Hello again everyone! I hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy as we continue to push through this pandemic. If you saw my post here last week, I touched on the topic of staying productive during this time of low foot-traffic in your store. While you may not have as much of your typical work to do, this is a great time to get yourself set up for even more success once you’re able to open your doors back up to the community. 

Getting your inventory sorted, organized and online is the best thing that you can do to set your store up for continued success. In the short term, you’ll increase exposure to your inventory by making more of it available to online customers. Looking past that, having your full inventory digitized will let you make more informed decisions while acquiring more inventory; this will set you up to provide your in-store customers an even better experience. 

Last time, we went pretty deep on methods for digitizing your inventory. This week, I wanted to give some guidance on what to be digitizing. As we all know, Magic makes up for a ton of sales on TCGplayer, in large part due to the Direct program. However, it won’t be alone in Direct much longer! Pokemon will be joining the ranks of Direct eligible products soon after Direct is back up and running.  As many have likely seen with Magic, Direct is a great way to increase your sales, and we are anticipating that you’ll see the same with Pokemon once it is part of the program. Getting your Pokemon inventory organized and ready will put you in a great position to start seeing returns as soon as Pokemon goes live with Direct.

Organizing Pokemon for Direct is a little bit different than Magic due to the presence of different types of foil cards. Based on how we will be organizing Pokemon in our Fulfillment Center, we recommend the following organizational system:

1. Foils and non-foils will be filed separately

2. Within each condition, organize by set, in reverse chronological order

3. Within each set, organize the cards alphabetically

4. Then by sub condition. Each super condition has multiple sub conditions for example, Near Mint Reverse Holofoil and Near Mint Holofoil are both Near Mint Foil and will be grouped together. If a set has a card with the same name that has both a near mint reverse holofoil and a near mint holofoil printing they will be found next to each other specifically with the reverse holofoil first.

Here is our method for getting your inventory organized and digitized, including all the materials you’ll need. Once you’ve got everything organized, upload them to your account, and you’ll be ready to go once Pokemon is available through Direct!

If you aren’t a Direct seller yet, learn more about the program here. If Direct is the right call for your business, apply here.

As always, our Customer Experience team is here to help you along the way. If there are any questions you have, please be sure to let us know.