling any return or any claim that a card was not as described. For five cards that is an evening. For five hundred it can turn into a part-time job.
eBay on your own account suits a handful of mid-value cards, sold by someone who has the time to list them properly and the patience to deal with buyers.
Facebook groups, Marketplace and collector forums
Selling directly to another collector costs nothing in fees and puts your cards in front of people who know exactly what they are looking at. It also means there is no marketplace standing between you and the buyer if something goes wrong.
If you go this way, agree how you will be paid before anything changes hands, never post a card until the money has cleared, and be wary of any buyer who pushes for an unusual way of paying. Meeting another collector in person, somewhere public, is the safest version of this route.
Consignment, where an established seller sells for you
Consignment sits between doing everything yourself and selling to a shop. You send your cards to a seller with an established account, and they photograph, list, sell and ship them, then pay you a percentage of each final sale price. Your cards are not bought from you. They stay yours until a buyer has paid for them.
That is the service we run. We have been selling trading cards since 2016, first as Lake Game Store, and our eBay store has sold more than 64,000 items, carries more than 33,000 positive feedback ratings and has more than 8,000 followers. When you consign with us, this is how it works.
- You keep between 85% and 95% of the final sale price, and your share rises as the price does. On our Standard rates a £500 sale pays you £440, a £1,500 sale pays £1,350 and a £3,000 sale pays £2,850. The payout calculator works it out for any price.
- We pay the eBay listing and final value fees, and the buyer pays the postage. Sales under £50 carry a £3 handling fee per item.
- Each item goes into one of our two ten day auctions every month, or into our eBay store at a Buy It Now price you set. If you would rather we priced it, that is £1 per item.
- Payouts are normally made within 10 to 14 working days of the buyer's payment being received, by bank transfer, PayPal or Wise.
Consignors who reach £50,000 or more in paid sales through us in any rolling twelve months can be granted VIP rates, which reach 95% from £2,500 instead of £3,000.
Compared with selling on your own account, the trade is simple. As a private seller on eBay you would keep the whole sale price, so our percentage is what you pay for the photography, the listings, the packing and posting, the buyer questions and returns, and for having your cards in front of an established store's followers rather than a brand new account's. Our store is a business account too, so buyers pay no Buyer Protection fee on top of our prices.
For a few cheap cards, that trade is hard to justify. For graded slabs, valuable vintage and collections running to hundreds of cards, the time it saves is usually the point.
Which route suits which cards
Bulk commons and cards worth a pound or two belong at a shop, or together in one lot. Our £3 handling fee on sales under £50 makes single low value cards poor value to consign one at a time. A lot listing is treated as one item, though, and priced on the lot's total, so a stack of commons sold together can still be worth sending.
A handful of mid-value cards, with time to spare, suit eBay on your own account.
Cards people are hunting for, graded slabs, valuable vintage, sealed product and whole collections suit consignment. Within consignment the route matters as well. Our auctions suit chase cards, hyped sets, fresh grades and anything without clear recent sales, because the bidding finds the price. Buy It Now suits low population slabs, niche promos, sealed product and higher end cards with a solid sales history, where waiting up to three months for the right collector is worth it.
Selling Pokemon cards near me, or by post
We do not have a shop to walk into. Consigning with us works by post, so it is the same whether you live in Sutton, where our PO Box is, or at the other end of the country. We accept consignments from abroad too.
The rule that catches people out is the courier. Your parcel has to reach us through Royal Mail, so from inside the UK that means posting with Royal Mail, and from abroad it means a service that hands over to Royal Mail for the final leg. Parcels delivered by Evri, DPD, Yodel, UPS or other couriers may be refused. Choose a tracked and insured service and pack the cards properly, because the parcel is your responsibility until we confirm it has arrived. Once it is with us, it is insured against events such as fire and theft. The shipping policy has the full detail, including the separate address for parcels sent from outside the UK.
Choosing where to sell your cards
A shop is the fastest route and pays the least. eBay is free to use and costs you the time. Facebook costs nothing and asks you to manage the risk yourself. Consignment costs a percentage and takes the work off your hands. If your cards are worth more than a shop will offer and you would rather not sell them one at a time, tell Lake Card Store what you have and we will come back with the route that suits each card.