Selling trading card games is a bit different than being a retailer for most other items. When the time comes to restock, there’s nowhere to place an order for the exact singles you need. Aside from buying sealed product, restocking is dependent on what the players sell to you. Let’s jump into some strategy for restocking your inventory and how to drive more sales in the process. 

Unless you are opening sealed product, making sure you stay stocked with the cards that fill orders –– those staple commons and uncommons –– can be tricky. They aren’t necessarily worth going out of your way to buy, but they are important to entice buyers to come to you. A seller is more enticing to order from when they have more of the desired items. The more cards you can get from a single seller means buying from fewer sellers, thus less shipping fees and less waiting for multiple orders to arrive. How do we keep them in stock though? This can be done through buying collections, or offering to purchase bulk from your local community. This allows you to bring in the quantity of cards you want without having to put forth the effort of targeting individual cards, allowing you to sell at a profit.

When it comes to restocking the higher dollar cards, you want to be a little more precise in your purchasing. Stay up to date on the games you sell. Understanding the current best sellers will allow you to focus your efforts and make sure you are bringing in cards that will sell. After identifying the cards you will target, it's a matter of acquiring them.

For Magic: The Gathering, you can utilize the TCGplayer Buylist. This will allow people all over the country to sell to you at prices you set, and you get all of your purchases verified by TCGplayer staff. For games not supported in that way, you can still make a buylist to display on your Pro Website and/or Kiosk. This can let people who visit your site, or store know what you are buying and for how much, increasing the likelihood that they sell to you. You also want to share your buylist in places outside of your website. Make sure people can either see it or navigate to it from your social media accounts, or wherever else you exist online. You want to ensure people have as many opportunities to sell to you as possible.

The last suggestion for restocking inventory is through opening sealed product. As I mentioned in that previous blog, you do need access to a lot of sealed product to be able to reasonably predict the value of your purchase. You will also want to be able to purchase it at cost from a distributor, rather than pay retail prices. If you do have access to a distributor, sealed product is a great way to restock on the latest cards, but will be increasingly difficult to restock older and in demand products.