TCG Supply Co: a custom Shopify store and buying program

Somebody walks in with a card and wants a number. Getting to that number means answering two questions at once. What condition is this card in, which can swing the value by multiples and is a judgment call that takes experience to make consistently. And what is that card worth this week, which is not what it was worth last week, because this is a market that moves on print runs, tournament results and whatever the internet decided matters on Tuesday.

Both answers have to arrive while a person stands at the counter. A shop that goes away to research, or that guesses low to stay safe, loses the card to the shop down the road that did not.

Why an app was never going to cover it

There is plenty of software for selling singles online and a reasonable amount for running inventory. There is very little for buying over a counter, and nothing we could find that ties grading, live market data and an offer into one screen a staff member can operate with a customer watching. The pieces exist separately, which means three tools, three logins and a staff member retyping numbers between them — which is the same as not having the tools at all when there is a queue.

And then there is the rest of the catalog

A card shop holds thousands of individual singles, each one its own price that moves independently of every other. Hand-pricing that is not work anybody can keep up with, so in practice it does not get done, and a store ends up selling cards below market and sitting on cards above it at the same time. Whatever solved the counter problem had to solve this one too, off the same data, or the shop would simply have two pricing systems that disagreed with each other.