Most shop margin is made at the buy counter, not the till.
Set the terms before the customer arrives
Decide, and write down:
- Your standard buy percentage of market, by game.
- Your bulk rate, per hundred or per thousand.
- What you will not buy at all — fakes, heavily played bulk, product you cannot move locally.
- Whether you pay more in store credit than cash, and by how much.
Having a policy makes the conversation easy and the same for everyone, which is what makes it defensible.
The collection-buy conversation
- 1.Sort before you price. Separate the head — the handful of cards carrying most of the value — from the tail.
- 2.Price the head individually, in front of the customer, showing your working.
- 3.Bulk the tail at your stated rate. Do not price 400 commons individually; nobody is paid enough for that.
- 4.Grade honestly and out loud. "This is Lightly Played because of the back edge whitening" builds trust; a silent lower offer does not.
- 5.Give a total and a breakdown. People accept lower offers they understand over higher ones they do not.
Avoiding the classic losses
- Buying a card at a price that has since fallen, because you were working from memory.
- Buying deep stock of something you already have twelve of.
- Not recording what you paid, so you cannot tell later whether the deal was good.
How the platform helps
Buy prices are calculated against live market data at your configured percentage, so the number in front of you is current rather than remembered. Buys and trades are recorded as Deals, which feed the transactions ledger — so cost basis, margin and cash flow are recorded at the moment of the buy rather than reconstructed later. See the deals guide.