TCGPlayer’s new Store Your Products (SYP) program will be a gamechanger for how your store manages online inventory. Gone are the days of sorting through your inventory looking for that last copy of Lightning Bolt that got misfiled. You can now send your cards to TCGPlayer before they sell; TCGPlayer will handle all logistics of maintaining your inventory and shipping your cards for you. What makes it even better is that SYP comes at no additional costs to you when compared to TCGPlayer Direct.

Here are five major reasons you should consider using TCGPlayer’s Store Your Products (SYP) program.


1. More Sales and Faster Payments

If you have been using Direct, you know how fast you can sell certain cards. Still, Direct sales require that TCGPlayer already has a copy of that particular card in their inventory. This means you will sometimes have cards in your inventory that cannot be sold via Direct simply because TCGPlayer’s inventory lacks that card. Solution: SYP. This new program eliminates the problem. Using SYP, you will send the cards to TCGPlayer up front. Every card you have loaded in your SYP inventory is Direct eligible – netting you the highest possible sales volume with no additional work required.

SYP also accelerates payments. With a regular sale, payment is held until delivery is confirmed. With Direct sales, payment is held for your Direct Reimbursement Invoice (RI). But SYP pays even faster! There is no payment hold because TCGPlayer already has the cards – sales made via SYP are released for payment within 4 days.

Ever since our stores enrolled in SYP, we have seen our net collection time – the lag between moment of sale and payment hitting our bank account – decrease by about 3 days.


2. Lower Shipping Costs

As a traditional TCGPlayer Direct seller, you are responsible for sending sold cards to TCGPlayer via an RI, and you must ship based on the schedule TCGPlayer generates. That can mean pulling and shipping cards up to three times a week, depending on your sales volume. It can also mean that sometimes you ship a small number of cards relative to the postage you pay.

But with SYP, you ship on your own schedule, and you choose your shipping volume. This gives you maximum value for each shipment. For example, a USPS Medium Flat-Rate box holds around 2,500 cards. When shipping to SYP, you can make sure that box is completely full, giving you the lowest possible shipping cost per card.

Consider a scenario where you sell 100-150 cards per day via TCGPlayer. With Direct, that means 3 RIs per week, each one around 300 cards. That will cost about $18 per week or $950 per year in shipping.

If you ship to SYP weekly, you could fit those same 900 cards into a single shipment for around $10. That would cost you only about $520 per year, for a savings of $430.

If you like, you could go even further and ship once a month. 4,000 cards in a USPS large flat rate box at current rates costs around $18, meaning it would run you only $220 per year to ship the same number of cards.

Depending on what shipping schedule works best for you, your store’s yearly savings on shipping alone could easily be anywhere from $400 to as much as $1000 or more.


3. Less Labor

Once you have sent your initial shipment to SYP, future shipments can require significantly less labor. When selling Direct, you list cards, sort them into your inventory system, and then you have to wait for them to sell. After the sale, you (or your employees) pull the cards back out of your inventory, package, and ship them either to an individual customer or as part of a Direct RI.

With SYP, this process is streamlined. Your fresh intake can be graded, listed, and immediately packed for shipping – without the intermediate steps of sorting them into your inventory and then later pulling them back out.

At our store, ever since we began sending cards from our new intake directly to SYP, we have seen a nearly 33% reduction in labor hours required for listing new intake and managing our online inventory.


4. No More Adjustment Charges, Shrink, or Decay

No matter how careful you are and how meticulously you keep your inventory, some errors creep in. Maybe it is a card inadvertently listed under the wrong set, or perhaps a grading discrepancy. It could even be a card that was listed but you can no longer find it in your physical inventory.

If you are a Direct seller and an error appears in an RI for your Direct Sales, TCGPlayer will correct the error, but it is disheartening to see a sale reversed with an adjustment charge. With SYP, that never happens. TCGPlayer reviews the cards and corrects any possible discrepancies before the cards are live on your inventory. This means you never again have another order adjusted off your payments.

SYP also protects your inventory from shrink and decay. With TCGPlayer storing your inventory and guaranteeing the grading, you never have to worry about an employee accidentally nicking a card when packing it for shipping. Your Near Mints will stay Near Mint. You also never have to worry about the accuracy of your listings ever again. No more emails from customers complaining that they ordered a card from Unlimited Edition, but they received a Revised Edition card. With SYP, when you send in a shipment, TCGPlayer ensures that all of your inventory is listed under the correct set. If there is a grading issue or any other problem with the customer, TCGPlayer’s support team resolves it. You don’t lift a finger – and you still get paid!


5. Effortless Buylisting

If you have ever used TCGPlayer’s Buylist, you know how easy it can be to acquire cards to boost your inventory. As a Direct seller, once you have purchased cards on the Buylist, you have to wait for them to be shipped to you and then list them for resale. After the sale, you then have to ship those same cards back to TCGPlayer.

SYP makes it so much easier. Once you set your buylist prices, TCGPlayer will receive the cards, process them, and then list them into your inventory for you – you never have to touch the cards at all. Just put cards on your buylist and then sit back to wait for payments to roll in.

Your labor costs go down while your available inventory and sales go up.


Summary

Joining the SYP program provides a host of benefits. As seen above, we have demonstrated a potential of $400-$1,000 savings on shipping as well as additional labor costs savings within your first year. You will enjoy more sales and faster payments while reducing labor and postage costs. Clearly, the result is more profits for you. SYP merits serious consideration for your business.


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