eBay is cleverly appealing to collectors’ desire to save money by touting an advantage to using its trading card “vault.” In a marketing email eBay sent this week, it stated: “Shop vault-eligible cards: No sales tax when you store them in our secure facility.”
The vault is a physical building where eBay stores collectible trading cards for buyers and sellers. It’s part of eBay’s focus category strategy, aka vertical strategy, which preceded current CEO Jamie Iannone’s arrival.
The strategy appeared to have had its origins in reaction to niche sites like StockX taking away market share from key categories (sneakers in the case of StockX).
During eBay’s third-quarter earnings call last week, Iannone told Wall Street analysts that the Vault was in its early days and said eBay was seeing momentum week-over-week, with more enthusiasts preloading their inventory into the Vault to enable faster trading.
In addition to launching the eBay Vault (which copied other companies’ vault offerings such as PWCC), eBay also launched authentication services in Trading Cards and other categories.
This week’s email carried the subject line, “Shop top cards and send them straight to the eBay vault.” It linked to Vault listings, stated the benefits of using the Vault, and linked to a YouTube playlist featuring videos about the trading card vault.
In Episode 1 of the video series “Loading the eBay Vault,” four collectors spoke about their collections.
That’s silly! The main idea of the vault is that you can buy and item and then resell it without having to store it and ship it, right? I mean, I know you are able to get it sent to yourself at any time, but that’s not really the main idea of the vault, is it? If you’re buying an item for resale, it’s tax exempt whether it goes to the vault or not!
I would never trust ebay to have possession of my items