I think it's one of the worst feelings in flipping cards.

An auction closes 20% lower than the latest comps. Or you see another listing priced cheaper than yours sell first.

It's seriously frustrating, and the worst part is that it's usually fixable. Optimizing your eBay listings isn't a sexy topic, but it's essential if you want your cards to sell for more and sell faster.

Here's what I've learned after thousands of transactions.

If you were looking to buy a card to get graded, would you pick this one?

It's dark, it's got a glare, and this person has it set as an auction. I wouldn't be surprised if it sells $30-$50 below recent comps.

Getting the right lighting is hard, but bad photos aren't just an inconvenience—they cost you real money.

Three ways to fix it:

A single photo is a no-go.

A lot of the cards I buy are $200+ and I'm planning to grade them. When a seller shows close-ups of each corner and multiple angles of the card, I'm much more confident in the purchase, and I'm willing to pay a little more for that confidence. It's worth two extra minutes of your time as the seller.

This happens to me almost every day. I click on a listing, see the shipping cost or the estimated delivery window, and immediately click back out.

Why would I wait three weeks for a card to arrive? Why would I pay $20+ to ship it?

You don't have to offer free shipping. I always use "Buyer pays shipping," which comes out to $5-$6 for buyers in the US. That's reasonable. Anything that makes someone do a double-take and click away isn't.

I'm mostly done with selling via auctions.

Some sellers like them because buyers can get caught up in the bidding and occasionally overpay. In my experience, the opposite happens more often. You wait seven days, and the final price falls short of what a Buy It Now would have gotten you.

That's actually why I target so many auctions as a buyer. I usually get better deals.

If you're worried the card won't sell, the answer isn't an auction. It's buying more liquid cards and pricing them right. Do that, and most things move in one or two days.

If you do run auctions, don't have them end at 2 AM on a Tuesday.

You can schedule when your auction starts, which means you control when it ends. My best results always came from auctions ending around 9 PM EST on a weekend, when buyers are actually paying attention.

Early on, when I was selling higher volumes of low-dollar cards, I saw a noticeable jump in sales the week my feedback hit 100. Cards that had been sitting for months started moving.

It matters less where I’m at now. I actually started a new eBay account and have under 50 feedback on it, but I've gotten good at buying and selling popular, liquid cards, so they move regardless. Plus, anything that sells for $250 or more automatically goes through eBay Authenticity, which reduces the trust gap for buyers.

But if you're selling low-dollar cards and feedback is holding you back, the fastest fix is buying a bunch of $0.99 cards to build your score quickly.

One of the more painful things to watch is a card selling 20% under comps because the seller made a title mistake. eBay has gotten better at auto-correcting misspelled names, but these still slip through constantly:

Common mistakes are:

When you fill out eBay's item specifics, more buyers can find your listing through filters. I don't fill out every field, but the obvious ones take about 30 seconds and are worth doing.

Here’s an example of what I might do for a Topps Chrome Dylan Harper Rock Stars:

Most of this is pretty obvious when you see it laid out. But the majority of listings I come across are costing sellers real money by failing at least one of the points above.

If you do nothing else, work on your photos first. It's the highest-return activity you can spend time on for your eBay listings.