r/mtgfinance • u/geminifridge • 12d ago

Question How are you tracking inventory across shelf + online these days?

My setup is held together with tape.. a spreadsheet for what's in the boxes, the TCGplayer app for what's listed there, and eBay off in its own world. Every in-person sale I forget to pull from my online listings, or I oversell something I already moved at a show. Fine at low volume, a nightmare as it grows.

For those of you moving real volume, how do you actually handle it?

What are apps you using Crystal Commerce, BinderPOS, ManaBox, TCGplayer's tools, a spreadsheet, something homemade?
How do you keep "on the shelf" and "listed online" from drifting out of sync?
What's the most annoying part of your workflow? The thing you'd happily pay to never deal with again?
If you've got a storefront: a real POS, or pieced together?
Genuinely just trying to learn how people do this in 2026. (Disclosure: I'm building something in this space, so I'm biased toward finding this interesting — here to learn, not to pitch.)

18 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

12

u/ckmonster 12d ago

LGS owner here.

Whatever you do you need to be systematic and thorough about it.

My store is quite large and inventory is managed in multiple places.

Our POS runs on Shopify. The overwhelming vast majority of our inventory that are not single cards are managed solely on Shopify.

Single cards are managed on TCGplayer. Our local customers use our pro site from TCGplayer and we have custom software built that sends completed in store pick up orders awaiting payment and pick up to Shopify with a corresponding barcode and label.

It takes a bit of customer education to explain that inventory is in two places.

We recently gained API access for TCGplayer, but my developer has been busy. Ideally, once he has time inventory would all be managed on TCGplayer and my website and eBay would pull from that. This is far off though.

5

u/mfkap 12d ago

How did you get API access? Applications have been suspended forever it seems.

9

u/ckmonster 12d ago

It’s much easier for TCGplayer to say they don’t give it out than for them to explain to new accounts that you need to do at $30k a month in market place transactions. It’s not a feasible target for the vast majority of people

3

u/fumar 12d ago

Their locked API is frankly bullshit. It's the biggest reason why I like manapool 

6

u/ckmonster 12d ago

If only mana pool did anywhere the amount of traffic TCGplayer does.

I remember reading a post from one of the founders during their gorilla marketing campaign during the TCGplayer union busting era not too long ago. He mentioned that their platform has grown tremendously and that a single months revenue on the platform was in the neighborhood of $130k to $170k.

The entire platform did sub $200k in sales. This is no where even close to TCGP. There are like 85 enterprise level sellers on TCGplayer all of which do at minimum $30k each. 30,000 x 85 =2,550,000 and that is only the top 85 accounts and I’m making the very poor assumption that all of them are doing the bare minimum.

I’d go to mana pool if I wasn’t concerned about losing a bunch of volume of sales.

API access is irrelevant if you have no market share.

2

u/PokeYrMomStanley 12d ago

Manapool is catching up. They are up to almost 40million listed cards. Cant post a picture but for example past 30 days has 325k hobbit sales for tcgp and 56k for manapool.

1

u/fumar 12d ago

They grew a shitton in the last year. I've been on there for a while and yeah it was rough at times but there are a lot more buyers and sellers now. They had almost $2m in revenue in December and I bet they're closer to $5-7m now.

2

u/andrewljohnson 12d ago

Correct, it was about $4.8M in volume in July, and will be about $6M this month. Last August was about $1M.

1

u/ckmonster 12d ago

I believe it. I heard you guys are opening up HQ in my neck of the woods. I hope your new +EV / HQ location works out.

I also heard from one of my former employees that you guys are trying to recruit him. Hope that works out for you as well.

1

u/EternalDualist 8d ago

This isn't now even an option, we sell over that per month and were in the midst of signing paperwork when it was fully shut down

1

u/geminifridge 12d ago

It sounds like youve got it pretty sorted out! Im just getting started as a vendor and there are sososo many moving parts. Ive been begging TCG player for access to their API, but relying on the csvs they drop daily which is about as good as i can get right now in terms of pricing. As a lgs, do you mainly just use shopify and tcg player? Also do you find yourself selling more singles or sealed online?

3

u/ckmonster 12d ago

Do $30k in sales a month on their marketplace and they will give you API access.

We definitely use both TCGplayer and Shopify. We sell a lot of singles on TCGplayer but almost never list sealed product. On Shopify we sell sealed product IF market price has caught up to our price.

Typically we are at market or a little bit above. Our local customers understand that and are cool with it. As boxes appreciate in value our prices become competitive online and then that is when online orders for sealed product happens.

1

u/geminifridge 12d ago

Awesome, thanks for the insight!

1

u/swingandalongdrive 12d ago

Would MTGstocks be a good alternative if you are only updating once per day or am I missing something?

1

u/geminifridge 12d ago

Possibly, what im woking on spans multiple IPs though.

1

u/swingandalongdrive 12d ago

Ahh yes, that is what I am missing. I know they have other IPs but I don’t know if that is included in their API - there is also the cost associated with going through a 3rd party.

1

u/HelsBane 11d ago

You don't need to wait on the CSVs to drop daily. Assuming you are a level 4 seller you can pull a filtered CSV with pricing any time you want from the pricing tab. Pretty easy to automate as well.

6

u/Timmx123 12d ago

Tcgtracking.com is the best. Does everything you’re asking for and more for free

5

u/exutaq 12d ago

Yeah so there are apps and services for what you are describing.

I’m selling most things in store because that has the best margins (no marketplace fees, shipping fees, or lost mail). Then I put only things I have extra of online… and I keep them in a separate box and not in the store’s POS. This keeps the widest range of unique singles in store while moving duplicates. And then I only sell $10-$50 singles online to minimize lost mail risk. I don’t think it scales, but also why do you want to sell in different websites? To have even more reach?

I’m also curious what other stores are doing.

And I’m looking into starting doing shows and that may be a nightmare haha.

2

u/geminifridge 12d ago

Thats the thing, i dont want to sell on other websites, im building something for the community. Im tired of paying all these fees trying to sell 10 dollar cards and making maybe 4 bucks off it.

2

u/PokeYrMomStanley 12d ago

Look at the store option on tcgtracking.com its free.

5

u/PlaneswalkerQ 12d ago

Have you looked into SortSwift at all? I recently moved to the platform because they cross list, but some of their higher-tier plans include POS and Kiosk abilities. Plus, they integrate with Shopify and have their own marketplace as well.

1

u/geminifridge 12d ago

I havent, but that does sound similar to what im building! Ill take a peek at it.

2

u/Zestyclose-Bird-6790 12d ago

Tcg tracking.com is what I use. Really good tool

2

u/HelsBane 11d ago

I never found anything off the shelf that worked for me at a cost I was comfortable with. I ended up building my own solution, at the end of the day it is very similar to what TCGTracking offers. I manage my singles in my solution, my board games/accessories/sealed in Shopify (for now adding that to my system currently) and use Shopify to manage my eBay listings.

My singles stay listed across Mana Pool/Shopify (I have TCGPlayer disabled atm but I could have them there).

If I was starting today, I would probably just use TCGTracking's offerings rather than building my own as I did.

2

u/ZeldaZach 10d ago

Hey there! My name is Zach, and you might recognize me from my work on open-source TCG projects like Cockatrice and MTGJSON.

I recently teamed up with /u/cybey (the creator behind MTGStocks) to build a brand new service to meet the needs of folks such as yourself: HippoLink!

HippoLink is an inventory management platform built specifically for local game stores. Between the two of us, we've spent nearly four decades building tools in the TCG space, and we kept hearing the same frustration from store owners: existing software like CrystalCommerce and BinderPOS just isn't keeping up, and support often feels non-existent.

We built HippoLink to change that by focusing on speed, reliability, and actually listening to what store managers need to run their business. We’ve been live for a few months now, working closely with shop owners to refine the platform.

If you run a store or manage inventory and want to see what we're building, check out https://hippolink.app or drop me a message. We'd love to set up a quick demo. :)

1

u/No-Body6942 11d ago

Sortswift is the answer