What thickness of card should I get?

[burnley_collector]

I'm selling a few football programmes on ebay at the moment, and have been sending them out in an envelope protected by cardboard from cereal boxes etc.

However, I want to add a more professional element to my transactions, and have thought about purchasing plain card.

However, I'm not sure as to what thickness I should be looking at - I don't understand all of this 80gsm, 100gsm business.

Can someone give me any advice?

[MRPROGRAMMES]

Just get some A4 cardbacked envelopes - can be sent as a large letter and it does protect the programme, always better safe than sorry !

[Auchinleckian]

Do what I do for starters. Recycle everything, it's much cheaper, and people really do appreciate having their p&p costs kept to the bare minimum.
Card backed envelopes aren't cheap to buy, so any programmes you get in this way are well worth recycling. An A4 piece of white paper cut in half, and sellotaped onto the old address gives you a virtually new envelope, albeit the end you opened will need to be secured with parcel tape.
Whatever you do, don't make the mistake that some folk do and use ordinary cardboard cut from a box to try and strengthen the envelope, it just makes it very easy to bend and can have a disasterous effect on the programme.

[Wullie]

I'm lucky beacuse i can get thick cardboard from work, as much as i need. I always "sandwich" the programme between to bits of cardbord and cellotape it closed. A bit OTT maybe but my motto is "Send programmes the same way you would like to receive them".. it's really good that you are giving some thought to the problem of posting programmes.

[badhand]

I'm probably looking for the impossible, but when I receive a programme, I am looking for it to be well packaged. However, I object to over packaged, particularly too much tape.
I confess that I have damaged programmes trying to get them out of heavily taped envelopes

[gurulion]

Here's an important tip....

Whatever thickness of cardboard you choose, ensure that it does not have any creases.

This week I received a Millwall away programme from this season sent by an ebay dealer. He had apparently gone to great trouble packing the thing but had appeared to overlook that the carboard was not firm and weakened entirely by a hinge.

After carefully extracting the programme from the plastic envelope I discovered that it had been fatally creased exactly where the hinge bent...leaving it far from mint - ruined in fact.

Another exasperating form of packing is when the dealer puts a thin old programme in a soft plastic bag for protection...and then tapes it to death. It is then almost impossible to extract without either bending or ripping the programme, or getting it caught against the gum on the tape. My record is actually taking an hour and ten minutes of painstaking keyhole surgery with a stanley knife to remove a booby-trapped programme without causing damage to it.

[Wullie]

Too much sellotape is a nightmare. I never use too much. The cardboard i use is ideal ...very tough. If anyone is posting a very rare and delicate item and would like some i'd be happy to post some to you. Don't worry about postage i work for the Post Office. I'm not going to post hundreds of the stuff like i say only if you are worried about posting a very old item.