Index:
Progress Against Our Strategy
The Road Ahead: Continuing Work On our Seller Tools and Capabilities
As you know, we have been on a journey to make TCGplayer a stronger, more scalable platform — connecting and empowering the hobby community. We want to share with you an update on our progress towards our strategy that we shared earlier this year.
Our primary objective remains unchanged: to meet the needs of sellers by establishing ourselves as the most reliable TCG platform in the market. We are committed to supporting and empowering the hobby community, ensuring that our users have access to the information necessary to make the most informed decisions for their businesses.
Progress Against Our Strategy in 2025
When we shared our strategy in February, we also shared progress that we had already made in 2024. We subsequently shared our Q1 progress at the GAMA Expo in March. Over the past three months of Q2, we have continued to execute our strategy to more effectively deliver on sellers’ top needs in selling large volumes of TCGs. We've made strong progress across our five strategic priorities:
Expanding Buyer Engagement Through Targeted Promotions and Improved Experiences
- Mayhem, our largest store credit promotion of the year, drove an unprecedented increase in buyer traffic to the Marketplace during a seasonally slower time period. Mayhem offered buyers a 10%+ store credit percentage back on purchases made during the promotional period, encouraging repeat business. Leveraging diversified marketing tactics including targeted ads, game-specific promotional emails, and optimized search brought more buyers to your storefronts and helped deliver record-breaking sales on our platform.
- We’ve also unified the TCGplayer experience allowing buyers to search for products, articles, and decks in a single search bar. With this update, TCGplayer content previously separated on our Infinite site has been integrated directly into the Marketplace, so buyers can access all of the information they need without having to click away from the Marketplace.
Enhancing the Selling Experience
- Disney Lorcana and One Piece Card Game have been added to Roca and Scan & Identify, expanding our product line support for our digitization tools. Hundreds of sellers and counting are currently using Scan and Identify to quickly turn their physical inventory into digital listings. We’re committed to continuing to add new product lines for these tools in the future.
- WPN seller badges are live on the Marketplace. Sellers who applied for this program will have a WPN badge displayed next to their store name on the TCGplayer Marketplace. This signals to buyers that the store has been recognized by Wizards of the Coast as an authorized retailer and trusted partner, helping customers shop with confidence. To sign up for a WPN badge, you can submit an application.
- We heard your feedback that automated set release notifications were disruptive to your workflows, so we turned off automated email notifications related to new set releases. We will continue to work on improvements for how we engage with you, including building a new communications preferences page for you to opt in and out of communications that are of value to you.
Scaling Fulfillment Solutions
- Last month, we shared with our team the difficult decision to consolidate Direct operations into our eBay logistics center in Louisville, KY, which means closing our Authentication Center in Syracuse, NY. As we make this transition, we’re focused on two things - the first is supporting our impacted teammates in Syracuse who helped make TCGplayer the amazing company it is today and the second is minimize disruption to your business while we ramp up operations in Louisville. We’re confident this move will enable us to grow the Direct program as we improve speed, efficiency and quality to create a better experience for both buyers and sellers.
Building a Scalable Infrastructure
- We’re working behind the scenes to improve our networks and infrastructure so that we can scale and add more features faster, but a few things you might notice are:
- We've partnered with Sovos, a tax service, to enable easy access to tax forms, simplifying the administrative side of selling and allowing you to focus more on what you love.
- We redesigned our customer checkout experience to be more user friendly and scalable, providing an extra layer of address validation to protect orders from being lost while also encouraging repeat customers.
Building Trust and Supporting Your Growth
- Based on your valuable feedback, we implemented a 2-day safeguard on Estimate Delivery Date (EDD), providing a more reliable and trustworthy experience for both sellers and buyers.
- Hundreds of sellers are currently participating in our free Growth Acceleration Program (GAP). With thousands of sellers participating in this program to date, graduates of this program consistently show an average of 90% sales growth, showcasing the positive impacts of personalized support and one-on-one coaching.If you’re interested in free personalized 1:1 support, you can enroll in GAP here.
The Road Ahead: Continuing Work our Seller Tools and Capabilities
We are dedicated to streamlining our seller tools and developing inventory management, fulfillment, in-store, and digitization solutions that better support you. We are currently focused on working towards:
Mobile App
- Our mobile app enhancements are in beta this month, featuring enhancements to the functionality, a better user experience and improved performance.
- The new mobile app engine significantly improves the speed and accuracy of our card scanning technology. This means fewer errors, faster processing times, and a smoother in-app experience.
- Once fully-released, the app will also support and scan all trading card games on the Marketplace.
- This upgrade is part of our commitment to improving our digitization technology for buyers and sellers at all stages in their selling journey. As a reminder, if you’re a Level 4 seller you can import inventory directly from the TCGplayer mobile app to the Seller Portal.
Point of Sale and Inventory Management
- We continue to make progress on developing improvements to our point of sale and inventory management solutions within our suite of seller tools. We'll be releasing improvements as they come, but this is a complicated project that we want to get right and is going to be a longer process.
Seller Registration Enhancements
- We are passionate about making TCGplayer the most trusted Marketplace for both sellers and buyers. In order to support this, in July, we will share details on our new seller registration process. This process will also require existing sellers to update their seller dashboard details.
- These enhancements aim to support legitimate sellers on TCGplayer, reduce risks, and ensure the integrity of listings on our platform – providing trust and a better overall experience for buyers and sellers.
As rebuilding our comprehensive suite of high-volume tools will require time, we aim to implement enhancements as they become available, actively seeking your input and feedback throughout the process. To gather your invaluable insights and guidance on our strategic priorities, we have doubled the size of our Customer Advisory Board. Your expertise is essential to our unwavering dedication to fostering Marketplace growth, enhancing trust and transparency, and investing in resources to elevate your selling experience.
Looking ahead, we will continue to update our Seller Blog with progress on our strategy in the next quarter. We also encourage you to subscribe to our YouTube Channel for more tips and tricks across all levels of your seller journey. Thank you for being a valued partner and joining us on our quest to empower and connect the hobby community.