Sellers who use eBay Standard Envelope to mail trading cards to customers now have the option of purchasing special eBay-branded envelopes designed especially for the service.
eBay Standard Envelope is a unique offering in that it offers limited tracking at a fraction of the cost – but it can only be used to send certain types of ephemera including trading cards, stamps, and postcards, for example.
A prolific poster on the eBay discussion boards, “wastingtime10,” noticed the new envelope on Tuesday:
“eBay said they were working on more flexible options for trading cards and I spotted this today,” adding a link to the item for sale in the eBay Shipping Supply store.
“It’s a plain number 10 envelope with a 3 pocket insert for trading cards and an eBay branded cardboard insert to offer protection,” Wastingtime10 wrote. “The cardboard mailers have had issues regionally with USPS claiming too rigid in some areas.”
According to the eBay listing, the “3-piece trading card kit” includes:
1) Outer #10 envelope
2) Cardboard insert for protection
3) 3-pocket insert that can support up to 8 cards per pocket
Sellers can purchase 100 of the envelopes for $41.33 (which works out to 41 cents per envelope).
The eBay Shipping Supply Store is managed and operated by Bascom, which is licensed to sell eBay branded supplies. In fact, eBay gives Store subscribers a quarterly coupon they can apply to purchases made from the store.
Wastingtime101 noted in their post, “What I don’t see mentioned in the listing is the interior dimensions of the pockets. Will work fine for most cards, but some cards are over standard size (I think MTG cards are the larger ones?) I suppose if you have Magic cards you could use these sans pocket insert if the inserts are too narrow for those cards.”
eBay has prioritized certain categories including trading cards as part of its “focus category” strategy. Stay tuned to see what reception sellers who try out the envelopes give them. Will eBay branded #10 envelopes containing trading cards have a better chance of reaching their intended recipient?
garbage….a seller with any sense would not use those 3-piece trading card kits, and most buyers will not want their card sent that way.
One has to be a compete moron to spent 41 cents for a special ebay labeled envelope to mail a trading card in. You can buy a whole package of 100 envelopes for less than 5.00 at your local dollar store and put your own flimsy piece of cardboard in it. Just another one of fleecebays rip offs.
Whoever designed those has never sent cards before. 3 non-sleeved cards loose in pockets lol. $41.33 + tax vs less than $2 for 100 envelopes from a dollar store lol. A huge disaster waiting to happen.
The eBay Standard Envelope Program never fails to find new ways to disappoint. The new “three” pocket envelopes might be useable for color slides. Unfortunately, eBay does not list color slides in the “Collectible Railroad Slides Category” as eligible for the eBay Standard Envelope Program. A recent spate of missing shipments of slides in rigid, square, 5 x 5-inch floppy disk mailers suggests that changes to postal sorting equipment in the Boston Area may be causing mailers to be shredded or destroyed. It is likely that a #6 or #10 envelope with the slide held in position by two pieces of appropriately joined presentation cover paper could pass through sorting equipment without damaging slides between the paper strips. The slide would also be protected by a clear archival slide protector to avoid scratching. Does anyone know how to effectively contact eBay to add new categories to the protected list?
Slides of substantial value are shipped in #000 padded mailers between two pieces of comic book board further protected by a piece of cardboard. The extreme price gap between the low cost of mailing a one-ounce eBay Standard Envelope for 63 cents and a two-ounce USPS Ground Advantage package for 6 to 7 times more leaves a huge value gap between the eBay $20 maximum and a reasonable minimum for USPS tracking. In the stamps category I found that an item selling for $20 was eligible while $20.01 was not. I have been printing labels for the occasional stamp selling for $20 or less. The label on the front of a #6 envelope adds unnecessary rigidity. I found that cutting the half-sheet label to the height of the envelope and rapping excess around the ends produced the most flexible result.
What should eBay do?
1. Add categories like color slides.
2. While maintaining $20 insurance, allow sale prices up to $100 into the program to fill the “tracking gap.”
3. Set up print options for #6 or #10 envelopes.
Meanwhile, I will use coupons to buy some of the new envelopes at no cost and hope that eBay sees the light about adding new categories.