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I'm finding this series to be absolutely fascinating! Happily subbed the first time I saw a video of yours. Next video could you touch on what discrepancies you still have? I'm a (small-time) TCGPlayer seller and wouldn't mind hearing more specifics about the conditioning process itself and where it may have gone wrong. I think that would be really insightful for people like me who are also conditioning cards. Can't wait for the next one, cheers!

In my experience, tcg direct is almost never a better deal than paying shipping to a dozen different sellers individually.

Yuck, I see why some stores only sell singles, and packs. Haha

If bandai would just stick to 1 or 2 games we wouldn't have this issue but they have 6 games total including union arena thats coming out this year that no one wants to play.

Would you ever care to hop on a call and let me pick your brain about opening a store? I'm in Tennessee and where I am at we do not have the highest quality stores.

Having everything listed, conditioned, and organized is the only way to go. It’s a struggle to get everything organized but in the long run it will pay off. The absolute key is ensuring you have a storage method that is scalable or you’re going to have to keep reinventing your method. I store cards based on set release so it matches Direct, then core sets, then commander/set commander. I use stickers with set names and type the set names on each box. It’s daunting to keep up with the organizing.

So, not listing things as NM doesn't eliminate the card from your inventory. You list it as LP and it's still in your TCG inventory...still searchable.....still there for your customers to find on your Pro site/TCG marketplace. Is it because you already have NM there and simply don't want to drop it as an option because you've already incorporated it? Because again, I don't list anything NM (anymore. When I first started I did so there would still be a few NM on my store) and there's been no drop in orders. Eliminates an entire conditioning category to worry about with Direct and possibly getting dinged because there was some kind of "defect" you guys didn't notice and they deem it as LP anyways. But, I don't know if you get dinged for sending in NM for LP either. I haven't asked my rep that question. My growth program sponsor is trying to get me to go Direct real hard but I'm finding it more and more less sensible in my scenario. I'm a small shop. It's me and my cousin helps out 2 or 3 days a week and that's it. My growth program sponsor also told me that the "sweet spot" for listing on Direct is that $3-$15 mark. Otherwise you end up losing a lot to Direct fees and you end up having to figure out if losing the amount to fees is actually worth listing the card, or trying to simply list it on your own shop (because again, you can have two accounts if you want. You can have one for your "normal" shop inventory and one specifically for Direct.) So, maybe see if your sponsor agrees with mine and try to limit the dollar amount you list on Direct? I dunno, something you might want to just talk about with them. And, if you're wondering about my hesitancy with going Direct is because of what you just said about having a 20 page RI. I get that having things in one huge chunk of work kinda streamlines things but had you just sold those things through your normal channel.....sure, it would probably tie up someone for longer each day packing up orders, but what's the difference in spending an extra say, hour or two each day, packing up your orders versus possibly spending the entire day/shift packing up one RI....3 times in a week? Plus the fees are so wide ranging it's hard to see if it is worth the time and effort or if it really is, like my rep said, an easier way to simply move cards that would, most likely, just sit in the boxes collecting dust? Because people *are* more prone to go Direct for the smaller package count. The Direct symbol does give a sense of security for some people when buying things. Are the simple optics of being a Direct Seller really the end goal? To hopefully get that little extra volume push? Also, I'm not trying to be adversarial here. So please don't read this with any kind of condescending tone or anything like that. I just like talking to other owners/people about these things and picking their brains.

This is the first video of this series I’ve watched. Now I have to go back and watch the rest. I loved it!!!

Just mark everything as damaged lol

One way to distinguish all the versions of especially Magic cards is the card number printed at the lower left corner. At least all the different art versions like "regular", "extended art", "showcase art" etc. have the same card name but different numbers. I guess the same is for other games in similar ways.

Completely resetting and reorganizing inventory because you've found issues is one of the hardest things a store or business has to go through, and businesses like ours with hundreds of thousands of items make it just that much harder. I really appreciate you showing us all how you're tackling it with grace and transparency

Karlov manor alternative cards are the worst.

I nether own a store nor sell on TCG Player but this series is one of my current favorites on youtube.

Is the inventory from stuff currently coming in or also from those stacks and stacks of bulk you've done videos searching?

Im part of the direct program but without any notice or anything they removed my status from my listings but i still get some direct sales, meanwhile tcgplayer support stopped answering me months ago.

I would love to see a binder of pages from different games with cards from each of the conditions as they see it. That would go so far in training for conditioning.

started watching rng gamez a year ago, found your channel through his. There are plenty of amazing shops out there, You 2 are imo, the best at keepin it real and always good info in gen. I do this part time on the side and just blew my whole inventory up, it's been a slow process re-conditioning everything, but i know it will be worth it in the end. honestly makes feel better knowing top dawgs go through the same pains as the real small fish. Just sucks seeing all this potential $ sitting here but gotta start somewhere =) keep the content comin! look forward to this weekly series =)

Dollar binders baby!!!!!

How much to change an HDMI port

A very interesting series ! Keep it going !

If i had the money i would so by everyones bulk and hired a few nerds that play and pay them in store credit to go through cards and put them all in oder then after we got big i would make them all partners

You need to slow down if you want this to work. Being in a rush gets you nowhere.

tcg direct is total crap imo. It is usually WAY more expensive and a lot of the times the cards come slightly damaged so I just buy from small sellers now.

i like chatot

i feel like with their current model they just want pack fresh cards, i keep getting nm card getting condition dinged to lp or mp and some even down to damaged. When i get the cards back I literally can't find anything wrong with it.

So, if you talk to your TCG rep you can actually have a second TCG Player account setup and make that account your Direct account and have your "standard store" account remain a normal account. Your TCG rep can also boost that new account to a level 4 account. You can separate the inventories physically in your store also to maybe help your employees know where to pull things from to help prevent discrepancies. Sure, the Direct shop will also get some normal orders thrown in there from what I understand but I would think that keeping the inventories totally separated would help with knowing where things are coming from and where things need to go instead of it all going into one huge pot. Also, another thing that has helped me/us, is that whenever we take in trades on the app, and once it's all finalized, you can click on the three little dots and hit "import to seller inventory" and it'll import it into the "manage lists" section of your seller tab. Everything you just took in will be there and you can open it up, confirm prices/set prices, and send it straight to your live inventory in a matter of seconds. If you have the time to do this after every trade in or so, it helps with keeping things listed in a timely manner without having to worry about listing 100's of cards at a single time. However, yes, you have two of the biggest baddest sorting machines there are so I get why you most likely don't do this. But, if it's like less than 10 cards that get traded in I would do this method if I was in your shoes, simply because adding 10 cards to a pile and waiting seems kinda like a waste of effort if you could list them right then and there/file them away where they're supposed to go. And we've got close to 50k cards listed merely using our phones to list things and we have the same issues you seem to have ever so often too as far as card quantities go and even "ghost inventory" issues. So general overall accuracy of scans seems pretty close either with the Rocas or without. The Roca's seem to merely free you up to go and do other tasks which I'm guessing is the underlying reasoning why most places spend the $25k+ per machine. I mean this in the best way possible, as I do like your videos and your opinions/guidance, but it seems that maybe you're overly complicating things by having all these spreadsheets, data points, etc and trying to follow them to the "T"? Having data points to work with is great and I get wanting to be as close to a K.I.S.S(Keep It Simple Stupid) system as possible but adding micro steps to things that should be as simple as "hey, list these cards" just for example, adds confusion for some employees/people? Like you said, your employees are hesitant to even condition things now and are totally second guessing themselves which I'm assuming is causing at least some kind of a bottle-neck in operations as far as how the flow of operations goes? Direct also seems to be a huge part of stress for you too. I understand getting the invoice for a few hundred cards every couple of days seems easier to deal with, but if you're having employees spend say a few hours on those days simply packing up the Direct request.....what's the big difference in those same hours being spread over the entire week by fulfilling multiple single orders? I get that Direct pricing is usually higher than "normie" pricing and that TCG deals with all aspects of customer service with orders placed via Direct so you don't have to, but it seems like it's ultimately being more of a hassle than what it's worth? Especially with the 20-40% they typically take in fees for selling a card. Anyways, I really don't mean to come off as being mean or anything. I just like talking shop when I can. My operation is also seemingly smaller than yours too. So I suppose take that into consideration as well. I've got a 2k sq ft shop in a small downtown area in a town that is kind of out in the sticks.

I suggest doing a footbath with epsom salt or do some type of self nourishing or healing to avoid stress induced ailments, like ulcers, etc.thanks for all you do also. 🎉

1000s of cards a week? 😮. I wished I could sell 1 card a week.

Thanks for the video, gl with ironing out the discrepancies it's not easy. I posted on y'alls quick list video about software automation and auditing on the intake. It sounds like you need a data engineer to set you up with a database to track the out side from tcgplayer as well. Assuming you can export your sales data it should be straight forward to run a script to pull that data from tcgp and update a database with the time of sale, quantity, condition, etc. Wont help immediately but would be nice to have!

After years of selling via Direct, we opted out and have been doing well with just marketplace. Struggled to keep 50k-75k in current inventory now we topped over 204k. We get to spend more time on the growth instead of back and forth with SEI issues. It’s still a task to stay ahead of the demand.

I got kicked out of the direct program for a high discrepancy rate. They didn’t even give me a 30 day warning like they did for you. Wish I would have received that so I could have made changes and reconditioned my cards.

I've requested cancellation from direct multiple weeks ago, they've yet to take us off direct. We primarily sell under $3 cards and can sell the higher priced cards in our store. The 50% commission they charge on those card are just too high if that's primarily what you're selling. It also is cannibalizing our regular sales because all the good stuff gets sold so fast. Then people don't go to our inventory to buy other stuff. That's been our experience.

The last step I didn't get - you already use these CSV tables to upload the inventory through quick-list. I thought these tables already contain the pricing information so you can keep track of which card was uploaded when? Or does the offered card also gets a price change depending on the current market? Then it would be more difficult to keep track with so many changes across tens of thousands of cards. Anyway, you got this Mason, Zack, and team CNA!

Comment from homeland of TCGplayer! Love using direct when i lobe close by feel like i get my cards much quicker lol

Can you show us some of the return cards and what their condition is versus what TCG player said they were in another video

Keep crushing 💪🏼😎👍🏼

I am greatly enjoying this series. As one of the buyers on TCG player, our frustration over the years is finally being recognized on the seller front. Now keep this is mind. You're struggling with 50,000 cards, maybe adding 2k a week. imagine the quality issues a company must have printing, idk, say, 11 billion cards a year and having youtubers bash them over the slightest defect. Humbling. quite Humbling. Thank you for working hard to correct the issues on your side. I can only hope other sellers are as diligent.

Nah cause they right to be afraid. Watch ya'll going to do things their way and YOUR STILL gonna get RI's with huge percentages. There's no reason for there to be 5 different Conditions. It should just be Mint, Played, and Damaged. The graders at TCGPlayer want to keep their jobs so they're always going to down grade whatever you send in cause that's their only job. That's what they do all day. You can't change that. I sure hope your making a plan b for when they eject you from the direct program.

i'm so irritated by direct cause it doesn't have to be this way. they could just accept the cards at the rate they condition them at and let it be a wash. They're already making boogoo profit from combining them all and then still charging us for shipping on each one even if it is reduced. They're not spending the amount they charge us on shipping to send those cards out. It's boarding on scam territory now.

You make more not being on direct 🤷

I'd love to see the actual process with using quick list and conditioning.

Do you perform any final condition checks before you file into your (Roca'd) Inventory? Saw in your other video that you keep track of your files using Quicklist. You could use Quicklist to edit condition if you needed. So when you perform a Buy are you using a lamp to condition or just relying on the fluorescents overhead? You can't always catch the imperfections that you need to without a lamp to angle the card and catch the light differently. Light surface scratching especially can be easy to miss.

Take care of your mental health. If you burn out the numbers and all the hards work mean nothing. Take care of yourself, you got this!

On the Direct tab where it says Pending Reimbursement Invoice you can click Export Pending RI and it will give you an excel sheet of any pending Direct orders. So, in theory, when you are trying to clear your discrepancies in store you could export that, pull the pending direct inventory and sit it to the side, and then file your discrepancies back into your inventory. Still not ideal but saves you a few days of waiting.

You’re doing the work. You got this

The worst feeling about the SEIs is that you have to pour through every card, understand what TCGplayer says is wrong with it, decide if you're going to relist it at a lower grade, take the time to actually relist it, and then file it. And all of that potentially for cards worth pennies. I wish TCGplayer would give us the option to accept their downgrades of our SEI cards, and move them into a SYP-like inventory without shipping them back and forth again.

Captains log : day 5 👨🏻‍✈️🃏

i love this problem, wish tcgplayer could be accessed from, canada

My direct % is so high that i missed 7 cards in my last RI and wrote a note for each one stating they are missing. They didn't even mark them missing after they processed it. My direct accuracy is over 99.9% with over 300k cards in my invintory opperating from my kid's playroom😂. I hope you can get your issues fixed. You may just have to do the grading yourself. When you take the hits for discrepancies, you learn what they want super fast. But employees dont feel the hit like you do, so they won't learn as quickly, if at all. Or you could just ship me everything you want to list, and I'll grade and sort it for you properly, and send it back all neat and tidy, ready to list. But that may be a 3 week job, taking a week to ship to me. A week to sort and a week to ship back. Probably not the most efficient way to do things.... I'll keep thinking and get back with ya.

Gratz on the serialized ulamog! The shiny borderless is like $250 right now. I can imagine what you could get for a serialized version🎉