Buyback terms

Who buys your cards

poko.cards is the name of the site. The company that receives your parcel, checks your cards and pays you is KAWLET EURL. It answers for everything written on this page.

This text covers everyone and every parcel. Three cards found in a drawer or two hundred sorted on a Sunday afternoon, it is the same deal.

What we buy

Our buyback list says which cards we take and what we pay for them. A card that is not on the list is one we are not buying today. It means we do not know how to sell it on, and that can change in six months.

We buy three conditions: like new, lightly played, well worn. You are the one who ticks the box, card in hand, under a lamp. The condition guide shows you what to look at and in what order, and it tells you something that matters: when you are torn between two, pick the lower one.

Below a certain point we stop. Do not send us a card with:

• a crease, however faint, even in one corner
• a water mark, or cardboard that has warped
• a torn corner, a tear, a missing piece
• marker pen, a sticker, tape, or a name written on it

Nobody will take those cards off our hands afterwards. If one slips into your parcel, it is not paid for and it goes back to you, at our expense.

A card on the list sometimes closes for a while. Either we have too many on the shelf, or its price has swung wildly over the last few days and we would rather not quote you a figure the market could disprove before your parcel even lands. The list tells you so on the card itself, before you add it.

Your price, and how long it holds

The price shows up while you build your list, card by card, and the total climbs as you go. That total is what we pay you.

Once you confirm, that price is locked for three days. The card market moves every day, and for those three days it stops being your problem. Your card can climb or drop, the figure on screen is the one that counts.

If your parcel leaves later than that, we work the price out again on the day it lands. There is nothing else to watch but your posting date.

Sending your cards

You post the cards yourself, whichever way suits you. A tracked envelope is plenty for a small stack. A parcel takes as many cards as you care to put in it, and once your lot is worth enough you write its value on the form so it is covered if it goes missing on the way. The last screen offers you what fits the size of your shipment.

You cover the postage, and it comes back to you once your cards have been checked. If they are in the condition you said, the trip will have cost you nothing.

Sleeve your cards before you seal the envelope. A bare card gets its corners knocked in transit and lands in a lower condition than the one you ticked, which costs you money over a penny of plastic. Slip in the summary we email you as well, because that is what ties your parcel to your list.

The parcel travels under your responsibility until it reaches us. That is why tracking matters, and that is why declaring the value matters as soon as the lot gets big. Until something arrives here, there is nothing we can check and nothing we can pay for.

What happens when your parcel lands

We film the opening and take the cards out one at a time. The first thing we do is match what arrived against what you declared. A card too many, a card missing, a card that is not the one you ticked: that gets noted before anything else.

Then every card goes through two checks that never get mixed up. Its condition first: is it in the shape you ticked? Its authenticity second: did this card really come off the publisher's presses? A badly worn card can be perfectly genuine, and a flawless one can be fake. The two questions have nothing to do with each other.

Nothing is paid until every card in the lot has its verdict. You will never find out afterwards that a doubtful card was paid for in among the rest.

Our authenticity guarantee walks through that check in more detail.

If a card is not in the condition you declared

This is the most ordinary thing that happens in a buyback, and it is never a telling-off. Condition is judged by eye, under a lamp, and two honest people do not always see the same card.

When a card lands in a lower condition than the one you ticked, we touch nothing. We photograph it, we tell you what we see and where — the corner, the scratch, the mark — and we offer you the price that goes with the condition we found.

From there it is your call. You have seven days from the message we send you, and you can answer card by card.

• You accept the new price. We pay you that amount, and the rest of your lot carries on.
• You turn it down. We send the card back, and the return is on us.
• You say nothing. After seven days we read your silence as a refusal, and the card goes home at our expense.

The return is on us every time we are the ones reopening your price. Turning down a new offer must not cost you anything, or it would not be a real choice.

It works the other way too. If your card lands in better shape than the one you ticked, we pay you for the better condition without you having to ask. That is why the guide tells you to pick the lower one when you hesitate: underselling yourself costs you nothing.

If a card is not genuine

First things first. Almost every fake card that reaches us was sent in good faith. They come from a bundle bought online, a swap in a school playground, a box found at a grandparent's house. Getting this message does not mean anyone is accusing you of anything.

That card is not paid for. The rest of your lot carries on as if nothing had happened: the other cards are checked, priced and paid at the price you locked.

That one card, though, we cannot send back to you, and we owe you the reason. Putting a counterfeit back into circulation is off limits for everyone, us included. Posting it back to you would be doing exactly that.

So there is no paid version of that return. Offering to cover the postage changes nothing, and neither does insisting. That door does not exist, at any price.

We do not destroy it either. A destroyed card can no longer be examined by anyone, and on the day we are the ones who got it wrong, you would have nothing left to show.

So we set it aside. It is photographed front and back, filed with a written record of what we looked at, and it stays that way for thirty days from the message we send you.

Those thirty days are yours. If you think we have this wrong, write and say so. We send you the photos and what we saw, then we have the card examined by someone outside poko — a recognised expert in the card market, or a grading service. We tell you who we propose, and you can put someone else forward. Their view settles it, and we stand by it even when it costs us money.

If they say we were wrong, your card is genuine and the choice is yours. We send it back at our expense, or we pay you the price that had been locked.

If they say we were right, or if thirty days go by without a word from you, the card leaves our hands for good. It is handed over, along with the record and the photos, to the trademark owner or to the authorities. It never goes back on sale.

One card can happen to anyone, and there is nothing more to say about it. Several parcels in a row is something else: at that point we stop buying from you, and your account is closed.

Our authenticity guarantee walks through how the check works.

How we pay you

You choose before you even post: a bank transfer to your account, or credit on poko worth ten per cent more. The credit gets spent here, the transfer goes wherever you want.

We ask for your IBAN once your cards have arrived and been checked, never before. As long as there is no sale, your bank details have no business sitting with us.

Payment goes out once the whole lot has been checked, and the postage you fronted goes out with it.

What we keep about you

To buy your cards we need your email address, your name and your postal address. The email is how we send you the address to post to, then news of your parcel at each step. The name and address tell us who we are buying from, and let us send back whatever we do not keep.

Your bank details come later, only if you chose the transfer, and only once your cards have been checked.

The Privacy page says where all of that is stored and how to ask us to erase it.

If these terms change

We can change them, and the date at the top of this page says when we last did. The version that applies to your sale is the one that was online on the day you locked your price. A text rewritten afterwards cannot come back and change what we promised you.

If something goes wrong

Write to us and give your sale number. It is the shortest route for everything: a card you do not recognise in our photos, a parcel posted ten days ago that you have heard nothing about.

kevin@kawlet.com