Busy couple of weeks
February 19th, 2024
Hey there. Just because it’s been a couple weeks since I’ve sent one of these out, doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy. Quite the opposite really. Let’s get into it.
Card Dealer Pro
So I’m really enjoying the new scanner, and the Card Dealer Pro software. It’s really actually accelerated my ability to list items on Ebay, which has more on it than I’ve ever had before. Lately I’ve listed lots of these racing cards I got last month, and they’ve actually been selling. Slowly, but not zero sales.
I’ve even been workshopping a process for using CDP to more quickly and streamlinedly (sp?) create listings for my website Shop. I am using WooCommerce rather than Shopify, because WooCommerce is free. Of course, this means I have fewer (i.e., zero) automatic integrations with other software, tools, &c. So I kind of have to create my own.
The basic workflow is this:
Sort the cards just as I would normally, and get a chunk from a set that I want to list on my Shop
Scan the cards with the scanner and clean up the images as I normally would if I were listing them on Ebay
Load the images into CDP so it can do its thing, just as if I were listing them on Ebay
Once CDP identifies the cards, then export the csv like I was going to upload it to Ebay
Upload the same images to WordPress
I have a free spreadsheet plugin on my WordPress site called WP Sheet Editor, which allows some measure of control over your products by means of editing a spreadsheet. The usefulness of the Card Dealer Pro portion is that it quickly generates the titles, which you can paste in to new listings through the Sheet Editor. This creates drafts to which you can tie the images, paste in your description, and put in the proper categories and tags. Much quicker than trying to do it all card-by-card. Still not great, but better than nothing
In other news regarding CDP, the fine folks over there saw my video about using it from a couple weeks ago. They reached out to me because they were excited to have me as a kind of ambassador for the software, considering they just launched TCG AI detection. (It works pretty well, I have to say; I got about 100 vintage Pokemon cards listed to Ebay last week also.) So, if you’re interested in signing up, use my code “TCGBulkKings” and you’ll get 500 free scans after your trial period ends.
Site Memberships
Speaking of the Shop on the website, I have added a new feature to the website: memberships! If you have ever looked at my Patreon, this is set up to be very similar. This is because I am actually going to be stepping away from Patreon towards doing all my membership activities through the website memberships.
This is for a number of reasons.
I have always found it difficult to create content on Patreon. Not really because there is anything inherently difficult about putting content on Patreon, but because I have some kind of difficulty getting my brain to do so. I guess it’s just too far outside my normal purview, my usual stomping grounds. So I often feel a bit of guilt about not doing enough over there.
As a result of not really producing much content specifically for Patreon, it kind of mostly became a club for purchasing bulk off of me. And it never really functioned well as that.
Patreon has introduced a lot of changes in the last 6-12 months, which in many ways I feel undermines at least what I wanted to do with regard to a membership service. Free memberships being forced on my account, and a lot of unasked for features that basically just poorly duplicate a lot of other services, but that people new to the platform or to my page may begin to expect from me.
As I’ve grown less and less pleased with the platform, and began looking for other solutions, it became clear that there are options out there for me that I can implement directly through the website, allowing a lot of integration there that will reduce the work on the back end for me. Which means that more of my time will go into actually interesting activities rather than struggling to do things separately form my normal workflow. And more of your support will go to supporting me and those activities, rather than supporting Patreon for providing a now subpar platform whose sole remaining merit is brand recognition. Seriously, the fees they charge just to have someone support me gets a bit ridiculous, when they aren’t actually providing anything that is unique or helpful. The basic plan costs 8% of your support funds, as well as costing 1% to actually withdraw the money after you’ve paid, only to have it go to PayPal, where I may need to pay an additional fee to get it into my bank account if I need it there rather than in my PayPal balance. Now I only have to worry about the standard Stripe/PayPal transaction processing fee, and the money goes straight into my account.
So, all that is the long version of me saying this: I will be transferring Patreon benefits and activities to my own website. You can still sign up for a Free membership account, which will allow you to see the activities blog, to buy things from the Shop, and to submit bulk (the bulk submission portion of the website is currently under reconstruction, bear with me on that please =] ). The 3 tiers of Paid memberships will get you a progressively higher discount in the Shop, as well as access to Paid member only benefits, including some free TCG Bulk Kings merch, Discord access at certain tiers, and a monthly roundtable discussion at the highest tier with me and all the others of that tier. Check it out here if you’d like.
CardTrader Zero
So if you’ve been following me for a long time, you may remember that late 2022 to early 2023 I was selling on a new-to-North America platform called CardTrader, specifically using their CardTrader Zero program. This is similar to TCGplayer Direct, in which CT sends out the buyer’s orders for you, but instead of dealing with a big central warehouse inventory, they just have you package up all your orders and send them in once per week, and then they distribute them out throughout the world for you. Pretty handy, though my experience with them was that it was pretty low volume sales.
Anyway, since I have been building up a pile of non-English cards, I have been wondering what to do with them. I’ve settled on giving CTZero a try again. I backed away from them after the whole inventory syncing fiasco between them and TCGplayer, so I will not be syncing my inventories across both platforms again. But I figured, since they have the worldwide market, it may be a good place to sell non-English cards. I will let you all know how that goes as I get more info. If you would like to sign up, feel free to check it out here.