Hey there Grinders! Q1 is gone and Q2 is upon us!
Weird, I know. The year is flying by (and yet dragging all the same). I’m currently scripting a relatively informal video I’m hoping to shoot tonight/tomorrow, and then to post tomorrow/Thursday giving kind of an update of the world of TCG Bulk Kings after Q1 and looking at where we are aiming for Q2 and beyond. So be on the lookout for that.
But I’ll go ahead and talk about one of those things here, to give you all a bit of a sneak peek behind the curtain. I am looking in the future to make developing the website a bigger priority. And one of the ways I wish to do that is to make the website more friendly to card buyers and collectors. I love collecting, even more than playing. That’s why I can mess with sports cards as well as the cards that are neither sports or game related.
So, please, tell me: are you a collector of cards? And if so, what manner of collector are you? I’d love to showcase some collections or collecting styles here. I personally like collecting things I’ve found in bulk, especially things like autographs, misprints/miscuts, and oddities (like the Theros Hero’s Path cards, or the Magic Mini Game cards). I also love to try to complete sets from only bulk purchases. I would love to hear what you like to collect – feel free to comment.
Now, as for the complaint in the title. Another thing I’m working on is to streamline some of my repetitive tasks. One of the largest speed bumps for me right now is in recording sold cards in my inventory system. Unfortunately, no platform does an excellent job of putting all the info we need at our fingertips in any kind of scalable way. Ebay is pretty close – you can export your orders into a spreadsheet and that has 95%+ of the info needed. But they don’t include the fees AND the ad fees in this, which means you have to check for those manually.
The worst is Whatnot, but mostly because of the nature of the platform. It is still doable, it just takes a good chunk of time to sit down and power through it all. The info from each order is available, but not in a spreadsheet-exportable form. But you can tab through each order and type it all out pretty quickly. 30 min to an hour to knock out a typical show.
Which leads me to TCGplayer. I really REALLY wish TCGplayer weren’t almost but not quite there. Be awful or get over the finish line. There are two problems for me with the availability of information from TCGplayer. You have a couple options of what you can export from their backend. You can export all the cards sold over a number of orders, to generate a pull sheet. That’s great. You can also export your shipping, so you can import it into a shipping software. Also great. Finally, you can export the info from your orders, which gives pieces of info like product total, shipping credit, order number, how many cards in the order. &c.
But.
My first problem lies in the fact that none of these exports will tell you the fees on the order. Not one. The only way to see what the fees are on any particular order is to open up the order itself. Which, when all this other stuff is readily available, feels like a big time sink. You can copy and paste over lots of info from these other spreadsheets you can get, but not the fees. That you have to go through the orders one by one (with no arrows to jump to the next order).
Second problem: there is again no way to tie which cards were sold with which order. You can get the sheet with all the cards sold, you can get the sheet with all the orders and their respective pieces of data. But you cannot get a breakdown of what cards were on what order. You may have sold 10x Kabira Takedown, but did you sell them all on one order, or one at a time to 10 different customers? These are important pieces of info. Also, without knowing which cards are on what order, subject to which shipping fees, credits, or transaction fees, it is impossible to track profitability and sales velocity by card, which is very important to us as sellers. So, to get this info, again, it requires manually slogging through each order and manually typing them all down. There is no possible option to automate this process entirely.
If anyone has any tips or tricks out there for how they manage this, please feel free to share with the class.
Anyways, keep on grinding! And cheers!