Back by Popular Demand: Volume Customer Discounts

By Dean Hanley
Founder and Owner, Deans Cards

Back By Popular Demand are our Volume Discounts for customer orders. You have spoken and we have listened. Stop on by our website to see how low our prices have gone. Here is a summary of how our discounts work.

The Primary Mission Statement of Dean’s Cards, or our purpose for being, is to “make vintage card collecting fast, easy and fun”. Two of the many things we do to enable this is to “offer conservatively graded vintage cards at competitive prices”. Another goal that we have is “to strive to stock at least one of every vintage card online, in each of the popular grades in stock”. 

The Dean’s Cards Surplus Inventory Discount, often referred to simply as “Inventory Discounts”, help us to achieve each of these objectives.

Inventory Discounts  

The idea of the Dean’s Cards Inventory Discounts is simple. Dean’s Cards has over a million cards online. We buy and sell thousands of vintage cards each week. The as the quantity of an “item” (a card, in a particular grade) in the Dean’s Cards Inventory increases, it triggers a higher Inventory Discount and lowers the net price of the item by 10%.


When Dean’s Cards decreases or sells out of a certain item, the Net Price of that item increases. The higher price is then reflected in our Dean’s Cards Bid Software, which allows us to bid more aggressively and replace the items with low quantities. We strive to be your “one stop shop” for vintage cards.

The Inventory Discount applies only to the cards from before 1981. It also applies to all magazines.

  
Volume Discounts on Customer Orders

As the dollar amount or volume of your order increases, so does the percentage of your volume discount. Volume Discounts begin at $50 and top out at 20% when the invoice amount (net total after Inventory Discounts are applied) reach $1000. Volume Discounts are based off the Total Net Price of the items in an Order, before tax or shipping charges.

 Getting Dean’s Best Price

With these two discounts, you can rest assured that you are getting our best prices. You also get the benefit of knowing that we do not give any other discounts, to anyone, on any product - under any circumstance. Dean’s Cards was founded in 2001 and we have never made an exception to this policy.

The reason for this policy is simple: Our customers know that they are getting our best price, so they know that they do not have to contact us to negotiate on every order. This is all part of making buying from Dean’s Cards fast,easy and fun. From our perspective, with the amount of business that we do on a daily basis, we would be overwhelmed by the number of inquiries.

If you have any questions please contact us.

Dean Hanley, founder and owner of DeansCards.com, is considered one of the foremost experts on the subject of vintage baseball cards, other sports and non-sports cards and has a regular column in the Sports Collectors Digest and publishes articles on his blog.

Dean has also written two books on vintage sports cards: The Bubble Gum Card War: The Great Bowman & Topps Sets from 1948 to 1955 and Before There Was Bubble Gum: Our Favorite Pre-World War I Baseball Cards. Both are available in eBook and paperback form.

Vintage Baseball Card Pricing

Vintage baseball card pricing and baseball card values are often a point of debate among collectors.  What a card will (or will not) sell for is often a surprise for many sellers.

A few years ago when Dean’s Cards was a new site, I would often list items online at the Beckett Adjusted (for Condition) Book value or ABV.  There were a few times, when a dealer would go online and buy out the entire inventory and resell them at a profit.  Even worse, some book values were too high and the items would sell slowly or not at all.  That is a very frustrating feeling.

Although Beckett Price Guides and the Sports Collectors Digest Price Guides are a decent reference for sports card pricing, Dean’s Cards has developed our own retail pricing over the years.  I truly feel that the pricing that Dean’s Cards uses is more accurate for us than the Beckett or SCD Prices.  I do not make this boast lightly.

Both Beckett and SCD  sell their pricing, but neither actually buys or sells sports cards!  It is much like the Priest who gives marriage advice.  He may be very intelligent and well educated on the subject matter, but there is no substitute for experience.

Dean’s Cards buys cards from private collectors, online sellers and other dealers.  We also sell hundreds of thousands of sports and non-sports cards through the Dean’s Cards eStore.  We know when something moves fast or does not sell at all.  We also know which cards are scare and which are plentiful.  We build dozens and dozens of sets each year.  Quite often we will notice that a particular card always seems to be missing.

Please do not get me wrong.  Both Beckett and SCD Price Guides are good products and are a credit to the hobby.  The people that work there know a lot about cards, but Dean’s Cards has the advantage of having an 850,000 card (and counting) inventory of which to gather information.  We can look at a simply look at our online inventory for a particular year and observe that we have twelve of card #253, twenty-three of card #254, seventeen of #255 and only one of card #256.

A great example of a rare common card is the 1970 Topps Al Oliver.  It seems that we are always missing that card.  What is so special about it?  I have no idea, but we always seem to be missing it to complete the set and it is usually hard to find when I go shopping for it online.

Another example is the 1969 Topps World Series Cards.  We have built dozens of 1969 Topps sets and we always have to go looking for those cards.  Those cards are way under priced in the official price guides.

A final example are the 1966 Topps high number baseball cards can rarely be bought for below book value in any condition.  For that reason, a 1966 Topps set is one of the hardest to complete.

As we adjust the pricing for different sets over time, I will make a blog posting of our observations.  Hopefully, we will be able to make our pricing available online in the near future.

Please leave your comments and examples of other cards that are “mis-priced”.