The Problem with WhatNot, and What You Can Do About It

May 2024

I’ve been spoiled. After getting introduced to card breaks a little over a year ago (late bloomer, I know) and exclusively using a tightknit community of breakers on Twitch, I finally wandered into the chaotic hellscape that is online auction/carnival barker platform Whatnot this month, and what I found was…not good. Enough to make me wonder whether platforms like Whatnot (and the house-owned Fanatics Live) are doing more harm than good to the breaking ecosystem.

Don’t get me wrong…Whatnot has been a massive boon to a lot of the breakers who make the platform home, as well as the creators of Whatnot—their last funding round in 2022 valued the company at $3.7b, and I’m sure as the sports card hobby has tipped even more towards card breaking in the last two years, their revenue has grown substantially. But for the end users—the buyers who flock in droves to Whatnot streams to buy into breaks or take part in lightning auctions for singles and slabs—the platform is designed to make you spend as much money as possible, and frequently more than the value of what you’re actually buying.

‘Auction Fever’ is a real thing

At the heart of Whatnot’s success is the behavioral principle of the endowment effect—the finding that people are more likely to assign more value to an object they own than they do to that same object when they do not own it. The best example of this was an experiment where subjects were each given a coffee mug and then given the choice to sell or swap it for an equally-priced alternative which, in this case, was a pen. Fascinatingly, they found that people wanted to be paid twice the money for their coffee mug as they’d themselves be willing to pay for the pen.

“But Breaks & Takes,” you’re probably saying, “the people bidding on these auctions don’t actually own the items they’re bidding on yet, so would the endowment effect still apply?!”

The answer to that is a resounding yes—because of the second principle of online auctions, which is perceived ownership, which states that the amount of time someone has been involved in an auction, combined with the amount of time they’ve spent as the lead bidder, as a percentage of the total auction time, can increase their perception that they already own the item—which, if you refer to principle number one, will cause them to significantly overvalue it and spend more than they would in a fixed price setting. When you’re dealing with auctions that can last anywhere from 5 to 30 seconds, that perceived ownership establishes itself fast.

The Bad

Again, this is all great for sellers and for the platform itself, which earns an 8% cut on every item sold, plus a 2.9% transaction cost, plus an additional 30 cents for…reasons. But across a couple of weeks in April I spent on the platform I tracked prices for slabs, singles, and breaks sold, then compared them to available price data—for singles on 130point.com and for breaks on BREAKCOMP.

It’s a small sample—but on average, people buying slabs and singles paid 57% above comps on their purchases. Breaks were a little harder to get an estimation on because so many WhatNot breakers use the auction into random team format (with the bottom-line inflating ‘Spin 3, Pick 1’ and ‘Spin 5, Pick 2’ ‘promotions’)—but for breaks where there was a direct one-to-one comparison, break prices were, on average, 40% higher than the most expensive comparable prices tracked by BREAKCOMP.

The Ugly

We need to talk about repacks, mystery chases, whatever you want to call them—the practice of taking perfectly good cards that would sell perfectly fine on their own, throwing them in a box or envelope with A COOL DESIGN, doubling or tripling the value of that card for the stated ‘floor’, and then adding it to a break or auctioning off a bundle of them on their own.

The design for my future repack series ‘Fire-Shitting Unicorns’

Repacks/mystery chases are a product that have been meticulously planned by breakers to maximize their profits. They have taken the value of every card they have included in the repacks, calculated them, added WhatNot’s 8% markup, added the markup of the wages they’re paying, added an additional markup on top of that for profit, and then peddled them to the masses who are happily snapping up thirty $200 spots to win a chance at a card that, on its best day, would net $200 total. There is no randomness in mystery packs—the breakers know exactly what you are buying and what it is worth and they are absolutely not giving away value out of the goodness of their hearts. I have yet to see a repack approach its stated floor, never mind the ceiling—and the buyers are the ones left holding the bag.

The Good(ish)

So we have a popular, well-trafficked platform that incentivizes higher sales full of sellers charging inflated prices and your own brain working against you—but it’s not all bad.

First, there are a lot of personal collectors on WhatNot just looking to move parts of their own collections for a fair and decent price. Came across a few of those and made a few purchases I was happy with—shout out to Stinger Rips who let me hang out and chat Philly sports teams and then sold me two dope autograph relics of Jimmy Rollins and JT Realmuto. The amount of collectors and the breadth of their collections is impressive—if there is a card you’re looking for, chances are somebody has it and is willing to move it for the right price.

Second, if you know what you’re doing and you’re willing to be patient, there is value to be had. Personal collectors will offer discounted prices if you purchase multiple cards or lots from them because most of the time they a) just want to build a presence if they’re newer to WhatNot and b) move inventory that would just collect dust anyways. If you’re going on WhatNot to flesh out your PC versus changing the high-value players everyone is going after (the Wembys, Strouds, Crews, Bedards, etc) you can usually do so without breaking the bank.

Tips for Buying on WhatNot:

1. If you’re looking for value, don’t buy into breaks on WhatNot. I repeat, if you are looking for value, do not buy into breaks on WhatNot. Card breaking is ubiquitous enough that you can find breakers on other platforms with more consumer-friendly pricing (I cannot recommend BREAKCOMP enough for comparing prices and finding a breaker who’s friendlier to your wallet). If you have a breaker you personally like or you’re just there for the vibes, no judgment here at all, but don’t think you’re getting a good deal, because you aren’t.

2. Research comps on the fly. This can be tough to do when you’re dealing with five, ten, or fifteen second auctions, but there’s usually enough time between when they announce the card and start the auction to do a quick search. Know what the card is worth, and then don’t spend above that.

3. Use the ‘Max Bid’ feature. If you know what you’re willing to pay for a card, enter it as a max bid, and then let it ride. If you don’t win, you didn’t overpay—let some other sucker handle that.

4. Don’t be afraid to negotiate. Negotiating is a lost art—let’s bring it back. When you’re buying from personal sellers, they know that the first price they’re quoting is probably not the one you’re going to buy for—check out the comps and feel free to make an offer that’s more in line with what you could get the cards for elsewhere, and don’t forget to negotiate bulk discounts. If the seller isn’t willing to budge, you’re always free to walk.

5. Be yourself and have fun. Self explanatory.

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