Storing Your In-Hands: Hello Monster Box, Bye Bye Baggies

So now you have a bunch of etopps cards from etopps via UPS. Each card is still in its "baggie." Each card can be considered genuine mint. Rubber bands and bubble-wrap are strewn all over the floor. Whatever adrenaline you had in receiving them is now receding. Now what.

If you do not have that many in-hands, the box that etopps supplied for shipping the cards makes a nice storage container but if you are receiving these cards to re-sell them, the box they came in is not exactly what you want for the long haul. It will take time to find a card that sold on ebay if you store all of your in-hands in five or ten of these boxes.

Rathern than creating a monster with your inventory, I recommend a sports card Monster Box.
The picture above holds 3200 regular cardboard cards and costs roughly $5 online. They are bought and sold unassembled and are easy to put together. They come in different sizes in width based on rows. I have both 2-row monster boxes and 5-row boxes.

You can divide your cards by sport or by year. Those of us who have done card shows depend on this type of box to transport inventory. After I injured my back, I bought some 2-row boxes to prevent re-injury.

While it's tempting to keep your cards in the baggie that came with the card, storing the cards in their baggies in these monster boxes is not your best option. Each row of a monster box fits the width of an etopps in-hand card perfectly but the added width from the baggie will be more of a hinderance than an asset.

Instead I would recommend removing the etopps cards from the baggies and keep the baggies someplace else (such as the etopps shipping box) and use a different product to protect your etopps cards from scratching each other. Enter the funyet bag. Maybe this is abbreviated from "Are we having fun yet?" but I doubt it. They fit each in-hand snugly and have an adhesive seal to close each bag. These are indispensible for the 2005 in-hands to make it easy to include each card's Certificate of Issuance.

If you sell an in-hand on ebay and ship it in a fun-yet within a baggie inside a bubble-lined mailer, you're going to have a satisfied buyer who will appreciate your business.

You can buy them from an etopper who sells them in bulk. For more information, email him ultrasportscollectibles@yahoo.com