ne1seenmykeys

While that is unfortunate, the purpose of this thread isn't to come and complain about CSG. If you have complaints about them I suggest you give them a call. I put that in like the first or second post in the thread. Thanks. If you want to follow along with this thread, then please include the dates in the given template. Thanks again.

Yeah I would call them bc a 206-card bulk order I sent them in late Aug (They received it on Aug 24th I believe) has been back to me for a couple weeks now.

I'm not trying to get a definite amount of time determined bc I understand the turnaround times are dictated solely by the amount of cards they get. In other words, I'm not trying to turn this into a science. I'm simply trying to give people a better idea of how close their orders are from being returned as CSG optimizes their end of things. For example, if three people post in here saying they had a 120-day turnaround time all around the same time, then it'll be easy to deduce if you have an order in around that same time when your order would or should be coming back to you.

Yeah I would definitely call them. Maybe even reference this thread bc the ones I sent in May have been back to me for a hot minute.

What are you asking? I have read this five times now and I still can't work out what it is you're wanting to know.

If it's in as good a shape as in these photos then I'd send it Super Express to PSA bc you will get way more value out of PSA if you are strictly looking for a financial return. Also, no way I'm going to guess what grade that would be. It looks great from the photos but the photos aren't the best, either. Just send it into PSA bc they give by far the most return on investment.

Yeah i just noticed that. They must be ripping through cards bc ones I sent in for bulk at the beginning of December have been in grading for over two weeks now. I like it!!

You are supposed to pay $5 per card to be able to download the images.

I can help with that last part. It goes into "Grading/Quality Control" once the order is finished but hasn't been received by you. I talked to a rep on the phone about it awhile back and that was the reply that I got. I was wondering bc that wasn't a technical step on their "Status Explanation" page. It seemed to be like some in-between phase?? Anyways, it means your cards are graded and being sent back to you, so that is great! Well under the listed TaT right now of 165 days, too!

Hmmm that is interesting to say the least. I wonder what happened. Please keep us updated and good luck on the grades!

ok sweet, so that's well under the 165-day TaT they are advertising right now!

That is wild bc I have a bulk order shipped to them on 08/17/21 Delivered to their facility: 08/21/21 Received: 09/18/21 G/E/I: 01/02 (I think)/22 Shipped: 02/01/22 So I mean that's 3-4 weeks behind yours and they're already shipping mine back to me. I don't understand that. I have another bulk order that they got in the mail on 12/05/2021, marked as received the following day and they already have it in grading, and it's been in grading for like a week or more. It's flying through the process (which I'm not complaining about).

I want to thank everyone who has contributed to this thread. Let's keep it going so peeps will know what the TaTs are. Thank you again!

That is so odd. I talked to a rep on the phone yesterday and she told me that by far the most back ups are occurring in encapsulation. Apparently the cards themselves (for bulk orders) are being graded within two months, but will sometimes sit in a queue 4-6 months waiting to be encapsulated. Especially if their business continues to grow with the partnership with eBay + Fanatics, I don't see why purchasing more encapsulation machines wouldn't be priority number one, like, yesterday.

I had 4 bulk orders totaling 206 cards that I sent in all within a few weeks of each other that were all well within the 165 days listed for bulk. From the day they received the packages the longest one was 152 days or right around eight months, which I wasn't in a rush to get any of these back anyways. Just wanted to add this.

I have another bulk order to report: Bulk Order: Delivered to CSG: 05/27/21 Grading/Encapsulation/Imaging: 12/14/21Quality Control: didn't write it down (sorry)Shipped: 01/19/22

I would actually disagree with your logic here. Let me put it this way - there are *so many* people in this hobby that are not only trying to grade cards for a profit, but they are grading them for their personal collections, as well, so a grading company has zero expectation of getting a 2x return for whatever you send in. It's the market that determines the value of a card so if you send in a card that cost a dollar to buy and $15 to grade but the value of that card is only $10 in a PSA 9 then that's not on PSA. PSA and the other grading companies are under zero obligation, nor do they set out to say "okay let's get this person a 2x return for their card." So to answer your question I'd say i just matters what you are sending a card in for and why. For instance, I have some vintage soccer cards for my personal collection (that I'll never sell) that just look better in a slab from SGC, so even though the value of the card I'm getting slabbed might not be $30, it's going to cost me $30 to get the card slabbed with SGC. Another, different example - I have 143 Michael Jordan cards that I want to sell (I'm not personally a huge Jordan fan but I have a ton of them from my childhood etc) and I know to maximize the profit for those cards I need to grade them with PSA, so because the value of most of these cards won't be above $100 I'm simply waiting for PSA to open their bulk service back up. That way, hopefully if they get the price back down to $10-15/card then it'll be almost guaranteed profit considering it's Jordan. So, as you can see, it just depends on what you're wanting to do with your cards. If you want to keep them for your PC then things like what slab each card will look best in, etc come into play, and the cost of grading is something that isn't as high up on the priority list. If you are simply trying to flip certain cards for profit then you def need to think about the price to grade them more. And again, I can not stress this enough - because you won't get as much money for cards that don't grade as high as others, I don't think it would really be fair to whatever grading company you chose to say, "I'm not going with them anymore bc they didn't get me as much return on investment as I thought" bc it could have been your fault for not understanding what grade the card would get, for example. I just think this idea you have in your head - that your cards have to have a certain return on investment for what you paid to have them grade - is just not the way to go. If you are getting cards graded and protected for your personal collection then just go with CSG bc they charge so little to grade each card and they have by far the best slab (the label is debatable). If you are getting them graded for profit then you need to weigh how much time you want to wait to get them back vs cost of grading and other things that would help you make the best decision. Hmu with any other questions you have, and if anyone else reading this has anything else to correct me on or add, please do!

The market determines the value of cards at any given time. If they graded a card that no one wants, even in a high grade, then the price will have to reflect that.

Bro what!?!? CSG 9's of this card are going consistently between $16-20 on ebay so why are you asking $150? Source - https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=2020-21+donruss+lamelo+ball+csg+9+-optic&_sacat=0&rt=nc&LH_Sold=1&LH_Complete=1 I"ll give you $30 for the pair if you'll do PayPal F&F.

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I can help answer these questions. Bare with me, though, bc it takes some explaining. First, PSA has been around and grading things since the 1980s so their reputation in the grading community (and not just with sports cards) is second to none, so getting a PSA-graded card comes with a certain level of trust, authenticity and reliability that other companies can't offer. That's why their cards still sell for more than any other companies, barring a few exceptions. In terms of having cards graded the same across all platforms and having it be near mint or mint, while I understand where you are coming from, if all companies graded cards the same then there really wouldn't be any need to have different companies. And I mean sure, like you mentioned, you could have a diff company giving out the same exact grades under the same exact grading system for a lesser price, but bc it's not PSA that almost guarantee of the card being worth more in a PSA slab would cause people to still go with PSA, bc most people want the most return for their investment. In terms of sending them a card that might not be worth $100 once graded, I think my answer to that is twofold - 1) Any card that you want to keep for your own PC, esp if it is a high-dollar card, might be worth it to send to PSA for the $100. Here's the thing, though - PSA will charge you more than $100 if the determined value (after grading it) is more than a certain amount. So, for example, for $100 you send them a Justin Herbert Rookie Patch Auto #d to 10 and it grades a PSA 10, and there are copies of that same card that have sold for 10k-20K, PSA is going to charge you way more than $100 to grade that card bc they know how much it's currently worth and they want their cut of that money. I personally think that is complete BS, but it is what it is in a completely unregulated, capitalist-driven market. 2) There are A LOT of people who are either coming back into the hobby after years to decades away or have been in the game for a bit but are just completely new to grading. A lot of this section of people have seen the prices of graded cards go through the roof over the last 2 years-ish so they want in on that. However, bc they aren't caught up on how severely the value drops from a PSA 10 to a 9 or an 8, etc, there are a LOT of people learning very valuable, or should I say expensive, lessons right now. SO, to answer this concisely, you are absolutely right - if a card isn't worth $100 in value after being graded it seems rather dumb to send the card in for $100. With that said, until around Sept or Oct of 2020, PSA used to grade cards in bulk for $8-10, so you could send in *so many* cards to them for such a cheap cost and almost guarantee you're going to profit if you choose to sell the card, assuming it gets a grade high enough to warrant selling. In terms of people sending to other companies, just like with PSA, there are ups and downs. First things first - PSA owns so much of the market share of card grading (whether it be Pokemon, sports cards, etc etc) and they have such a foothold on ROI (return on investment, if you're not familiar with that acronym) within the hobby it's almost impossible for them to lose any sort of footing or have another company take enough business away from them to force them to lower prices. They are just that big and trusted. Think of them as the Wal-Mart of the card grading world only in terms of how big their marketshare is and how much their name is trusted globally. They are almost too big to fail, in a sense. Not only that, but the card collecting world has exploded like never before over the past two years, and bc of that PSA got a record number of submissions in early 2021, culminating with I believe almost 6 million individual cards they were shipped from January to March of 2021. It was so overwhelming that they literally shut down card submission at any level up to Super Express at $300 for months and months and months. That left people with the only other options being BGS (Beckett Grading), SGC (SportsCard Guarantee), HGA (Hybrid Grading Authority) and CSG (where we're at here, duh). BGS and SGC have both been around forever, as well, and both have a very string backing and reputation in the hobby, but neither has ever really been able to surpass PSA in terms of holding overall value for their graded cards. The same could be said for HGA and CSG, but mostly due to the fact that both companies started in 2021, so they just haven't had the time to really get their foothold and make a mark as serious companies that will retain long-term value to most people in the market. With all that said, it is absolutely cheaper to send in cards to every other company (except BGS), but the downside is your collection will not be worth as much in the end on the resale side of things. There is a LOT more I could go into, and if you have any questions feel free to shoot 'em back at me, but this should give you a good, simple-ish rundown for now of why everyone goes nuts for PSA. *Most* people who are sending cards into PSA for $100/card right now are sending in only cards that are, at minimum, going to be $300 and up in value. Most ppl sending into PSA at those amounts more than likely have some idea of what they are doing, but there are surely tons of people who don't know what tf they're doing and are getting burned and burned bad bc they didn't do the research necessary. The same could be said of other ppl at other companies, too, even here on CSG's site. Right now you can look in the Buy/Sell part of these forums and see a guy who sent in a 1990 Score #697 Bo Jackson card to CSG at their $125 Walkthrough level. I assume he saw sales of PSA 10s of that same card back in February of 2021 going for multiple hundreds of dollars and thought "Well I'll send in to CSG for way cheaper and make even more money!" But, unfortunately for him, it doesn't work that way. He ended up getting a grade of a CSG 8, and bc CSG doesn't hold NEAR the value of PSA, that's more equivalent to getting a PSA 6 or 7, which....ugh. SO what he thought was a multiple hundred dollar card, unfortunately, isn't worth more than $8-10 in real value on the open market. People, including myself, tried to tell him this but he just mocked us in return, and it was just painfully obvious he had no damn clue what he was doing.

Close to 10 months since this comment. Is there any way to give an indication as to when this is actually happening?

Bruh if you can't follow the template I provided please don't comment in this post

Ive done surprisingly well selling baseball RCs from the Topps paper sets from 2019/2020, actually. I think, as with anything else, it's all about picking the right players etc.

Agreed. I only list CSG 9.5s and up. I think I may have listed a few 9s but only if I was sure I'd be able to move it for a fair value. I'm literally keeping every single 8.5 for when the value of CSG cards ultimately goes up quite a bit once the Fanatics takeover is complete and under way. I give it about 5-6 years and we'll see significant increases on the value of CSG cards.