2024 in Review: Key Enhancements and Market Trends

As we approach the end of 2024, we’d like to reflect on improvements we’ve made to your seller experience and share some of the key market trends. We spent a lot of time listening to you this year –– what are your top needs, how can we help meet those needs, how can we improve, and how can we find ways to implement your feedback into more of what we do. We still have a long way to go, but we’re excited to share some of our accomplishments from the past year. 

Index: 

1. Listening and Implementing Your Feedback
2. Growing Your Sales
3. Expanding Resources Available To Help You Succeed
4. Empowering You With Selling Tools
5. Strengthening Seller Protections
6. Observing Market Trends

Listening and Implementing Your Feedback

We love getting your feedback. Previously, you could share your thoughts through three primary channels: the semi-annual survey, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey, and our helpbot. These channels remain important, but we’ve also created new mechanisms to gather your feedback, prioritizing one-on-one interactions to gather direct insights on how we can enhance your experience on the marketplace. The additional channels we’ve introduced include:  

Customer Advisory Board. In May 2024, we established our first-ever Customer Advisory Board (CAB) of 21 sellers to gather feedback on early developments and use their input to improve our tools and services. If you’re interested in participating in CAB, please fill out this form. 

Product Tests and Enhancements. Over the last year, we've launched several product tests, and betas to over 400 sellers, enabling us to gather direct feedback as we build tools and services that best serve our sellers.

Growing Your Sales

The number one thing sellers have expressed as their top need is driving their sales by attracting more buyers. In response, we have invested heavily in enhancing and growing our marketplace to drive more buyers to your storefront and increase your sales. Below are the ways we brought in more customers, resulting in double digit buyer growth in 2024: 

Six New TCGs. By adding six new and emerging games to the marketplace, we've connected you with millions of customers around the world. Our focus is to attract more buyers to a broader range of your inventory, beyond just the top three TCGs, to generate more sales across the entire catalog. 
 
Search and Sales Improvements. We improved our search features, which now offer buyers data-driven product recommendations and an individual product pricing guide.

More Buyer Content. We’ve invested in developing diverse content that drives more buyers to you. Customers who view our content visit TCGplayer 26 times more frequently and purchase 170% more than buyers who don’t consume our content.

Cyber Weekend Success. All of our work to improve the buyer experience, combined with a strong marketing promotion, led to our largest Cyber Weekend promotion in history. This resulted in more sales than we've ever seen on the marketplace over Cyber Weekend, all without any added seller expense. We covered all the marketing on your behalf to ensure a significant increase in your sales. On average, sellers tripled their sales over Cyber Weekend. 

Expanding Resources Available To Help You Succeed

We know transparent communication and educational resources are important to make it as easy as possible for you to run your business. As a result, we expanded our resources to support your growth, including enhanced reports, comprehensive guides, and an expanded library of video content. Here are the resources we added in 2024:

Conditioning Updates. We launched quarterly Conditioning Release Notes to keep sellers informed about conditioning updates. We also updated our Card Conditioning Guide to include clear and precise measurements for each imperfection type, helping you to accurately assess card conditions. We're working to get better conditioning tools into your hands, enabling more consistency across the community.

Increased Video Content. We focused on creating more video content on the Seller YouTube Channel, delivering accessible educational content and creating a seamless, informative onboarding experience to support sellers at every stage of their customer journey.

New Market Trends Content Series. We launched several new content series highlighting top-selling products and price trends to empower sellers with actionable data. These initiatives help sellers make informed decisions about listing prioritization and inventory acquisition.

Empowering You With Selling Tools

In 2024, we were focused on the tools you use to identify, price, and organize TCGs, so that you can lower your cost of doing business while increasing your ability to scale. We’re continuing to make enhancements to all of our tools, but here are the key updates from this year:

Roca Expansion. We introduced the Roca Pack Creator feature, allowing Roca sellers to boost sales by creating custom packs or easily liquidating low-value bulk inventory with automation. We also added Disney Lorcana to Roca’s product capabilities, utilizing our Catalog 2.0 development to help Rocas accurately identify new products using Roca Vision. 

Card Identification Tools. We ran a beta program with select sellers to test a new TCG identification tool, called Scan & Identify, to ensure it provides value to you. This tool is meant to significantly expedite the inventory upload process, and is set to launch to all Pro sellers in 2025.

New Seller Website. We launched a new seller website, designed to support sellers at every stage of their growth journey. As part of this initiative, we migrated the TCGplayer, Roca, and BinderPOS website into one. This website includes a new, easy to navigate Seller Blog that hosts a wealth of resources and educational content, from price trend insights to articles that spotlight our sellers.

Strengthening Seller Protections

You shared feedback that we needed to update our seller protections to be more sustainable and scalable for your business. We made the following policy updates to ensure fairness and transparency for buyers and sellers across the platform: 

Refund and Order Policies. In March, we made changes to our Refund and Return Policy to provide sellers with clarity on critical business operations, including defining the maximum refund period for missing orders and clarifying credit for missing tracked orders.

Return Policy Updates. We've updated our Return Policy to reduce customer disputes and protect sellers from excessive buyer claims.

Onboarding and Fraud Prevention. We've tightened our seller onboarding process to reduce fraud on the marketplace and protect market price integrity, filtering out over 99% of fraud across the platform.

Observing Market Trends

We understand that you value data and insights to make informed decisions regarding inventory acquisition, listing prioritization, and sealed breaks. In response, we're excited to share the marketplace trends we've observed throughout the year and during Cyber Weekend. Here are the key trends we noted in 2024:

Top 10 Product Lines: 
In an impressive debut, Star Wars: Unlimited has broken into the Top 10 product lines on the marketplace this year, marking the only change in the lineup since 2023. Despite this success, Fantasy Flight Games faced supply chain challenges that impacted their ability to maintain and expand their customer base. Nevertheless, Star Wars: Unlimited's entry into the Top 10 underscores its potential and the strong interest it has generated. 

Top 5 Product Lines Growth Year-Over-Year:
We've seen substantial year-over-year growth in some areas, with Disney Lorcana experiencing a remarkable increase. Disney Lorcana delivered strong product design, easy onboarding for customers new to TCGs, and a successful Organized Play program that leveraged the Disney IP to create valuable prizes. Conversely, Yu-Gi-Oh! experienced a slight decline in sales this year, primarily due to a stagnant competitive format, unpopular prizing, and a focus on reprint sets, which didn't resonate as strongly with long-term players who already had the cards. However, these trends were anticipated, and there are promising developments on the horizon, such as potential format updates and the introduction of Rush Duels, which could reinvigorate the player base. Magic continues to grow, and Wizards of the Coast is focusing on characters and themes that are recognizable outside of traditional TCG players with crossovers like the upcoming Final Fantasy and Spider-Man sets.

Top Singles Over 2024 and Cyber Weekend: 

• Top Magic: The Gathering Singles
  ​​Hare Apparent and Slime Against Humanity have become staples in Commander decks due to their unique ability to bypass the "a deck can have any number of cards named X" rule, making them essential for deck-building and attractive long-term holds for buyers and speculators. The popularity of Modern Horizons 3 singles is also driven by Commander, but they're strong in competitive play as well. Meanwhile, Standard is experiencing a resurgence, fueled by Wizards of the Coast's efforts, leading to increased value for Uncommons like Boltwave and Monstrous Rage –– when competitive Uncommons or Commons reach $5 or more, it's a clear indicator of heightened interest and investment in the Standard format.

• Top Pokémon Singles
  All of the top ten cards of 2024 were competitive Common or Uncommon Trainer or Energy cards worth less than $5. These cards see play (or at least consideration) across every deck archetype, so they and their equivalents are more or less guaranteed to top these lists every year. The few cards that managed to buck this trend on Cyber Weekend—Potion, Grass Energy, and Kyogre—appear to have been buyouts with unknown motivations.

• Top Yu-Gi-Oh! Singles
  Yu-Gi-Oh’s best-selling singles continue to be affordable tournament cards that can be played in a variety of decks, either as individual tech cards, or themed cards that can be played together to support bigger and often newer strategies. Seven of the year’s top ten best sellers were tournament reprints, while nine of the ten Cyber Weekend best sellers were tournament reprints.

Looking Ahead to 2025

As we look forward to 2025, we’re excited to share more data-driven insights and improvements to help support you. As always, thank you for being a part of the TCGplayer community.