General Forum

Seeking inventory management wisdom and advice from folks who have inventory listed both here and on another site (in my case Sportlots).  My general strategy is to list all my traders on TCDb first, as my main goal is to trade those for other cards I need for my PC.  Any dupes of those traders I list on Sportlots to sell, as selling is secondary to trading (but need to do it to get rid of my dupes).  If something from my TCDb trade list gets traded away, I'll move the dupe from my Sportlots inventory to my TCDb inventory to keep my TCDB inventory fully stocked.  A somewhat tedious process as it requires adjusting inventorieson both sites.   I also currently keep the physical inventories separated since each card is listed on one site or the other, not both to avoid accidentally selling or trading away a card from the other site.  So the process involves physical transferring of cards as well.

Any suggestions on how to improve the process?

A big thing I do is I have everything sorted by year and by sport. So sports are on different shevles and with in the sports I have them sorted by year, with an index card showing what year is behind my cards and on the outside of the box I ahve what years are included in the box. I believe this could be done with your trader and your sportlots cards to make it easier for seperation. Then if you are moving a year you can locate it easier.

I see you have a couple different named collections in your inventory, why not create another collection called Sportslots. That way all of your inventory is in one database, when you sell or trade a card, remove it from the Sportslots collection ( if it exists there), and with the physical inventory do the same, always pull from your Sportslots box first ( doesn't make sense to pull from your TCDB box and then move the same card from your Sportslots box to the TCDB box).

From my understanding, doing so would not prevent other users from trade matching to that collection. Is that accurate?

Correct, but you state they are all duplicates on Sportslots, so if they match to that, it must also exist in your main trading inventory. Not perfect, but may allow you to not maintain two separate inventory systems.  The only risk I see is if someone wants to buy one on Sportslots at the same time two people are requesting it in a trade. 

If you have them listed as FS/FT, then they will match. You could get around that by listing them as being "in your collection", and then they won't be matched against. (But, if you're trying to sell/move them, what would be the garm in having them be available in two places? Simply remove them from Sportlots as soon as the deal is struck, and if someone buys on SL, then remove from here.)

Pretty much what Dan just said. I have about 2k Magic cards for sale on TCGPlayer, and listed FSOT here. If any sell on TCGPlayer, I remove them from here first. If any go into a transaction here (that I accept), I remove them them my TCGPlayer inventory.

OBTW... TCGPlayer has announced that it plans to integrate sport cards into their offerings "this summer". Will be interesting to see how extensive their inventory database is, and how much traffic/exposure it will generate for their sellers.

One issue with what dan said is what if someone buys the card as you are making a trade deal or vice versa. Yes it rare but it can easily happen. Also just though you can make a second profile and trade with yourself when things are getting moved from one to the other and just have trades of on the sportlots account.

I maintain separate inventories between TCDB, Sportlots and Kronozio, so I don't accidentally unload a card on one site and forget to update the other sites.  So I keep the cards physically separate, or I just make sure if I have 5 of a card, I don't list all five in multiple sites.  

Nothing worse than making a sale only to find you traded the card away a couple of weeks earlier.