Just found your channel! I started on TCGPlayer in September and became a lvl 4 seller in just under a month. Now have thousands of sales, learned A LOT and still learning. Friday - Sunday i am getting close to 60-70 sales a day so packaging takes up a lot of time. Looking forward to your experience in Direct. Subscribed!
Great growth!! That is a lot to pack every day.. I will release an update on Direct soon, want to talk about pros and cons as I learn myself. I will say the one major perk is doing one big shipment every couple days vs tons of individual orders.
Good stuff. It's nice to see you actually caught the pricing issue at the start and was able to adjust quick enough. In my case I was unable to and lost quite a few hundred bucks on that first RI from undervalued cards. Also nice adjustment on the tcglow + 30% autopricer. I initially used tcgdirect low autopricer and screwed me over big time.
I’m glad I did because I definitely could’ve solid off some value for nothing. And the higher priced the better, as long as sales keep coming in that is.. 🤷🏻♂️
Awesome video man, I’ve been on direct for a little while now. Took a little bit to build the system but what I started doing was selling anything over 40 cents on my 2nd TCGplayer non direct account because the labor to cost/revenue was well worth it. Since I was able to find consistent inventory I was still filling out an RI every week on .10 to .39 cards or the higher value cards with the markup. Direct has definitely been worthwhile but taking the higher fees on the .40-$4.99 cards I was leaving too much money on the table margin wise. Excited to keep following the journey!
Did you join Direct before you migrated your cards over 40 cents to the second account? Or did you already have a big enough of an inventory of 39 cent or less cards to join Direct?
@ I had the same philosophy of 40 cent and over on my account before it joined direct, unfortunately learned the hard way at first haha, didn’t migrate anything and practically sold through it all 40 cents and over which was then where I made the decision to make a 2nd account after seeing all the fees, direct has been awesome because now I can put .10-.39 cards on there in large volume and make better margins than just selling them wholesale at bulk pricing
is there not an option to use tcg direct only for the cards you want to send them and then manually pack orders on other cards u don't want to send in to them?
@GameVitamins 100%. It's tough to say for sure with such a small sample size but I sell a lot of lower end cards and it sure is nice not packing 50+ envelopes at a time.
Hey man! Love the vid as always. You said your shipping cost is 0.95 per order. I’ve got super clean and premium shipping material (card stock envelopes, thermal printer, nice sleeves) and my cost is around 0.85. Mostly because it’s in super bulk, but still. Let me know if you want me to send you some details. You seem like a man of quality and don’t settle for the painters tape and regular envelope type of guy.
I run two accounts, one direct, one non direct. That allows me to pick and choose which cards I want to sell through direct. Also (not to tell you how to run your business) I would consider raising your shipping. I sit around $1.99 shipping on my direct account and still get the occasional non direct sale. This is because cards come in and out of stock on direct on a daily basis. Something to think about.
Yeah I upped my shipping shortly after uploading this last night to $1.99. Though I will probably want to look into running another account. Question, do you simply register for another account or do you need 100% separate info including addresses, business name, etc?
@@GameVitamins they just ask for a different bank account number and store name. Address and personal info can be the same. I do the exact same thing this guy does.
Hello, i love your content i havent start selling but definitely seems like something i would like to do soon and having your videos for starting then will be super useful. Now just looking at the date from this video i like to fidget with excel and first of all I would probably start by making a monster fee formula that encapsulates all the fee brackets so that you dont need to input the set fee amount while doing the analysis junping from 19.99 to 20+ should be doable (if kinda anoying) with a bunch of if statements but i dont know if you would prefer to tackle your inventory needs first? Also, on a quick note, if you do go for the super fee formula, you should be able to easily plot the points into a couple graphs to better see/understand what are the important price points.
One thing to note, fees are per order and not per card. If you sell 2 $2 cards in a single order they're not going to take a 50% cut on both, you'll be in the next fee bracket. Same goes with your $19.99 scenario. You'll notice a lot of sales where people buy multiple copies of the same card at higher prices for playsets.
I’ve been selling on tcgplayer for nearly 2 years and I’ve been ramping up my inventory and sales in the last 3 months and I’ve seen amazing growth BUT your video is eye opening especially with the numbers side and fees. I’d be interested in seeing a guide for what price points to avoid. This is huge and could be a total game changer for me
Once I have spent a bit more time in direct I’ll certainly tackle the pricing strategies at length. Right now I’m still just too new to it all but over the coming weeks I’m sure I’ll figure out better ways to optimize! But definitely want to watch for those price points where fees change.
@@GameVitamins that would be amazing! I’ve tried to wrap my head around the numbers before but I’m just so busy with a full time job and it’s overtime plus trying to launch a card shop and having a pricing strategy would help maximize my effort and get me closer to opening a brick and mortar shop. Shops around here don’t have any online catalog for buyers to order from locally
I agree with you on Direct (I dont sell games available on Direct so I cannot comment my own experiences) but I'd be curious how much you are saving on postage and supplies since that is likely the place you are saving the most money, beyond the time. The other question is "what about the business" does the extra time allow you to do (not just "life time")..thanks!
This is the right way to be looking at it! You save time on packing, so where does that time get allocated to make more money -- for me it'll be in the custom product space on eBay. I'm waiting for my sorter, but I may try to get some listings put together and a few "trial" products put together.
Interesting and informative video! Been looking for a video like this when I thought about starting my own TCG business in the summer of last year. I couldn't find anyone really talking about the numbers of being on direct. I like knowing the numbers as well, but I haven't really learned how to use excel too well. Do you have any of your excel sheets available to the public and was that page about the fees on direct publicily available? I've tried googling to find what the exact fee structure is like before, but couldn't find it.
Oh also, you forgot to account for lower fees now that your account is a direct seller. So your math on the marketplace numbers is off. For a 25c order total fees is actually only 47c not 50c.
Good catch, I'll definitely make a note of that in my calculations. I was comparing when you're in vs out of direct, but that is true! Standard marketplace orders do benefit from the lower fees once you're in it as well!
I think if you're pricing your product higher, it can be a good way to drive sales. I did that for a while and just increased my products to 5-10% over market. Got more sales with free shipping + higher priced products. And then pretty often it was still under $5 so I'd get $1.27 vs the $1.49 I had it set to before and that difference was made up on the card price.
I have found that it takes me about 3 minutes per card (when selling them individually on TCG player). I have a decent packing system and keep the cards alphabetized for faster pulling. I usually pull and pack in about a 1.5 - 2 minutes, but I figure 3 minutes per card to give a little buffer for post office driving time, initial sorting, alphabetizing etc.. I usually try to buy in and sell in larger batches so I can keep everything efficient and cut down on time per card. It also cuts down on time when I sell multiple in one order but I just count that as gravy. I have figured about $1.5 - $2 as a minimum for me which would equate to about $20 per hour after everything. And that's for cheapo cards, larger cards become way more profitable especially when they are about $13 -$24.99 or over $50 because of the way shipping costs weigh on the profit percentages. Those are just my numbers, I'm sure every seller has different ways of doing things (I am a non direct level 4 seller with 1000 plus reviews at 100% rating).
Personally I think that with the way box prices have gone on a tear it's an artificial way to 'lower' the cost of the boxes for consumers. Unsure on where it'll go, I've heard lots of mixed reviews, but never hurts to pick up some in pre-order then some after release and cost average.
Dude I love your video and the break downs but I'm sitting wondering how you remember and track all the data??? my ADHD drives me crazy when I'm sorting and listing cards and tracking every boxes data to the card and price of each box. I'm a level 4 pro seller and I sell supplies, pokemon and yugioh, nothing fancy just bulk and whatever I pull from yugioh boxes
I use a spreadsheet for everything so it just becomes part of my 'process' when I'm done packing and it's a quick way to help me keep track of all the numbers. But honestly, tracking the numbers is part of the fun for me, so I guess I'm lucky in that regard 😅
Thanks for showing this, I am staying away from Direct, the margins are already small enough, if they take even more, I will stop using TCGPlayer altogether. I am already shifting most my inventory to another site.
Ive been selling just pokemon for 8 months. I have found that javing a direct account and non direct account is best. At least in pokemon direct really only makes sense for cards only 50 then i do everything else on my self fulfilled account
Do you get to choose what part of your inventory goes into direct? Is it an all-or-nothing affair where everything with a Direct Price listing is switched?
The biggest thing that makes direct not worth it for a lot of people is definitely the fees. Yes, you sell a lot faster, and sometimes for inflated prices, BUT if your business is primarily built around selling cards under $5 (particularly under $3), that 50% fee will KILL your earnings. It then devolves into having to basically feed the beast. It doesn't help that aside from LGS' and people with 20-30k+ worth of inventory, I've yet to see a single direct seller netting over 6k a month despite doing thousands of orders. Meanwhile, I primarily sell card games that are not on direct, and I was doing 10-20k in sales monthly doing 25-50% the amount of orders, manually, but it's not really that difficult to pull 30 orders a day. Some things to note if you want to keep on the direct business model. If your card is around $20, you are better off selling the card for even like 17 or 18 dollars, otherwise price significantly above 20 to make up for the increased fee due to those orders "requiring tracked shipping". Same applies for cards near $3, you need to be closer to $4 or so
Not yet! Might mess around with a build this evening. Apparently one of my friends just made a deck similar while I was gone, so gotta tread carefully haha.
Hope you don't get any RI discrepancies. You will need to have 98% accuracy. That counts conditions, missing cards, wrong quality, wrong variant, extra cards. Good video. Keep up the grind.
Hope not.. luckily all my cards are brand new from sealed product so conditions, variant, etc shouldn't be an issue. The main one is if I have any internal inventory discrepancies, but I try to be as careful with that as I can be.
@GameVitamins It is best to only have cards from boosters. Just watch out which booster boxes. I got hit hard with bloomburrow. Those cards had rough cuts right out of the box.
@@HeavenlyCCG I've had no problems selling cards with rough cuts as NM through Direct. Especially tokens. Per TCGPlayer's conditioning guidelines, they do not factor in rough/dull edge cuts unless they change the shape of the card.
I don't want to speak on this quite yet. It really depends on someone's situation too as to whether it's 'worth it' so I will make an update video once I have more data!
Want to give you a heads up that to be consistently profitable you need to rip and ship new sets. Biggest profit margins you will have as a direct seller. Collection buying WILL NOT be a continuous stream due to inability to compete with stores. Pm me if you would like to talk about direct would also like to pick your brain on things.
Just found your channel! I started on TCGPlayer in September and became a lvl 4 seller in just under a month. Now have thousands of sales, learned A LOT and still learning. Friday - Sunday i am getting close to 60-70 sales a day so packaging takes up a lot of time. Looking forward to your experience in Direct. Subscribed!
Great growth!! That is a lot to pack every day.. I will release an update on Direct soon, want to talk about pros and cons as I learn myself. I will say the one major perk is doing one big shipment every couple days vs tons of individual orders.
this is exactly what i was looking for ! I just started my tcg journey and needed some serious in depth fee talk, so thank you very much
Heck yeah! Glad it was helpful!
Good stuff. It's nice to see you actually caught the pricing issue at the start and was able to adjust quick enough. In my case I was unable to and lost quite a few hundred bucks on that first RI from undervalued cards. Also nice adjustment on the tcglow + 30% autopricer. I initially used tcgdirect low autopricer and screwed me over big time.
I’m glad I did because I definitely could’ve solid off some value for nothing. And the higher priced the better, as long as sales keep coming in that is.. 🤷🏻♂️
Awesome video man, I’ve been on direct for a little while now. Took a little bit to build the system but what I started doing was selling anything over 40 cents on my 2nd TCGplayer non direct account because the labor to cost/revenue was well worth it. Since I was able to find consistent inventory I was still filling out an RI every week on .10 to .39 cards or the higher value cards with the markup. Direct has definitely been worthwhile but taking the higher fees on the .40-$4.99 cards I was leaving too much money on the table margin wise. Excited to keep following the journey!
Did you join Direct before you migrated your cards over 40 cents to the second account? Or did you already have a big enough of an inventory of 39 cent or less cards to join Direct?
@ I had the same philosophy of 40 cent and over on my account before it joined direct, unfortunately learned the hard way at first haha, didn’t migrate anything and practically sold through it all 40 cents and over which was then where I made the decision to make a 2nd account after seeing all the fees, direct has been awesome because now I can put .10-.39 cards on there in large volume and make better margins than just selling them wholesale at bulk pricing
@@PeakFiction101 Thank you for answering my question! :)
is there not an option to use tcg direct only for the cards you want to send them and then manually pack orders on other cards u don't want to send in to them?
I just fulfilled my first direct RI as well! For my business model I see direct being a really great thing.
Nice! I think it will work for mine.. but I'm going to need at least a month of data to really figure it out.
@GameVitamins 100%. It's tough to say for sure with such a small sample size but I sell a lot of lower end cards and it sure is nice not packing 50+ envelopes at a time.
Hey man! Love the vid as always. You said your shipping cost is 0.95 per order. I’ve got super clean and premium shipping material (card stock envelopes, thermal printer, nice sleeves) and my cost is around 0.85. Mostly because it’s in super bulk, but still.
Let me know if you want me to send you some details. You seem like a man of quality and don’t settle for the painters tape and regular envelope type of guy.
I run two accounts, one direct, one non direct. That allows me to pick and choose which cards I want to sell through direct. Also (not to tell you how to run your business) I would consider raising your shipping. I sit around $1.99 shipping on my direct account and still get the occasional non direct sale. This is because cards come in and out of stock on direct on a daily basis. Something to think about.
Yeah I upped my shipping shortly after uploading this last night to $1.99. Though I will probably want to look into running another account. Question, do you simply register for another account or do you need 100% separate info including addresses, business name, etc?
@@GameVitamins Unsure about the other points, but I know they require you to have a different/separate bank account per TCGPlayer account.
@@GameVitamins they just ask for a different bank account number and store name. Address and personal info can be the same. I do the exact same thing this guy does.
Hello, i love your content i havent start selling but definitely seems like something i would like to do soon and having your videos for starting then will be super useful.
Now just looking at the date from this video i like to fidget with excel and first of all I would probably start by making a monster fee formula that encapsulates all the fee brackets so that you dont need to input the set fee amount while doing the analysis junping from 19.99 to 20+ should be doable (if kinda anoying) with a bunch of if statements but i dont know if you would prefer to tackle your inventory needs first?
Also, on a quick note, if you do go for the super fee formula, you should be able to easily plot the points into a couple graphs to better see/understand what are the important price points.
One thing to note, fees are per order and not per card. If you sell 2 $2 cards in a single order they're not going to take a 50% cut on both, you'll be in the next fee bracket. Same goes with your $19.99 scenario. You'll notice a lot of sales where people buy multiple copies of the same card at higher prices for playsets.
Congrats on getting to TCGDirect!
Thank you! It's been a big step, but we’ll see how it actually plays out!
direct becomes a full time job as opposed to a part time hobby
Can confirm. I have all my listings significantly inflated because of that. Lol
Can definitely see how it could/will!
Lol selling cards isn't a hobby playing the game is
@ both can be true.
I’ve been selling on tcgplayer for nearly 2 years and I’ve been ramping up my inventory and sales in the last 3 months and I’ve seen amazing growth BUT your video is eye opening especially with the numbers side and fees. I’d be interested in seeing a guide for what price points to avoid. This is huge and could be a total game changer for me
Once I have spent a bit more time in direct I’ll certainly tackle the pricing strategies at length. Right now I’m still just too new to it all but over the coming weeks I’m sure I’ll figure out better ways to optimize! But definitely want to watch for those price points where fees change.
@@GameVitamins that would be amazing! I’ve tried to wrap my head around the numbers before but I’m just so busy with a full time job and it’s overtime plus trying to launch a card shop and having a pricing strategy would help maximize my effort and get me closer to opening a brick and mortar shop. Shops around here don’t have any online catalog for buyers to order from locally
Very nice. Going to have to comb this one.
Even I have to as well haha. Lots more to learn!
I agree with you on Direct (I dont sell games available on Direct so I cannot comment my own experiences) but I'd be curious how much you are saving on postage and supplies since that is likely the place you are saving the most money, beyond the time. The other question is "what about the business" does the extra time allow you to do (not just "life time")..thanks!
This is the right way to be looking at it! You save time on packing, so where does that time get allocated to make more money -- for me it'll be in the custom product space on eBay. I'm waiting for my sorter, but I may try to get some listings put together and a few "trial" products put together.
Interesting and informative video! Been looking for a video like this when I thought about starting my own TCG business in the summer of last year. I couldn't find anyone really talking about the numbers of being on direct. I like knowing the numbers as well, but I haven't really learned how to use excel too well. Do you have any of your excel sheets available to the public and was that page about the fees on direct publicily available? I've tried googling to find what the exact fee structure is like before, but couldn't find it.
Oh also, you forgot to account for lower fees now that your account is a direct seller. So your math on the marketplace numbers is off. For a 25c order total fees is actually only 47c not 50c.
Good catch, I'll definitely make a note of that in my calculations. I was comparing when you're in vs out of direct, but that is true! Standard marketplace orders do benefit from the lower fees once you're in it as well!
What are your thoughts on offering the free shipping for orders $5 and over? Do you think that’s good or is it better to always charge shipping?
I think if you're pricing your product higher, it can be a good way to drive sales. I did that for a while and just increased my products to 5-10% over market. Got more sales with free shipping + higher priced products. And then pretty often it was still under $5 so I'd get $1.27 vs the $1.49 I had it set to before and that difference was made up on the card price.
I have found that it takes me about 3 minutes per card (when selling them individually on TCG player). I have a decent packing system and keep the cards alphabetized for faster pulling. I usually pull and pack in about a 1.5 - 2 minutes, but I figure 3 minutes per card to give a little buffer for post office driving time, initial sorting, alphabetizing etc.. I usually try to buy in and sell in larger batches so I can keep everything efficient and cut down on time per card. It also cuts down on time when I sell multiple in one order but I just count that as gravy.
I have figured about $1.5 - $2 as a minimum for me which would equate to about $20 per hour after everything. And that's for cheapo cards, larger cards become way more profitable especially when they are about $13 -$24.99 or over $50 because of the way shipping costs weigh on the profit percentages.
Those are just my numbers, I'm sure every seller has different ways of doing things (I am a non direct level 4 seller with 1000 plus reviews at 100% rating).
What's your take on the new pricing for the play boosters starting with Aetherdrift? You think the preorder price is the best we are gonna get??
Personally I think that with the way box prices have gone on a tear it's an artificial way to 'lower' the cost of the boxes for consumers. Unsure on where it'll go, I've heard lots of mixed reviews, but never hurts to pick up some in pre-order then some after release and cost average.
How do you feel about having to send your RI to two different locations now? Can double your shipping costs.
Mine only had to go to their NY location
Dude I love your video and the break downs but I'm sitting wondering how you remember and track all the data??? my ADHD drives me crazy when I'm sorting and listing cards and tracking every boxes data to the card and price of each box. I'm a level 4 pro seller and I sell supplies, pokemon and yugioh, nothing fancy just bulk and whatever I pull from yugioh boxes
I use a spreadsheet for everything so it just becomes part of my 'process' when I'm done packing and it's a quick way to help me keep track of all the numbers. But honestly, tracking the numbers is part of the fun for me, so I guess I'm lucky in that regard 😅
I'm from Canada and don't have access to selling on TCG. Any platform you would recommend to be able to list cards and sell in the same manner?
Unfortunately I'm not sure, I don't know the Canada market, I only sell within the US 😕
Where do you get your inventory fromto get those singles? Bulk or sealed products or both?
Mostly sealed right now. Will do more bulk once my sorter comes in!
Keep up the good work.
Really enjoy your channel.
+1 subscribe
Really glad you're enjoying it 👍 appreciate the sub!
Thanks for showing this, I am staying away from Direct, the margins are already small enough, if they take even more, I will stop using TCGPlayer altogether. I am already shifting most my inventory to another site.
What other sites are you looking at? Is there another viable one that isn’t eBay?
What other site? I literally just started selling on TCG player today,... now I'm worried. .lol
Card kingdom
@@jamesphillips5461 Manapool, less fees and they don’t take a cut of the shipping
Which box do you prefer to buy? Play booster?
It depends on the products sale price to EV, but typically the best spreads I've found that are profitable are in Draft, Set and Play boosters!
Thanks!
Appreciate you checking it out!
Ive been selling just pokemon for 8 months. I have found that javing a direct account and non direct account is best. At least in pokemon direct really only makes sense for cards only 50 then i do everything else on my self fulfilled account
Do you get to choose what part of your inventory goes into direct? Is it an all-or-nothing affair where everything with a Direct Price listing is switched?
It's all or nothing. Deciding what you could list as direct or not would be huge. Only way to get around this is have 2 accounts
Unfortunately not. People do run two accounts which would probably be beneficial. Going to look into that…
Cost of goods for a .25 card should be a fraction of a cent from a bulk buy or just “extra” from box opening.
From a bulk buy, definitely less. From sealed box opening, that’s what I’ve averaged out to.
The biggest thing that makes direct not worth it for a lot of people is definitely the fees.
Yes, you sell a lot faster, and sometimes for inflated prices, BUT if your business is primarily built around selling cards under $5 (particularly under $3), that 50% fee will KILL your earnings.
It then devolves into having to basically feed the beast. It doesn't help that aside from LGS' and people with 20-30k+ worth of inventory, I've yet to see a single direct seller netting over 6k a month despite doing thousands of orders. Meanwhile, I primarily sell card games that are not on direct, and I was doing 10-20k in sales monthly doing 25-50% the amount of orders, manually, but it's not really that difficult to pull 30 orders a day.
Some things to note if you want to keep on the direct business model. If your card is around $20, you are better off selling the card for even like 17 or 18 dollars, otherwise price significantly above 20 to make up for the increased fee due to those orders "requiring tracked shipping". Same applies for cards near $3, you need to be closer to $4 or so
I think bulk is where Direct shines actually.
@@CardThrone I agree!
How do you replace your inventory?
you need to buy big when ever you find deals
Yeah what he said, I buy large lots of product when a deal makes sense 👍
Did you decide to build Doran??
Not yet! Might mess around with a build this evening. Apparently one of my friends just made a deck similar while I was gone, so gotta tread carefully haha.
Hope you don't get any RI discrepancies. You will need to have 98% accuracy. That counts conditions, missing cards, wrong quality, wrong variant, extra cards.
Good video. Keep up the grind.
Hope not.. luckily all my cards are brand new from sealed product so conditions, variant, etc shouldn't be an issue. The main one is if I have any internal inventory discrepancies, but I try to be as careful with that as I can be.
@GameVitamins It is best to only have cards from boosters. Just watch out which booster boxes. I got hit hard with bloomburrow. Those cards had rough cuts right out of the box.
@@HeavenlyCCG I've had no problems selling cards with rough cuts as NM through Direct. Especially tokens. Per TCGPlayer's conditioning guidelines, they do not factor in rough/dull edge cuts unless they change the shape of the card.
Is direct worth it
I don't want to speak on this quite yet. It really depends on someone's situation too as to whether it's 'worth it' so I will make an update video once I have more data!
Want to give you a heads up that to be consistently profitable you need to rip and ship new sets. Biggest profit margins you will have as a direct seller. Collection buying WILL NOT be a continuous stream due to inability to compete with stores. Pm me if you would like to talk about direct would also like to pick your brain on things.
Hourly rate is an employee mindset.
Have you started making any money from your youtube channel yet?
Yes, but it's negligible 😅
Dang 0 views, bro fell off…
Be patient. With the lack of TCG Direct content this video will blow up over time.
Bro, 1 minute after posting…😂
Haha, dang maybe next one
Ebay
eBay will be a future topic of discussion for sure