How to open an online card store
A practical playbook for turning a collection or a local card habit into a real storefront, from someone who consults for TCG retailers.
1. Pick your sales channels deliberately
Most successful card stores sell on two or three channels at once. Marketplaces bring buyers but take a cut of every sale and keep the customer relationship for themselves; your own storefront costs a monthly fee but the margin, the email list, and the repeat buyer are yours. The mix that works for most new stores: marketplaces for singles liquidity, your own site for sealed product, breaks, preorders, and local customers.
| Channel | Typical selling cost | Strengths | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| TCGplayer marketplace | ~10.75% + processing (2026 rate) | Built-in TCG buyers, price discovery, catalog handles condition/printing | Commodity pricing pressure, no customer relationship |
| eBay | ~13.25% + $0.40 | Huge reach, best for graded slabs and sealed | Fees, returns handling, listing overhead |
| Your own storefront (Shopify) | ~2.9% + $0.30 processing; plan from $39/mo | You own the customer, email list, and margin; sell sealed, singles, breaks, and local pickup | You bring the traffic; pair it with marketplaces early on |
2. Set up your own storefront
For a card store, the storefront platform decision mostly comes down to Shopify: it handles payments, taxes, shipping labels, and inventory out of the box, and the TCG-specific tooling ecosystem (card catalog apps, buylist apps, break scheduling) is built for it first. Start on the entry plan; upgrade only when order volume justifies it.
Disclosure: if you sign up through this link we may earn a referral commission, at no cost to you. It's the platform we set up for the stores we advise.
3. Price from data, not vibes
Singles are a commodity: overprice and you sit on inventory, underprice and you donate margin. Reprice against live market data on a schedule: daily for staples and chase cards, weekly for bulk. That is exactly what The Lab tracks: daily prices, trend signals, and set-level indices for the whole Pokémon catalog, so you can see which cards are moving before you buy or reprice.
4. The launch checklist
- Business basics: entity, sales-tax registration, a separate bank account
- Photography setup: consistent lighting beats an expensive camera
- Condition grading standard written down before your first listing
- Shipping tiers: PWE for cheap singles, bubble mailer + tracking above ~$20 (our full supplies list covers the gear)
- Inventory system from day one (spreadsheets stop scaling around 500 SKUs)
- An email list from your first order; it is your cheapest repeat traffic
Run your store on live market data
The Sunday report covers movers, sealed EV, and repricing signals. What we'd want on a store owner's desk, free.