First of all, thank you. Thank you for your patience and your understanding. I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted here. And even my video content has been sporadic at best in the last half of 2024.
It’s been a tough year. I haven’t been anywhere close to the goals I set at the beginning of 2024. Some of this is for well hashed reasons. Partially because TCGplayer altered to some still unknown extent their warehouse mixture of Direct inventory. Partially because I didn’t react to this reality in any kind of agile way. Partially because our rent inexplicably went up 15% during all that. Et cetera; et cetera.
Those of you who are still here (and don’t immediately unsubscribe when you get this email notification), thank you. I’m going to use the new year to reinvigorate my content and my business. If you aren’t interested in hearing about that – thanks for sticking around this long. I’ve seriously tried to do exactly this reboot of various parts of my life several times in the last few months, and FINALLY I feel like I’m in a right enough headspace to be able to actually accomplish it.
So here we are. In a new year, with a new me, and a new TCG Bulk Kings.
I mean, it’s not really changed all that much. Still bulk, still informative, still trying to help the market be as efficient and unbroken as I can possibly make it. What does all that mean going forward though?
Bulk Buylists will begin to be updated much more often. Over the next couple weeks I’m getting all the ducks in a row that are needed to make that at least a bi-weekly and hopefully a weekly update, rather than quarterly. I’ve tried this before, but the automation I was using didn’t really do the job I wanted it to do, and I lost some inertia on the project. Then the summer happened. It is what it is. This time, I have a new tool I’ll be exploring, and even if it doesn’t do exactly what I want, I will simply “scale the unscalable” as they say and make sure I personally update the lists as often as I can.
It has become clear to me that I can’t be wholly focused on a single marketplace, or even primarily focused on a single marketplace. I need to develop my business as a holistic system that takes advantage of the various pros of multiple different marketplaces, while mitigating the risks of the cons of those marketplaces. As such, I won’t be solely or primarily a TCGplayer business, or an Ebay business, or even a business focused on growing this website. Instead, I have developed an inventory and marketing strategy that is very much an AND philosophy rather than an OR philosophy.
The lesson I’m carrying forward from 2024 to this point is that if I’m too all-in on a single platform, I’m vulnerable to that platform changing things on me in a way I can’t afford or react to. So, I’ve decided to spread my inventory across the multiple sales platforms in a way that (hopefully (but in an educated kind of way)) captures all their strengths. With TCGs, that means that any card valued at $2 or higher will not be listed to TCGplayer currently. Those cards will be listed to Ebay, crosslisted to the WooShop, and be given a shot to sell via a live-selling platform (probably Whatnot (more on that later)). Any TCG cards under $2 will be listed to TCGplayer and the WooShop. There are minima and maxima in place for each platform, so I’m not overburdening my resources adding a 75th copy of Spoils of Adventure to my inventory. With regard to sports cards and other types of cards (that is, stuff I can’t sell on TCGplayer), these will all be represented first on Ebay, and then on the WooShop (either crosslisted for more valuable stuff, or else with separate inventory for lower end bulkier stuff).
The purposeful tracking of inventory spread over different areas has caused me to see the need for a more detailed inventory system. So, I’m nearing the end of developing a 1.0 version of just such a thing. Once it is finished, I will be making it available to you all – free to Gold Crown members, and some amount of charge to all others. It’s something I’m really excited about, and will continue to be developing throughout my usage of it. Again, Gold Crown members will always have access to any version updates as long as they are members with no extra charge. I’m not 100% sure what the first finished product for this will look like, but that will be coming soon.
It became clear also in the last few weeks that my inventory is, not to put too fine a point on it, all jacked up. When I began using the QuickList+ software for listing, I apparently committed some manner of sin involving Staged Inventory that I didn’t realize was there, and it’s added a big amount of ghost inventory to my store. I tried to root it all out with cycle counts, but it didn’t rid everything. Additionally, my Ebay inventory was bloated with a lot of listings not getting views let alone sales, and a lot of it didn’t meet my current standards for the quality of Ebay listings. Similarly, my WooShop listings were really haphazard and inconsistent.
So I’m again taking the opportunity to start afresh in the new year. All my inventory will be readded to my platforms, and will be added into my inventory tracking system. This is in fact much easier and simpler than trying to shoehorn my old inventory into the new system. Just the Ebay listing revisions alone would have taken months. So again I’m really excited about this. It really feels like a good solid way to improve the quality of my stores. With all the quality tools at my disposal, this will I feel be simply a minor hiccup in the business, and once it’s all rolling back out, I expect to see a strong impact on my sales as well as my motivaiton.
2024 was a great year for growth. I feel like I’ve made more level-ups than I can even describe, but I made them unevenly and at different times throughout the year. I’m trying to draw together all the disparate growths I’ve made into some kind of unified whole. One of the ways I’m really going to be showcasing that is in content creation. I’m doing this long post as kind of a kickoff into more content creation going forward as well. I intend to write a short daily blog post each weekday, kind of describing quickly what I worked on that day, what my goals for the day were and did I achieve them, what kind of things I’ve been thinking about. This will be called The Daily Grindstone, and will start 1/1. I also will be making at least 1 short video per day with some similar kind of content. I am still shooting for one long form video per week. And in addition to this, I’m looking to add some short form written content on some platform or another (haven’t decided really yet where this will be, whether bluesky or linkedin or both or neither).
One thing I’ve regretted about this past year is not being better at producing this kind of content. It isn’t the case that every piece of video or writing I produce must be some gigantic pile of value bombs I’m dropping on everyone who deigns to watch or read it. Many people are interested in the more day-to-day tactical behind-the-scenes gritty stuff. If you aren’t really interested in that kind of stuff, I understand if you would rather unsubscribe from here or other platforms. But that’s more of what I hope to produce in the near to mid term future.
In other future-facing news, I will be attending the GAMA conference in February, in Louisville, KY. I will be giving a presentation there, so if you’re going to that, be sure to look me up. The nice fellows at CardCastle are sponsoring me there to give a talk and QnA about the bulk trading card business. The title of the presentation is: “Every Card Has Value – Discover How to Unlock It”. Really looking forward to that and to meeting a lot of interesting people there.
And as I said above, I am looking to expand into the live-shopping space as another avenue to be selling my trading cards. I have resisted this for a while, for a couple reasons. One, I was looking mainly to do so on TikTok, but they do not allow the selling of single cards on their platform except for graded slabs, so that’s pretty much slowed me down on it a lot there. Also, when I had looked at Whatnot in the past, it didn’t seem the platform was mature enough for me or my type of business. Finally, I am also just way, WAY, outside my comfort zone when it comes to being live. All that said, a lot of things are pointing me toward giving Whatnot a shot in 2025, so I’m starting off with a bang. I’m running my first show on 1/1, at 6p MST. If you’ve read this far into this post, come check it out. I’m going to start with selling a bunch of midvalue Magic vintage singles, and see where it goes from there. Perhaps some vintage Pokemon stickers, maybe some Uno Elite NFL. We’ll see where the tide takes us.
I’m not sure what to expect as far as sales on Whatnot, having never sold there before, or even in any kind of environment like that. But I’m looking forward to seeing how that goes. With regards to the other platforms I’m selling on, I do have an idea of what that’s like. I’m looking to not pursue directly certain revenue numbers at first, but rather certain listing numbers. This is because I have direct control over how many cards I list. I don’t have direct control over what sells. That depends in part on the customers who do the buying. That said, I am looking (indirectly) to reach a level where I’m selling about $1300 or so per month on each of TCGplayer, Ebay, and my WooShop, which gives a gross revenue of about $4000 per month. My listing goal is to list every weekday, and add 500+ to my TCGplayer inventory daily, 50+ to Ebay, and whatever makes sense from those to the WooShop. Since the inventory strategy is more internally consistent and holistically integrated, this should be much more achievable than in the past, and more consistent across all platforms for greater clarity and understanding no matter how you are shopping from TCG Bulk Kings.
Sometimes it is necessary to take a step back. I’ve learned that in a very big way in 2024. Pulling myself away from being elbows-deep in whatever mess I was trying to take care of in each moment and really having a look at what’s going on has really allowed me to make these adjustments and reorganize to make things work a lot better going forward into this pivotal year of 2025. It’s not a good time to be unfocused, uncertain, unmotivated, unorganized. Whatever we are planning to do this year will have either a strong headwind or a strong tailwind. If you or I can’t or won’t plan accordingly, we’re going to have a bad time. Now is the time to wed a strong ambition with an equally strong sense of practicality. So by all means, set your big audacious goals alongside me – let’s f&%#ing GO and knock them out of the park together, one grindy day at a time!
If you want to do this alongside me, make sure you are either following this blog, or making sure your emails aren’t getting filtered out, or at least subscribe to the YouTube channel. I wanna hear about all your big plans for the year as well. Thanks again for reading all the way to the end here. I’m excited to get to work crushing 2025 with you all!
Cheers!
BIG