What percentage of market should I offer on a walk-up collection?

There is no single right number, and any guide that gives you one is guessing at your costs. What matters is that your percentage covers your fees, your holding time, and the dead cards in the pile, and that it is different for the top end than for bulk. A slab you can move next weekend and a box of commons you will haul to four shows are not the same risk, so they should not carry the same rate.

The seller wants me to price every card. What do I say?

Tell them plainly that pricing a few hundred cards individually is an hour of work you cannot do at a table mid-show, and that the number would not change much anyway. Offer the alternative: you will price the top cards openly, in front of them, and lot the rest. If they want a full itemized appraisal, that is a different service on a different day.

How do I handle a collection that is worth less than the seller thinks?

Show them, do not tell them. The sort does most of this work: once the bulk pile is visibly ninety percent of the box, the conversation changes on its own. Then be specific about the few cards that do carry value and what condition or printing is holding them back. People accept a low number far better when they can see which cards produced it.

Should I buy a collection with cards from games I do not sell?

Only if you can price them near zero and the rest of the box justifies the buy on its own. Cards you have no buyer for are storage, not inventory. It is usually cleaner to say up front that you are only pricing the Pokémon.

Buying a Collection at Your Table

Someone sets a shoebox on your table and asks what you would give for it. You have a line behind them and maybe six minutes. Here is a way to work that collection without guessing and without losing the deal.

Walk-up collections are the best margin most dealers see all weekend, and the fastest way to lose money if you rush. The seller usually has no idea what is in the box, or what they want for it. You have to sort it, value it, and put a number on it while the show keeps moving around you.

The fix is not being faster at math. It is having a fixed sequence you run every time, so the only thing that changes from box to box is the cards. What follows is that sequence: set the terms, sort, sample the top end, lot the rest, make the offer, and log the buy before the seller walks away.

Set the terms before you touch a card

Thirty seconds of questions up front saves you from a twenty minute dig that ends in nothing. Before you open the box, get four things straight.

Are they selling or price-checking? Ask directly. Plenty of people want a free appraisal. That is fine, but you should know which conversation you are in.
Cash or trade credit? Say your spread out loud now, not after you have a number. Credit is usually worth more to them and costs you less, so offer it as the better of the two.
All or nothing, or can you cherry-pick? Some sellers want the box gone. Others want you to buy the good cards and leave them the rest. Those are two different offers and you need to know which one you are pricing.
How long do they have? If they are walking the floor for an hour, ask them to come back. A collection you can work between customers is worth more than one you rush.

Know your own ceiling before the weekend starts, too. Decide what you are willing to put out in cash across the whole show and treat it as a hard number. Buying is only good margin if you still have cash left for the deal that walks up Sunday morning.

Sort first, price second

Do not price cards as you pull them. You will anchor on the first good card you see and lose track of the rest. Sort the whole box into piles first, then price the piles. Four piles handles almost everything:

Top end. Anything that could plausibly clear a hundred dollars. Chase cards, older holos, alt arts, slabs, sealed product.
Real singles. A few dollars up to that top-end line. This is the pile that decides most offers.
Bulk. Commons, uncommons, played-out rares. Priced by the count, never by the card.
Not for you. Other games, damaged cards, non-card items. Say so early rather than quietly valuing them at zero.

Sort standing up, over the table, with the seller watching. It is faster, and it does something useful for the negotiation: they see the bulk pile grow. Watching four hundred commons stack up next to eleven real cards sets expectations better than anything you could say.

Takeaway: the sort is the pitch. Do it in the open.

Sample the top end, do not exhaustively price it

The top pile is the only one worth looking up card by card, and even there you are sampling, not auditing. Price the five to ten cards that carry the box and estimate around them.

For each one you check, three things matter:

The printing. Same art, wildly different card. First edition versus unlimited, holo versus reverse versus non-holo, the set symbol, the card number. This is the most common way a walk-up buy goes wrong. Confirm the printing before you look at any price. Why one card has many prices covers that failure mode in detail.
The condition. Turn it over and tilt it under the light. Edge wear and surface scratches do not show face-on in a hall with bad lighting. A card you buy as near mint and sell as lightly played is a real loss you will not notice until you list it.
The realistic middle of recent comps. Not the high sale, not the asking price on the first listing you find. The number cards like this one actually change hands for.

Scanning is faster than typing here, and it protects you from the printing problem. The CardOps scanner matches a card on device against a 20,000+ Pokémon card catalog and attaches its current market value, so you confirm which printing you are holding and what it is worth in one motion. It works with no signal, which matters in a hall where the network is gone by ten in the morning.

Slabs are their own case. A graded card is a known quantity and prices fast, but do not let a slab set the tone for the box. The raw cards next to it are still raw. Our guide to graded versus raw stock covers how differently the two move.

Price the middle and the bulk as lots

The real singles pile is where dealers lose the most time. Do not price it card by card. Fan it, count the cards that look like they carry value, and apply a per-card average you trust based on what you are seeing.

You are buying the pile, not the cards. Some will beat your average and some will be worth nothing when you get them home. If you would not buy the pile at your number knowing a fifth of it is dead, the number is too high.

Bulk gets a rate, not a valuation. Apply your per-thousand rate and move on. If the seller pushes back, explain what bulk actually costs you: it has to be sorted, stored, hauled to the next show, and sat on. Our guide to pricing bulk commons without losing hours goes through that math.

It is also fine to decline part of a collection. "I will take these eleven and the slabs, and pass on the bulk" is a real offer, and often a better one for both sides than a lowball on the whole box.

Takeaway: price three piles three different ways. Card by card for the top end, per pile for the middle, per thousand for the bulk.

Make an offer you can explain out loud

An offer you cannot explain is an offer that gets refused, and worse, one that gets you a reputation. Say the number, then say how you got there, in that order.

Something like: "Nine hundred cash, or eleven hundred in trade. That is mostly the Charizard and the two slabs. The middle pile I am counting as a lot, and the bulk I am taking at my usual rate."

Three things make that work.

You showed your piles. They watched the sort, so the breakdown is not abstract.
You named the spread. Cash versus credit was on the table from the start, not produced as a surprise.
You did not apologize for the margin. You carry the cards, the risk, the table, and the time. A dealer who acts embarrassed about a fair offer invites an argument about whether it is fair.

Build your fees into the number before you say it. Booth cost, travel, payment processing, and shipping on anything you move online all come out of that margin. If you have not loaded those into your floor, read tracking booth fees and show expenses. A buy that looks good at the table and bad at the end of the month is usually a fees problem, not a pricing problem.

If the seller says no, leave it clean. Give them your name and tell them the offer stands through the weekend. A fair number of no's come back Sunday afternoon after they have walked the room.

Log the buy before the seller walks away

This is the step that gets skipped, and the one that costs the most later. A collection you buy for nine hundred dollars is nine hundred dollars of cost basis spread across a few hundred cards. If you do not record it now, you are reconstructing it from memory in April, or selling the top card in three months with no idea what you paid for it.

Record three things at minimum, right there at the table:

What you paid, and whether it was cash or credit.
What you got, at least the top-end cards individually and the rest as counted lots.
Which show, so the buy lands against that weekend's profit instead of a general pile.

Show Mode in CardOps is built for this window: search inventory, sell, trade, and log buys in seconds, with the show's profit updating live as you go, including what you just spent. It keeps working with no signal and syncs when you are back online. That matters more than it sounds, because the moment you are most likely to skip the entry is the moment the hall's network is down and there is a line behind the seller.

Allocating cost basis across a lot is a judgment call, not a formula. The usual approach is to assign the top-end cards close to what you actually valued them at and spread the remainder across the rest. Tracking cost basis on card inventory covers how to do that so the numbers hold up at tax time.

Takeaway: the buy is not done when the cash changes hands. It is done when it is logged.