Site Forum

I'd like to start adding some inventory and trading on the site, however, I find the whole process pretty tedious.  I added a card, found someone that had it on their wantlist, then created a trade....all of this took too many clicks.  And then I had to look through their cards by sport/year etc. to see if there was anything I wanted for the card I was trading. 

Am I missing something?  Is it as difficult as it seems?

Thanks.

Yea your missing your collection your want list and your trade list you can't expect people to know what you have/want to trade you need to add more cards 

It can be time-consuming to enter in your collection / traders / wants, howver, once everything is in the database, there are several tools that will allow you to match your traders with others want lists, match your want lists to others available lists, etc.

If you try matching things up a card at a time, you'll get 3 trades done by Thanksgiving. :) A bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea. And yes, it takes time. But everyone that has taken the time has said that it's well worth it.

Minimally I would start entering some items you would like to trade and what you are looking to add first. That should get you started.

I am a new trader on this site as well. I listed cards I have for trade first and let the fellow collectors send me offers and let them know what I am looking for and once done I created my want list. Now I have 1,000s of cards that I want not on my want list but I have the player I collect and will do what I can to make a trade happen

I will agree with the tedious but well worth it opinion.  I recorded and tracked my collection here for a few years before I started seriously trading.

I can't speak to what is easiest, only how I do it.  I created my wantlist first.  This was fairly simple because my want list consists mainly of cards to complete sets.  The "Add all missing to wantlist" option is a huge time saver.  The option is also available for players and other ways of sorting cards.   After having a want list established, I added a trade list.  Again made easier by adding multiple cards from the same set.  At one point I started adding individual cards for star players, but that was extremely time consuming.  I may get back to that but for now I am resorting into sets for adding to the Trade list.

I have also been known to add specific cards to my list to target certain traders that have cards that I want.

I do wish that there was a way to prioritze my want list.  I have thousands of cards on my want list, but some are more wanted.  I have been offered cards from one set that I need when the same trader has cards from a set that I am focusing on but the trader had no way of knowing that.  Of course adding that info would make the input process even more tedious.  Double edged sword.

Prioritizing want lists would be a great help when trying to trade.   I'm just always so tempted to start my offers with as many 1988 Topps as possible...

Mark

Tedious? Yes! But it's totally worth it to do it the right way.

Adding ALL of your traders first is the best way to go about trading here. If you also add your Haves that you want to keep after that, it really makes adding your WANTS very easy. Then trading is completely simple here. It takes a bit of work to get to that point, but once you get there you're done. You might actually get swamped with trade offers. I know I did for each sport as I finished adding everything for them. It was and still is a good thing.

I doubled the size of my NFL Panthers collection since joining this site. And I doubled the size of my MLB STL Cardinals collection just in this year so far! Look below and you'll see that those are not small numbers.