Grade with Slabbys

Slabbys is an Australian card grading service that submits to PSA and Beckett on your behalf. You get your cards to them, they prepare and batch the submission, ship it insured to the graders in the United States, and ship the slabs back to you, with the order tracked through each stage along the way. They advertise insurance on every card for its declared value while it is in their care.

We recommend them for one plain reason. International grading logistics is the part of this hobby where an amateur mistake is expensive, and handing it to a specialist costs less than getting it wrong once. Submitting direct to PSA makes sense at volume; for a first or occasional submission, a local partner is the sane route.

• Pick a tier. Slabbys sells grading as all-in tiers priced per card, with the grading fee and the shipping to the grader included. The right tier depends on the card’s declared value.
• Get the cards to them. Post them in, or use a drop-off point where they offer one.
• They batch and ship. Your cards are prepared, batched with other Australian submissions, and sent insured to PSA or Beckett in the US.
• Track and receive. You follow the order through their tracking stages while the graders work, and the slabs come back to your door.

Prep still matters before anything ships: clean sleeves, semi-rigid holders where required, and an honest look at each card under a strong light. The PSA grading guide covers how to judge whether a card can earn back its fee.

Set your clock by the PSA turnaround realities, not the postage. Once your cards join a batch, the timeline is the shipping legs plus the grader’s queue at your tier, and that queue stretches whenever the hobby runs hot. The tracking stages exist so you can see which leg your cards are on rather than wondering, and you are notified when the slabs land back in Australia.

On the choice of grader: PSA has the deepest resale market and the strongest prices for Pokémon, which is why most submissions go there. Beckett suits collectors who want its subgrades, where centring, corners, edges and surface are each scored on the label. For resale value, PSA is the default. For detail on a card you intend to keep, Beckett has its case.

The same maths applies through any submitter. The graded value at the grade you honestly expect has to clear the tier price with room to spare, so check sold prices at each grade before committing. Be sceptical about grading anything cheap, since a borderline card is often better sold raw than graded into a fee it cannot recover. Bulk tiers make more sense for clearing a stack of mid-value vintage than for modern commons.

Keep the receipts too. Grading fees form part of a card’s cost base for capital gains tax, so the tier price belongs in your records.

Add each slab to Grails with its grade and cert number. PSA slabs get a one-tap link to their official cert page, and slab values update from recent eBay sold prices, so a freshly graded card starts tracking itself from day one. The grading guide covers all of it.

Useful links

• Visit Slabbys
• Slabbys grading tiers & pricing