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 | ~10.25% + processing | Built-in TCG buyers, price discovery, catalog handles condition/printing | Commodity pricing pressure, no customer relationship |
| eBay | ~13.25% + $0.30 | 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
- Inventory system from day one — spreadsheets stop scaling around 500 SKUs
- An email list from your first order; it is your cheapest repeat traffic