When is a single listing worth it?

The three costs per card

Everything that disappears between the sale price and what is left falls into one of these three.

• Selling fee: a share of the price. It grows with the price, so it is rarely the problem on cheap cards.
• Shipping and packaging: charged per shipment, not per card. A single 30-cent card sold on its own carries the whole amount alone.
• Your effort: minutes for matching, listing, picking and packing, times your hourly rate.

The calculation

What is left = sale price − selling fee − shipping share − (minutes per card × hourly rate ÷ 60). The threshold is the price at which that result falls to zero. Anything below it costs you money the moment you treat it individually, not because it is unsellable, but because the effort eats the return.

What a stack changes

Two quantities move as soon as several cards sit in one order: shipping is shared out, and effort per card drops because matching and listing happen once for the whole stack. That is exactly why bulk capture pushes the threshold down. It does not change the price, it changes the denominator.

The most common mistake

Putting your own effort at zero because “the time is there anyway”. That is the same arithmetic every small business uses to look richer than it is. If you do not want to set an hourly rate, at least count the minutes and look at how many hours they added up to at the end of the month.

Price references are guide values

The Cardmarket references CardEntry puts next to each version (average, lowest, trend) are explicitly independent of condition and are not a valuation of your card. For the threshold they work as an order of magnitude, not as a sale price.