At the risk of sounding repetitive, it’s been a while. I’ve been grinding away, but due to many many factors, keeping up with this daily little blog has eluded me. Here’s to trying to kickstart it up again. Back to school time has come and gone for us here in our school district, so I’m now settling into the new routine. Been tough, with the temperatures being what they have been, but it’s mellowed out a bit with some monsoons here in southern AZ.  While I’m not trying to sound whiney, I had a recently published video taken down for “harmful or dangerous content” today. They can’t explain what was harmful or dangerous about TCGplayer’s Pro Seller features, but I’m waiting to hear from some kind of supervisor. Hoping that gets ironed out.  Been listing a lot of new stuff on TCGplayer and Ebay lately. Notably got a lot of bulk Lord of the Rings listed today to TCGplayer, and some sweet Pokemon Pokeball holos from recent Japanese sets. Have a look at them if you’re interested.  Also have bulk lots of Magic in the shop again – get them before they are gone! If you have submitted a buylist offer to me and I haven’t yet responded, be assured I will be getting to them in the next week or so. Look for a response soon. Cheers!

I know, I know, I’ve not really said anything all summer.  But summer’s about to end, and I’ve been doing a lot. But from here this *should* go back to being a daily activity log. By summer ending, I mean, here in Arizona, the school year begins in the middle of July. And to think, all the school birthdays I missed out on by having a late July birthday in an area where school doesn’t start till late August. Anyway. You may have already seen, I’ve updated the UI on the Checklists page before I put out my video about it a few days ago. Hope that’s working out for everyone – if not, please leave a comment or send me a message. The Grand Canyon – it’s not just a clever name It’s been HOT here, but we managed to get away from the hot a bit during our summer trip. We took the kids up on a tour through Arizona, including 3 nights at the Grand Canyon. None of us had been before, and of course it was truly amazing!  In more card-related news, I’ve made some rearrangements in my office that will greatly enhance my ability to process cards swiftly and in a more procedural kind of way. Think The Toyota Way for cards. I had allowed myself to get bogged down in a lot of ways in the spring, and it took a while to see just where the bottlenecks were, as well as to pull myself out of the resultant burnout. I’m also hoping to literally rearrange the furniture in there sometime this week, just to improve things a bit more. More on that when it happens.  You may notice a huge number of adds to the Newly Listed section of the Shop. This is a lot of cross-listed inventory from Ebay. I will be back to adding more bulk-type inventory here as well starting this week. I will also be sorting these Newly LIsted cards out into their respective categories this week, with new additions to be added every Friday going forward.  I can’t really think of much to say as far as a big damn update for this one, so I’ll keep it short today. Tomorrow will be more specific and interesting, hopefully, maybe. Cheers!

Okay, I’ve been out a few… weeks…. Sometimes the brain weasels won’t let you do a lot of things, and you have to grit your teeth and do the most important things first. But I’m doing better and am back to trying to be back to making content. (lol) So  – what HAVE I been up to? Savvy website users may have noticed a new option in the top menu. We have added a Checklists feature to the site! Currently this has information from all of Magic, Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh! Please feel free to play around with it and leave a comment here with any troubles, feedback, feature requests,  or anything at all related to it. It is usable without logging in, though there will be future features that require logging in Note also that this is the minimally viable version of this. The ultimate plan is for this to be the best possible checklist solution available for trading cards of any kind. Over the next few weeks we will be adding lots of other TCGs, and then will start adding data for sports cards and other non-sport, non-tcg cards as well. There are currently an HTML and a printer-friendly PDF option for the checklists, but a CSV option will be added soon also. I’m hoping to turn this into a collection tracker too, with all kinds of interesting features related to that, but that’s a bit further down the pipeline. In the meantime, I hope you all can find some usefulness with the currently available features.  More news about this and many other things will be coming soon. Looking to get back to M-F posting starting next week or the following week if next week proves too difficult. It’s the last week of the school year and schedules are accordingly crazy-go-nuts.  Cheers!

What’s up Grinders? In preparation for the end of Q1 and the beginning of Q2, I’ve been doing a lot of process auditing and realizing that I don’t have processes firmly in place for a lot of activities. So I thought I’d talk a bit about my process for developing a process. Now I get it, this is somewhat of an esoteric, academic exercise. But it does allow me to unironically use this picture. First, I realize that I’m struggling with something. Something that I do a lot. Something that I may need to explain to someone else someday. I put on my manager hat and thing – if I were training someone to do this for me, how would I tell them to do it? Usually, if it’s something I’m struggling with, I don’t really have a good explanation for how to do the task.  Then I spend some time thinking about exactly what I *actually* do when I’m doing the task. I write it out in a flowchart. Usually this is hastily scribbled in my notebook, and is really usually only legible to myself. Then I look at this workflow, and I really sit and think if any of these steps can be improved. For this process, in which I’m recording my sales on Whatnot in my inventory management system, I’ve determined that it would be simpler if I put steps 1-3 into a process that I do *before* the Whatnot stream. That way I’m not unable to ship the cards until after I’ve gone through and conditioned and listed them in my system. Then I’m left only with steps 4-7. I’ll reevaluate these steps after effecting the changes determined in this first modification.  I try to only create one major modification per iteration, so I can really see how well it helps or doesn’t. Once I’ve settled on that change being worth keeping, I redo this process: draw it out, look at each step and see where the hold-ups are, float some kind of solution, test it out. The end result is, well, it’s a never-ending process, but the output eventually is a pretty good process. I did a short video about my back stock pulling process recently. Check it out here: https://youtube.com/shorts/gVswpu5_2W4?feature=share Video about Q1 into Q2 coming soon. I wasn’t able to shoot it last night, so I’m hoping I can tonight, or tomorrow during my midday break. Until then, keep Grinding! Cheers!

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!

Hey there Grinders! I’ve realized that, while I love my process for adding listings to my inventory system, I really REALLY don’t love adding sales to my inventory system, as it adds a lot of extra steps to the process of shipping orders. Or else it’s super tedious.  So I’m trying to figure out a way to automate to some extent the extraction of all the info I need in order to add sold cards to my Sold page, and thus have it auto populate through to my Master sheet.  It would be super nice if there were some kind of extractable csv that had selected orders on it, and what cards were sold on each of those orders, and what the price breakdown was between each of those cards. But that’s not available from TCGplayer. The best version of this involves getting some info from csv’s to download, and the rest of the info from either the packing slips or else the order pages themselves. But manually typing all this adds a huge amount of work to each order, far outweighing the work involved in actually pulling, packing, and shipping said orders.  Trying to do something with Character Recognition to extract text from the PDF, but it’s really inelegant and kind of driving me up the wall.  If you have any suggestions, any processes that work for you, feel free to let me know. Cheers!

Hey there Grinders. No exclamation point today because I’m tired. -_- Lol. I did the classic mistake of listing too much over the weekend and not catching up on all my orders. And now I have a *lot* of orders to ship. I’ve been trying to get them shipped, but it’s been hard.  Not only is working hard hard work, but also working from home means dealing with home while you’re working. Not that I would have it any other way – I absolutely love being able to work at home, and being able to do something I really enjoy in a way that is self-sustaining.  But sometimes working hard is hard work. Whoever said “Love your work and you won’t work a day in your life” obviously never had to ship orders.  Normally I really don’t mind shipping orders. I enjoy it even. But I’m tired. Spring Break is over, which means back to my square job for a bit, which involves getting up early and physical demands. I’m a bit Krabby. Anyways, I’ll stop complaining.  I did manage to list a bit of Pokemon reverse holos to the Ebay store today. Last bit was a bunch of very nice looking Sun & Moon Base Set reverse holos. Hope they do really well.  Tonight I should have time to finish up my various order shipping along with recording the sales in my inventory spreadsheets. Hopefully I’ll have enough time after that to get some more listing done – got lots more to list T.T Cheers!

Hey there Grinders! So, our Spring Break is over here in Vail AZ. So we’re back to regularly scheduled programming. (As best as I can approximate it anyways x.x) I want to go ahead and announce that I’m going to be starting up some new features for Q2, I haven’t nailed them down entirely, still got some ideas and implementations of them cooking, but come April 1, there will be some new things going on =] Some new engagement, more content, and most importantly MOAR CARDS! Over the last few days of Spring Break, I finally finished organizing the cards in my massive pile of unlisted bulk. Got everything a lot more set up so that I can really dig into listing, and have been pretty successful at getting lots done. TCGplayer current inventory at the time of this writing is over 15k; Ebay is over 2600. Feeling really good about that and the sustainability of continuing to add to that total daily. Now I just need to create the discipline and systems that keep me keeping up with it and with the resultant orders. The video I put out last week about using TCGplayer’s Scan and Identify tool has been very popular, though it’s been a bit contentious. I’ll do a follow up video about this soon, but I wanted to clear the air. This tool is really really good, but my video didn’t give it the best representation of that. I was specifically trying out their newly added ability to do One Piece cards through that system, and it didn’t perform super well. It does excellently on Magic, Pokemon, and YuGiOh. I can’t speak for the also newly added Lorcana, as I haven’t gotten to my Lorcana cards in the pile of bulk to be listed yet, but that will happen soon. I put out  a short earlier today, while I was shipping orders, with a question for sports cards collectors: how do you all interact with the massive amount of parallels that exist in newer sets? I know people don’t really do set collecting anymore, like was (and is still) done for older sets, and for Pokemon and to a lesser extent other TCGs. But do people try to collect one representation of each parallel type? Do people try to get a set or team or player collection, regardless of parallel type? I have so many questions, because I don’t really get how this aspect of the collectible market for sports cards really works. If you have any insight, and would rather leave a comment here than on the video itself, feel free, I’ll read it wherever. I know there are people who buy low end sports cards, just want to understand this aspect of the market better. I’m planning to finish shipping this weekend’s orders this evening, and get my listings in. Tomorrow I’m hoping to get a lot of stuff uploaded to the WooShop that has been on the back burner during Spring Break. And I’m putting in lots of brain work for how I can bring you all more value, so be on the lookout for lots more interesting stuff coming up. And of course, if you have any suggestions on ways I can bring value, whether it’s content ideas, website features, or anything else, please feel free to let me know. The worst that can happen is I won’t think it’s something I can or want to do; and the best that can happen is that I can just easily do so and haven’t thought of it yet, so then I can bring that value to you. Just let me know! Cheers!

What’s up Grinders! Today has been a real grindy kind of day. Lots listed on TCGplayer, mostly Flesh and Blood. Probably around 2500 cards listed today =] Got my orders shipped this morning, including the few orders from my first ever claim sale over on Whatnot last night. That was a lot of fun. Not the most monetarily rewarding (I made $10 XD) but I made several new contacts and also used it as an excuse to sort through a couple thousand Pokemon WotC and mid-era cards that needed conditioning before I did much else with them. Made some people happy and produced content while doing it. Win-win. Late yesterday evening, I decided I wanted to explore some API solutions. I’m wanting to have a channel in the Discord receive notifications when I add or update products in the WooShop. I also want to have my contact form for bulk submissions ping me in a private channel in the server, rather than send only to my email, where it often gets lost or overlooked. I thought I had found a free option for the latter thing, but several hours of trying to get the Webhooks operating properly resulted in nothing. Apparently the output from my contact form will not properly format to a form that Discord likes, so instead of posting, it just does nothing with it. I’ve confirmed both that the sender is sending properly, and that the receiver is able to receive properly, but when the sender sends to the receiver, it just acts like nothing happened.  Was hoping to avoid using Zapier, because it can add up kinda quickly, between the service itself and the plugin on the WordPress side. But it looks like ultimately that’s going to be the way to go. I’m hoping to build up a few more use cases for the service before I commit to getting it, because that’s a lot for a couple edge nice-to-haves.  Going to build my second card storage shelf tomorrow – I still haven’t gotten it put together since moving. Hoping to blast out the rest of the Ebay listings I need to be completely caught up from basically taking January off. And then also to get a lot of TCGplayer listings out as well. I am looking at a 4-row of Weiss Schwarz to list tomorrow, which should be a lot of fun. Always enjoy listing WS.  Oh, and the video I published yesterday is doing really well. Over 2k views as of this writing. A lot of people seem turned off by the difficulties I was having in the video, with regard to having to manually change the card listing to match the appropriate set. I think this is a new game problem with the service. I rarely have any problems with it when adding Magic or Pokemon. Maybe I should do an update video or short to showcase that…. Anyways, back to the grind tomorrow! Cheers!

Sometimes you grind the stone, and sometimes the stone grinds you. Erm. I mean. That’s what it’s supposed to do. It’s supposed to grind what you press against it.  It’s not a perfect metaphor okay? Anyway, yesterday was a day that left me feeling ground. I went to edit my video I shot on Monday only to find there was no audio with the recording. Turned out I had accidentally unplugged my microphone.  Okay, well. That sucks. I guess I have to reshoot it.  The video in question is a demonstration of how I’m using TCGplayer’s new Scan & Identify tool. This is the updated version of their Quicklist software, and replaces their Quicklist + closed beta they’ve been running last year. The first rollout in their new initiative to create more and better tools to reduce frictions in the TCG card marketplace. (Check this out here.) Since TCGplayer have also announced that the Scan & Identify can process One Piece and Lorcana, I thought I would show off my process while using it to scan in some One Piece. It was a relatively low hanging piece of fruit for me that just got a whole lot lower with this added feature. So seemed like a great idea. But honestly – it seems like it isn’t quite up to the standard that has been shown for Magic and Pokemon. In the video (which will be published later today), I had to manually fix nearly 40% of the 550+ cards I had scanned in. This made the process take a LOT longer than if I’d just used the filtered .csv option.  But. We made it through. We got the cards listed. We got the video recorded. It actually has audio lol. Got another several hundred cards listed besides (ZNR foils). The sun sets. The sun rises.  Today is a new day. I have an appointment this morning, but after lunch I’ll be editing video to publish this afternoon, blasting out a bunch of Ebay listings, and prepping and running a Whatnot stream this evening. Tonight’s stream will be my first attempt at a claim-sale type show. I have a big pile of Pokemon bulk from WotC era all the way to today that needs sorting, and I thought it might be nice if people could shop it while I’m sorting it. Be sure to tune in if you’re into that kind of thing; just follow the link on the home page. Cheers!

Hey there Grinders! Regular scheduling of content resumes this week. For real this time lol. There will be a new Daily Grindstone each weekday, new short videos each weekday, 1 long video per week, and 1-2 streams per week (usually on whatnot).  This past week has been one of reorganizing and preparation. It was the first week of the school district’s Spring Break, which means everyone’s at home and schedules have been lax to say the least. But I’ve gotten a lot of things moved around in the office, better placed and organized to improve listing. Been making plans and brainstorming about future things.  This week going forward again will be better scheduled as far as content is concerned. Also planning it to be a week of a big blast of new listings. TCGplayer, Ebay, and the WooShop should all be receiving lots of new inventory. Pokemon, One Piece, magic, Flesh & Blood, various sports cards, and Lorcana all should be going up, with Weiss Schwarz to follow as well. I’ve been having some, let’s say mixed success, on whatnot. I’ve got a few shows under my belt now, so I can speak a bit from a position of experience. Not like an old hand or anything, but I have a frame of reference that I didn’t have 3 months ago. All in all, I like the live selling, that has been way less terrifying than I originally thought. I haven’t been able to get much traction when selling anything other than Magic or Pokemon. I feel sports cards are pretty saturated, and buyers aren’t looking for the lower end or what I like to call “bulk plus” stuff anyway. I also tried out selling Weiss Schwarz, because I have a big stack of $2+ WS cards that I thought I might be able to find a niche audience for, but only a couple sold in about an hour of trying, so I wouldn’t call that a big success.  When selling Magic or Pokemon though, it has seemed like I was always able find a few buyers who were interested in anything I had available, and even brought in others who were interested too. I’ve had over $500 in sales through whatnot in March alone so far, which I can’t argue with one bit.  My biggest issue with whatnot is the inventory management. By the nature of the platform, it’s a bit loose on this sort of thing. You’re able to toss up for auction whatever makes sense in the moment, and it isn’t easy to tell after the fact in a scalable way what cards you’ve sold, what their prices were, what their details are, &c. The info is there, but it’s not simple to get the details tied to the orders and then into a form easily addable to a spreadsheet, like it is from Ebay or (to a lesser extent) TCGplayer. It’s just a challenge, and one I haven’t really got a process for yet, so stay tuned for when that comes about. I may just need to be more disciplined than the platform requires, in order to keep it all straight in my own mind, not sure. Big ideas I’m interested in pursuing in the middle/long term – I’d like to refresh the Discord server some. Creating a free section that I can invite people in that don’t pay for a membership, but limited access for them. Still maintaining a place only for those paid members with the added features they should be getting. Since I’m liking some but not all the aspects of live selling, I’m wondering if there is some way I can integrate it directly into the website. There seem to be solutions that emulate some but not all of whatnot’s features in an embeddable way so that I could run live selling directly through a page on the site. This would be cool for private shows only for members, or maybe only for certain tiers of membership, and again could bring more people into the community and purchasing directly from the site, which is better for me and for the buyer. Super super long term idea – building a marketplace in the style of TCGplayer but for sports cards, similar to buysportscards, but maybe better implemented, with more of an eye towards reducing frictions in the marketplace, and with a better marketing arm. Just an idea, but let’s you know the kinds of things I’m thinking about. A reminder – if you order single cards from the WooShop, and your order is of a kind to be shipped in a Plain White Envelope, we do have free envelope tracking available in the style of Ebay Standard Envelope. Even if your order is just a $.25 card, you get the tracking service as a free bonus.  Cheers!

What’s grinding, Grinders? My recording of my presentation at the GAMA Expo is now live on YouTube – feel free to check it out here. Last night I ran my first Whatnot stream since January. Went pretty well, felt really good to be getting back in the saddle (so to speak). I didn’t have a whole lot of product ready to sell, so I’m hoping my next show on Saturday will go even better =]. I am running shows every Wednesday and Saturday evening in March, and will revisit the schedule at the end of the month to see how it’s working for me.  I do have  a question, if you have any feedback, please feel free to leave a comment:  Would a Calendar page here on the website be useful to anyone? Would have dates of planned upcoming streams, planned video release dates, and anything else I can think of to add to it. If I’m making public promises to people who actually care if I uphold them, it may make me more accountable to some of these things. Or it may make me just feel more bad when other things prevent me from following through. I dunno. But let me know if that would be interesting or helpful for you. I’ve still been working on my Inventory Management System. The issue I’ve finally been able to tackle has been creating a Backstock Pullsheet. I wanted it to automatically populate a list of cards that are running low or sold out in whatever marketplace they are listed in. I was running into issues with the spreadsheets populating with things I have low stock on TCGplayer… and *every Ebay listed card*. Or when I “fixed” it, it just reversed the problem: it would give me the few things I”m sold out of in Ebay, and then every card I had listed on TCGplayer.  I have however eventually stumbled on the correct code for the formulas that allows it to create a list that only has things I’m low on in their respective marketplaces. So I’m super excited about that – look forward to a video about how this process works for me before long. This was the last major piece I needed to get working for my own purposes. If there’s any features you would be looking for, feel free to let me know. I have added some Magic bulk back to the Bulk Distribution page, as well as a bit of Flesh and Blood bulk. I will be adding Weiss Schwarz and Digimon before long as well. Hope you all enjoy these, and I look forward to getting this whole setup back to a more normal place.  Cheers!

Look, I know, I know. This is the DAILY Grindstone. It’s not the every three weeks Grindstone. February has been tough on the time demands. Between my kids being sick, schedules being disrupted by parent-teacher conferences, so having to figure out childcare logistics. And then suddenly it’s time to get ready to go to Louisville for the GAMA Expo. So I’m here to catch you up real quick =] Still trying to catch up to the listings goals I have, since I didn’t get much listed in January. Currently at about 6k listed on TCGplayer, 1400+ on Ebay. The work of listing these things has already started paying off, as the increase in listings has definitely led to an increase in sales.  I can report that even down to the bulk level, Pokemon is on fire. Stuff that was rotting on my shelves before moving, sitting around for months, as soon as I get it relisted it’s flying out the door. This isn’t just a sealed bubble – this is real demand from new people entering the market and filling out their master sets of SWSH and SV sets.  So, the GAMA Expo was a lot of fun. I mean, the actual expo part. Not so much the travelling. I’ve never had flights get cancelled or delayed before, but did twice on this trip. On the way out, my flight from Tucson to Dallas was fine, but when we landed, I got an email saying my flight to Louisville was cancelled, and that I’d been rescheduled for a new flight – 12 hours later.  That goes to Charlotte instead. And the connecting flight from Charlotte to Louisville didn’t leave till 9a the next morning.  I was able to make it out on a 6p flight to Louisville, and spent a few hours hanging out in the airport with Rocky and Andrew from Baxter’s Castle, an LGS in Queen Creek, AZ. They’ve got a lot of great ideas and are even coming out with their own store-centric TCG, so that’s really fun. I’m excited to work with them more in the future.  The next morning, after a stone-like sleep, I had a great breakfast, and then freaked out for a bit ahead of giving my presentation. I know, I make videos, but that’s a whole lot different than standing up in front of what turned out to be 150+ people and delivering a speech. All that said, the presentation seems to have gone really well, lots of positive feedback and great interactions and networking.  Had a lot of fun with the guys from Card Castle, and went to TCGplayer’s presentation as well. Got to see Mason from CNA Games (unfortunately we both forgot that we ought to take a picture for proof). Got to meet a lot of people whose names I recognize from TCGplayer official emails. Apparently they like sharing out my videos for new sellers to learn how to do things, which is super humbling and flattering. Lots of validation that I’m not just screaming into the void.  Travelling back gave me flashbacks as my connecting flight back to Tucson was delayed for a couple hours. But I made it home and things have started to settle back to normal for this week. Stay tuned, as I’ll be releasing my recording of the presentation either this evening or tomorrow (depending on how quickly I can add the slides to the video), and I’ve got a lot more stuff to talk about going forward.  Cheers! And keep on grinding!

Just a quick one today, Grinders. Had a fun Whatnot show on Sunday, selling about 36 cards for a bit over $60. All Pokemon from WotC era up through Sun&Moon. Nothing crazy, and learned a lot. Shot my new video today. Which means things are finally getting settled down enough for me to be able to shoot videos. Which feels really good. Hoping to get it edited tonight or tomorrow for a Tuesday or Wednesday release.  Things coming together. Sorry this one is light on content, but that’s where I’m at today. Cheers!

Two big things –  Starting tomorrow, I will be able to get a ride back home during my long midday break, so I’ll have 3+ hours of midday working I can dedicate to things like shipping and listing that I was previously having to do during dinnertime and evening hours. Big quality of life improvement for me and our whole family. Not only will I be able to get more business work done, I’ll also be able to get more hauswerk done too. I’ll be honest – I’ve been struggling to get things done only in the evenings, so this will help us all out a whole lot. The second thing – I tried to run a Whatnot stream last night. I was trying something new, in using my Chromebook to run it, rather than my phone. I have a USB camera I wanted to use for the show, which the Chromebook recognizes and everything – I’ve shot B-roll for videos with it before on this exact setup. But whatever camera service is built into Whatnot would only recognize the built-in front and back cameras on the Chromebook, despite me changing every possible setting and privacy allowance I could think of. Could not get it to work, and by the time I gave up and would have just used my phone, it was already nearing 10p.  All that said – I have extra time this afternoon, so I am going to run my Whatnot stream this evening, starting at 4p Arizona time. This one will be the UNO Elite NFL cards I have, and will also include a giveaway of a sealed pack of UNO Elite NFL. My next stream I’m tentatively scheduling for Saturday, and will likely have a bunch of vintage Magic and Pokemon! Anything that doesn’t end up selling in the Whatnot auctions will go to Ebay/WooShop, so if you miss out but it doesn’t sell, there’s another chance, but you might get a better price in the auctions, if that’s your kind of thing! Till tomorrow Grinders,Cheers!

Gosh, been a couple days =] I uploaded a bunch of scans to a Google Drive so that I could then create listings in the middle of the day, while I was away from the office. Which worked out great – eventually. Card Dealer Pro worked fine; got 40 more of the 1991 Topps Micro listed, and even sold one, so that was cool.  I struggled more with the TCGplayer Scan & Identify (which is the new name for Quicklist+). Trying to work through the App on my Chromebook was just not working – it wouldn’t upload images, or if it did, it would simply fail to process them. But working on it through the Chrome browser page worked just like it does at home. So I did manage to get that working. Got a lot more of those listed to the WooShop as well.  Also started listing Pokemon to TCGplayer and WooShop – check out the new listings in the WooShop if you’re interested. Started with Battle Styles since I had a bunch of it ready to go, but more will be being added soon. I received my first bulk submission of the year, which is a small Pokemon one. I think I’m going to make a video and/or a Whatnot stream where I go through it live. I’m excited to dig into it, but haven’t yet had time to have a look.  Hoping to do a Whatnot stream tonight at 830p Arizona time, if you’re on that platform feel free to stop in and say hi, planning to sell some UNO Elite NFL cards. Not sure how they’ll do, but I’m definitely going to find out.  Catch you all tomorrow, Grinders! Cheers!

Been a weird but productive couple days, Card Grinders! Some news items:  TCGplayer have launched the open beta of their new version of Quicklist. Instead of calling it Quicklist+ like they were originally, they are calling it Scan & Identify. This is available automatically for all Pro Sellers, and is a new tab that appears at the top of your Seller Portal. This service works really well, if you are already set up to use it. It works great with a scanner – instead of it live detecting and identifying cards, it simply uses images you’ve already got on your computer. I have been using it a lot, if you’ve seen some of my more recent videos around processes and such. CardCastle have announced they have launched a beta for their Lorcana card detection/sort for the CardBot. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but I imagine it works a lot like the Pokemon one, with maybe a bit fewer features currently. I’ll let you know when I get a chance to run some Lorcana cards through my CardBot. I was able finally to scan some cards last night and get them listed. I’ve been having a hard time with my current schedule, because I’ve been super tired after 9-10p, and having to get up at 430a to start the day. So, I was able to scan a bunch last night, and then drop those images into Google Drive so that I can get them taken care of during my long midday break away from home. Was able to list several hundred ZNR cards to TCGplayer, with a couple hundred more ready to go live on the WooShop tonight. Also listed 50 more of the 1991 Topps Micro set that I’ve been working on, a few of which I’ve cross-listed to the WooShop. They are available in the Newly Listed section until I create the categories for sports cards (likely very soon). I haven’t really had time and/or energy to get my shelves reconstructed yet, but I’m sure I’ll be able to do so at least by the end of the weekend. Need to shoot some short videos and maybe a long video this evening, and maybe throw together a Whatnot stream sometime in the next couple days.  Until tomorrow,Cheers!

What’s going on, Card Grinders? I’ve had a relatively productive long weekend. How has yours gone? There are a number of new updates and minor news items concerning TCG Bulk Kings I am able to report.  There have been a few cosmetic updates to the website, with the intent to make some pages more legible. I didn’t realize that on some pages we were displaying light gray text on a more differenter light gray background – sorry about that. Hopefully it’s been fixed, but if you have any issues with site function or legibility, please email me or leave a comment on one of these posts. I’ll gladly do my best to fix it up. I’ve updated the Categories in the WooShop to properly display with new current inventory numbers and information.  We’ve added BETCKEY Premium Labels to the main page as one of the major resources for supplies. If you’re needing thermal labels, or even a new label printer, make sure you grab them from BETCKEY and take advantage of the discount they’ve set up for me. Purchasing through my link also helps support the business as well making me look good to BETCKEY so they continue to offer this discount for you all. I’ve continued to work on these inventory management spreadsheets I’ve been talking about. Tell me – what kind of features would you like in an inventory management system? What specific details would you like to see at a glance on a dashboard? If your ideas are both something I can accomplish and seem like they’d be genuinely helpful to lots of people, I’ll do my best to incorporate them into my finished product. I have finished moving houses, and have gotten the bare bones of my office back to working order. I still need to set up my inventory shelves and clear out enough space to have a table out there. Those are my goals for this evening. Also to get back to listing in larger quantities again. I started listing cards from the 1991 Topps Micro baseball set, which was fun, if a bit time consuming. Hoping to have those all listed by the end of this week (have a complete set, but I feel like they’ll sell better individually). Check them out on the Ebay store, and if you want to pick one up, let me know so I can throw it onto the WooShop for you. Finally, I would like to bring to everyone’s attention that I have an envelope tracking service tied to my site now. If you make a purchase for single cards through the WooShop, and your order is under $25 and is few enough cards to send in a Plain White Envelope, then you will automatically get tracking attached to your PWE shipment. There is no extra fee for this – it is covered in the existing shipping payment or else in your free shipping if your order qualifies. Orders of higher numbers of cards or higher value orders will have standard parcel tracking as normal. This PWE tracking works similarly to Ebay Standard Envelope, though with a bit less detail in the tracking. Once your order ships, we will send you a link at which you can track your order. Currently it tells you the ZIP code in which it was most recently scanned. The service I’m using is called CardPathfinder, feel free to check them out. I think they are a great service and plan to use them going forward. They are also always looking to continuously improve their service, which I think is great. Anyways, I’m going to get to work on a few things now. Going to see if I can continue to improve these inventory spreadsheets some, as well as a few other projects I’m working on. Hoping to get those shelves set up this evening, and get some more cards listed. Cheers!

Gosh, sorry it’s been a few days you all.  While I meant to post on last Thursday, unfortunately, my phone didn’t charge overnight, and so I had no internet during my daytime away from the house. I also wasn’t feeling very well that evening, so I ended up going to bed early. Friday morning I woke up in chills and 103 degree fever – turns out I got the flu! The day before moving day! Because of course I did. Got to the urgent care to get diagnosed and get some Tamiflu, so I could be as in commission as possible for the weekend. Moved the heavy stuff Saturday. Moved some more stuff Sunday, but the Tamiflu was making me super nauseated. So that went slowly. But I was starting to feel better. Moved a lot of stuff on Monday, and finished up moving the last of it yesterday. Went a lot more slowly than originally planned for, since I was super sick and all. But it’s done. This evening, I’ll be getting my setup back all setup and also putting together things like our dining table and hooking up our laundry machines. But hopefully will be getting back to relative normal in a couple days, and can start catching up from what I’ve missed the last week or two. Cheers!

Hello Grinders, keep on grindin’! So yesterday I was able to get all the Bulk Buylists updated! They are accurate for all stores listed. Interestingly, PKMN Colosseum (or The Card Colosseum as they’re calling themselves now) are no longer buying bulk. Safari Zone are only buying C/U. And Bill and Ogre’s are only buying Magic C/U, which was a big surprise. Star City still has their buy prices upside down on foil vs. non-foil mythics. Otherwise, the most notable things are the general decline in Pokemon and Yugioh bulk rates, as well as the Lorcana prices having come down quite a bit as well. I’m hoping to keep a lot more on top of this than I did in 2024, and maybe establish a weekly average graph or something. Could be doable =] In other news, moving is slowly going, so there isn’t a lot of activity as far as new listings. I did go ahead and crosslist the most recent Ebay listings over to the WooShop. You can see them in the Newly Listed category over there. Lots of Pokemon stickers and some vintage Magic. Remember – if you ever see something on my Ebay store that you’re interested in, reach out to me and I can populate it to the WooShop. If you have store credit then you can use that to buy the thing you see in Ebay.  How do you get store credit? There are a couple ways. If you do a bulk submission, you can get paid in store credit (with a 30% bonus too). Also, if you sign up for an affiliate account (which costs you nothing at all, ever), you can direct other people to purchase from the WooShop with your links you can create in there. If they make a purchase, you will get a commission from that. And if you’d like, you can get that paid out as store credit (again with a 30% bonus). Let me know if you are trying to set that up, and I can try to help you out.  Today’s goals include updating my buylist submission form to match the newly updated page, and working on the inventory management spreadsheets. Not much hope for listing this evening, will *fingers crossed* be able to make some headway on move prep. Once this move is done, and we are settled into the new house, then the real fun begins, and the listing and content machines will begin grinding anew. Current inventory: TCGplayer: 499Ebay: 137WooShop: 135 Until tomorrow! Cheers!

Hello again, friends! Sorry this hasn’t started as “daily” of a posting as I had originally planned. Big things happening and whatnot. News item #1 – I have taken a part-time job just to smooth out the personal income stream while I get the business back into tip-top shape. I will be driving a school bus in my kids’ school district for a while. Early mornings and mid-afternoons will be accounted for, but I’ll have time in the middle of the day to do this kind of thing and web development and such. And the evenings for shipping and listing and content creation. And of course the weekends. News item #2 – I am moving houses. Very soon. We’ve finally resolved our differences with the massive rental corporation that owns the house we moved into when we moved to Tucson. We are going to move into a privately owned rental house, almost identical in size and less than 2 miles away, for less rent and all around just nicer and better for us. So look forward to a new office/warehouse setup coming soon. I did also find a new desk for free on Facebook Marketplace, just before realizing we need to move, so I haven’t set that up at all. Really looking forward to moving off of my folding white table desk and into a proper desk setup. I had meant to post a lot of this yesterday, but apparently when I believed I had charged the Chromebook that I’ll be taking with me during the day, I had in actuality been *checks notes* not charging it. So, I didn’t get to do much on the computer. Had to instead do some brain work in the old analog notebook – came up with an updated flowchart for how I process raw bulk (ideally anyway). Anyway, goals for today – I will be spending some time updating the Bulk Buylist prices on the Buylist page. I am not quite ready to start paying cash for bulk yet, but will be accepting Store Credit submissions. Please wait to send until I update with a new mailing address or I tell you directly where to send your submissions. Also hoping to update my own prices, as well as the submission form. If I also have time, I plan to work some on the Inventory Tracking spreadsheets I’m putting together. Almost finished with that project, just a few bugs to work out. Hoping to spend the evening doing a MASSIVE amount of moving prep work – we are looking to get moved entirely by Sunday 1/12. Have a couple orders to ship as well, but that will just take a few minutes. Not likely to do much listing in the next few days, so I’ll have to plan to list extra fast starting next week.  Current inventory counts: TCGplayer: 507Ebay: 137WooShop: 25 Note, some of the WooShop inventory is cross-listed from Ebay, so many of the WooShop and Ebay listings will represent a single piece of inventory.  January listing goals: TCGplayer: 11000Ebay: 1100WooShop: 2500 The WooShop one again is the most up in the air. It will be cross-listed Ebay inventory and excess bulk inventory. Not sure really where that number will end up, but having a goal will *fingers crossed* cause me to focus somewhat on adding to it. So tell me: what are your goals for this year? Quarter? Month? What kind of process do you have for taking in collections, if you have one? What kind of features would you like to see in an inventory tracking system? Let me know!

Hello! This is the start of my series in which I detail what I’ve gotten up to today, with regards to grinding away at good ol’ TCG Bulk Kings. Kind of a snapshot of the behind the scenes for today. What my goals are, what my struggles are, what my achievements are, and what I’m thinking about on a  day-to-day basis. Hoping to publish this once a day, M-F, for the foreseeable future. Anyway, I didn’t publish yesterday because in the evening I *drumroll please* ran my first Whatnot stream yesterday!  Especially given how nervous I am and have been about live streaming, I would call this an unmitigated success. I was live for about 3 hours, and made 120 sales for nearly $300! This was mostly vintage Magic stuff, with The Dark heavily represented. A lot of stuff I’d been meaning to get sold but hadn’t put the last bit of work into moving it. Today, I spent a while figuring out how I want to manage Whatnot sales through my inventory management system. I also got all the orders shipped. I can tell you that, once you get used to it, the shipping on Whatnot is pretty straightforward. Just took some time really trying to get in there and do it. The only way to figure it out is hands-on; even the tutorial videos they have aren’t very clear, though I suppose they were helpful enough for me to figure it out and get these orders processed. If you’re wanting to look into selling on Whatnot, they’ve given me this link that will set you up with a matching bonus from your first week (of course, I get a bit of a commission too). Speaking of, the inventory management system I’ve developed is coming together nicely. There are a couple bugs in the spreadsheet formulae that I need to work out, but that just requires some mechanical work and some time, not big-brain thinking. Once I get it working great and am a bit more confident with my day-to-day interaction with it, I will certainly be doing a video and seeing about getting a version of it set up for others to use as well =]. The day swiftly ran out on me though today, with a big trip to the store so my son could spend some of his Christmas gift card money. I wasn’t able to reach my daily goal of 50+ Ebay listings today (only got 26). I did go ahead and cross-list them to the WooShop though – they are viewable in the Newly Listed category. I also was only able to add a few cards to TCGplayer today. I will have to make up for the lost time from the last couple days over the weekend so I can keep up with my goals.  Goals for tomorrow: simply try to get another good amount of Ebay stuff listed, and roll out a few hundred TCGplayer listings. Also, my son randomly wants to help sort some things, so I’ll be getting him to do some of that tomorrow afternoon. Till next time~~

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

Hey there friends! I need your help. Things have been looking up with the addition of the CardBot to the business and all that. However, the cash crunch I’ve been experiencing hasn’t yet gone away. Sales are slowly catching back up as I add more inventory, but I’m sure you understand if you’ve sold on TCGplayer that you don’t receive your payments for 2 to 3 weeks after you make those sales, especially if through Direct x.x And even then, it’s not really ramping back up fast enough right now, since I’m still rebuilding from the Direct meltdown over the summer. So, in order to have enough cash to make it through the month, I’m asking. If you have been considering picking up something from the Shop – do so now. If you need an inordinate amount of Weiss Schwarz bulk, let me know. If you aren’t really seeing something you like, but you know someone who would love something you see, then join the Affiliate program and send them a referral. They get what they want and you get a lil ol kickback for it. If you use the coupon code “helpchase” at checkout, it will save an extra 10% through Friday. I promise I haven’t forgotten about all of you, I’m just scrambling to make myself stay afloat. I’m not going gently into that good night. Sorry if this message seems beggy or whiney. But I’m needing help. Cheers!

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Potentially light at the end of this tunnel. Apparently TCGplayer are working on this as a big bug rather than intentional dilution of the usefulness of the Direct program. At least that’s what they’ve told this commenter. Hopefully this ends up being just a big mess up on TCGplayer’s back end when they rolled out some UI/UX updates over the summer.  But the lack of communication that is still going on kind of points to a big drop in the trust associated with the TCGplayer brand, which was already losing ground in the last year or so. If you aren’t aware of what this is referencing, I did a video a few days ago about the issues going on at TCGplayer with the Direct program. Video is here: https://youtu.be/X8a01ehcjkY In other news, I’ve finished adding in all the website support for Flesh and Blood to be fully in the Shop. So you can be thankful you won’t have to listen to me blather on about that anymore lol. I am getting stock from each of the sets added as I can (added a bunch of Monarch yesterday). Some sets will still be empty until I can get to them in the next few days.  I am remixing my inventory spread across my platforms, starting with Flesh and Blood. My plan at the start, as sort of an initial condition, is to stock 5 of each unique card I have available on the website. Then put the rest onto the TCGplayer marketplace as sort of a shoppable backstock area. I haven’t settled on a pricing strategy between the two yet, but I think this mix will be good for ensuring I have plenty in stock on the website. If some cards sell, I can replenish them from the TCGplayer inventory easily enough.  This doesn’t include the Featured and Unique listings that each product line will have. Each card there will get it’s own individual listing, and so won’t be tied to this inventory priority mixing. I’ve only got Magic Featured and Unique listed so far, but there will be similar sections for each category eventually. Been adding to the Magic section too, with some really nice looking Unlimited cards. Well, a lot of them are pretty beat up, but a lot of them are pretty good looking too, and all of them are sleeve-playable =] The Magic c/u bulk has been selling… okayly. That’s definitely a word. A few boxes here and there – still have many boxes left from the first batch prepared, and the first ones sold are on their way to the buyers. Make sure you get some soon, or some of the other bulk that I have available still, including Pokemon, Weiss Schwarz, and a bit of other stuff still left. I think with just a bit more sales, I’m really going to be able to consider myself as mostly caught up Until next time, cheers!

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