I Was NOT Ready for This Many Orders… Scaling a Pokemon Card Business

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Have you ever been overwhelmed with orders in your TCG Bler business? Like I'm saying, you look at your day. You look at all the things that you have to accomplish and you're just not sure where you're going to fit packing orders and shipping out things to your customers. And on top of that, you've got other stuff that you've got to do as well for your business. You've got to list cards. Maybe you want to make content to where it's just like, ah, it is easy to get overwhelmed. Man, holy smokes, it is. In fact, tonight I came down here. I sat down at my computer and this is what I saw. Now, that is 74 orders that I need to ship out. And that's with me doing orders on Saturday night, which I typically don't do, but I just had a feeling that I needed to get ahead of the eightball this week. So, these are all orders from uh basically Sunday and today. And so, that is a little wild, but rest assured because in this video, I'm going to talk about some different strategies that are available.

[00:00:50]Some of them I've used to help me deal with this feeling of being overwhelmed with having a Pokemon card or trading card side hustle because there are ways to deal with just feeling like you can't take care of all of the orders. And so these are things that I've put into practice and maybe this will help you.

[00:01:06]But if this is your first time here, what's up? My name is TJ. I shoot videos like this all the time helping you guys get your stores off the ground. I love helping people get their stores rolling because I think that this is an incredibly fun side hustle, hobby, whatever you want to call it. And so if I can help you uh have a little bit of extra courage to hop into this place, that makes me very very happy. So if you enjoy content like this, uh subscribe to the channel, press a like, press the like button on the video, leave a comment down below. All those things help me out a ton. But let's hop in.

[00:01:31]What do you do when you're overwhelmed with orders? So the first tool that you have at your disposal is pricing. Is changing your prices and raising your prices to throttle down the amount of orders that you are getting in. Now, uh I'm not complaining about having these orders. Anytime something sells on my site at the prices that I set at, it is something worth celebrating. That's literally what I'm pricing things at.

[00:01:52]And so, I want sales to happen at that price point. But if I have enough foresight and I can get ahead of things and I know that my inventory is in a spot where I have enough desirable cards, I'm going to get slammed, I should raise my prices on the marketplace so that things come in slower. Because to to be honest with you guys, 74 orders an evening and I've got some systems uh in place to where I can crank through orders. I'm probably going to be able to knock these all out tonight. What is it? It's It's like 9:00 right now. I'm probably going to work on stuff until like midnightish. Just uh cracked open an energy drink. And so it's like I can I can probably do that, but it is going to be pushing it. And maybe I'll just like go for like 50 or something like that and save the rest for tomorrow. But uh anything more than this would be really really tough. And so I would rather it be like in the 30 range. 30 to 40 range be the high end of things. And so that means I just have to raise my prices. Now how high do you raise your prices? What do you raise your prices to? I don't know. I can't tell you exactly what to do. I can just say that you're going to have to mess around with it. Now, the cool thing is if you sell on a platform like TCD player, this is where something like Mass Price comes in handy where it's a tool where you pay a little bit of extra in fees, but you have this tool where you can raise your fees uh or your um prices by a percentage of the market.

[00:03:03]So, right now, all my cheap cards, which a lot of these are primarily, well, I guess a few of these are expensive, but a lot of these are, you know, cheap cards that are shipping out, uh, I can raise them instead of them being 30% above market. Sometimes I go all the way up to 40% over market on some of these cheaper cards. And guess what? A lot of them still sell. Holy smokes, a bunch of them still sell. You just have to have enough of the desirable cards. And you're like, who's buying these cards for 40% over market? Well, if you have enough inventory and especially enough inventory of the same kind of cards, these ones primarily being those Japanese illustration rares that I talked about in the video yesterday, then people are still going to buy them because they just want to save money on the free shipping and hit that $5 mark.

[00:03:39]And so, it does end up making sense in the end. And so, if you are feeling overwhelmed by your orders, maybe instead of turning your store off, just think about raising your prices to a point where uh orders become manageable, where you can deal with the amount of orders that are coming in. Um, and then once they slow down, uh, you can do one of two things. You can add more inventory to where it keeps moving at that same pace. That's like the most ideal. Or then you just drop your prices a little bit. And again, we're talking about being above market anyways. And so if you have to drop your prices for orders to come in, like that's okay. I wouldn't ever go undermarket. That's probably something that I would avoid just to make sure that you can continue making money. This is assuming that you're picking up collections at like 70%. But that's been an absolute game changer for me, being able to change my prices and have that be the throttle like the spigot. Like I'm just going to turn it and when I want more orders, I'll, you know, lower the prices. If I want uh to slow things down, then I'll just, you know, raise the prices a little bit. Let's me make it manageable.

[00:04:34]Now, the second thing that you can think about doing, and I've done this before, is you can think about joining the direct program. If you're not familiar, if you do sell on TCG Player, there is a program called TCG Player Direct. This is where instead of shipping cards uh to customers, you as the seller shipping it to the customer that buys it. Instead, the customer buys it immediately. When that sale happens, TCG Player sends them a card from their warehouse. And then after you hit a certain amount in sales, you reimburse TCG Player the cards that they sold on your behalf. And so TCG Player themselves act as a middleman for you and the customer. And the idea with this is for you to increase the volume of sales that you are doing, but that does come at a price that comes at a cost. You have to pay more in fees. Uh I would say significantly more in fees to make sure that happens. So instead of, you know, here shipping out 74 orders this evening, I might have 15 orders that I myself have to ship out and then all 70 or 60 of those other orders would just be going to TCG Player. So, instead of shipping those all over the place, I would eventually get a uh reimbursement invoice where I have to send all these cards in one package to TCG Player, which takes a lot less time than shipping them out all over the place, then putting them in individual envelopes. They just all go in a big uh box or a big bubble mailer to TCG Player. That is very, very slick.

[00:05:52]Another cool thing with direct is there are premiums on the cards because people like the direct program aspect of getting it directly from TCG Player.

[00:05:58]it's always going to be shipped to them with tracking and they are going to have more of a guarantee that the card is going to get there in the right condition. Obviously, people have had instances where they don't get a card in the correct condition from TCG Player Direct. That's probably the the minority of situations, but so direct is something that you can uh consider. If you are still able to source cards at a remarkably fast rate and you're trying to raise your prices and you're still not able to have enough time to ship everything out, you could consider joining TCG Player Direct. But just be aware, your cards will move fast, especially if you have uh desirable inventory. I'm not necessarily talking about bulk. I'm talking about hits. I'm talking about EX's and up. full arts, illustration rares, uh mega attack rares, special illustration rares, uh expensive stuff, dollar plus stuff, those things will sell on direct very, very fast. So, just be sure if you are heading into direct, you're going to want to have a great ability to source collections to source cards because uh you are paying more in fees for those to get shipped out and uh it is going to wipe out your inventory incredibly fast.

[00:07:03]I remember back the first time before I joined uh the direct program, the rep who I was working with as I put in my application. Uh because in order to join direct, you need to be hitting a certain amount of uh sales a week. I think you need to do like 600 sales a week and you need to have an inventory that's greater than 3,000 cards or something like that.

[00:07:18]Maybe they've changed it, but they were saying like, "Okay, you're indirect.

[00:07:21]You're ready to go." And I'm like, "All right, sweet." And they're like, "Hey, just to warn you, like sales will pick up, so just be be ready." I was like, "Yeah, okay, whatever." Yeah. But then I remember I was getting off church one day and I got in my car and I looked at my phone and I pulled up my email and it was like I had to scroll to get to the bottom of my orders. I probably had like 80ome orders just in that one day because direct things move fast. So you have to price accordingly there too. And then the last thing that you could consider doing and this is not something that I have done but something that people have suggested or something that uh is certainly an option is you could look to actually hire someone yourself.

[00:07:54]hire someone who comes over for a couple hours in the evening and they would ship out cards. You would teach them how to do that. You would teach them your process of pulling cards from the inventory, uh, shipping them out to people, doing all that stuff. You could hire someone to do that. Uh, I've heard examples of people doing that to some success. And I've heard examples of people doing that and it's gone horribly. And so that really comes down to like how good are you at training someone in and managing people, which this is something I have a tremendous amount of experience doing like outside of the Poke Pastor part, but just like my real job, but that's a whole different ballgame. Uh we're talking getting your processes down yourself.

[00:08:30]Like yeah, that's tough. Trying to teach someone else or uh manage someone else so that they give the customers the same great experience or a better experience than you give them is really really hard. So, I would say out of these solutions, pricing is the easiest, joining direct is the is the middle one, and then hiring someone is the most challenging. But then again, that would be pretty cool if right now I could be, you know, doing something else, working on doing other stuff, and I just had someone who's going to come over for two hours and and ship out all these cards.

[00:08:58]That sounds pretty sweet. Uh, and I certainly like cash flow-wise have the ability business-wise to to cash flow that pay someone a few times a week to do that. But is that something I really want to do? I don't I don't think so at this point. like I I still enjoy doing this, but it would be something to maybe consider. And and if I did that, then I wouldn't necessarily have to raise my prices to slow things down. I could keep things going at this pace, and I as long as I'm able to source cards, as long as I'm able to keep things rolling, we could uh we could be in good shape. But again, that is something that is a whole different can of worms. And then you're talking about all the ins and outs of actually hiring someone for your business, which is not something that I have had to delve into yet. But let me know if you have. And I want to know your experience of teaching someone your systems. Cuz as as organized or as systematic as I think this is, when I try and wrap my head around teaching this to someone else, I think they're going to probably think that I' I've got a couple screws loose upstairs cuz uh yeah, this is uh it works. But it is a uh it is a bit of a a beautiful uh disaster. But what about you though?

[00:09:56]Have you felt overwhelmed with orders that you've had to ship out before? How have you handled that? And yeah, I would love to hear and maybe I can learn some tips and tricks from you guys because I like I love giving tips and tricks, but there have been many of times where I have conversations with you all or I read comments down below and I get to learn from y'all and that is a huge blessing for me. But uh thank you guys so much for watching this video. I believe that Jesus loves you, that he's got an incredible plan for your life.

[00:10:20]I'll catch you on the next one. Peace.