A show is a good day's trading and an inventory nightmare, unless you plan the stock side as carefully as the selling side.
Before the show
- Allocate specific stock to the event, rather than taking "some of everything". You need to know exactly what left the shop.
- Price before you go. Pricing at the table under pressure is where margin dies.
- Take the right mix. Sealed and mid-price singles move at shows; your highest-value cards often do not, and carry the most risk.
- Assume the signal will be bad. Venues are concrete boxes full of people.
At the table
- Have a visible, simple price structure for bulk — browsing boxes at a flat price move volume with no decisions.
- Keep high-value cards in a locked case, out of reach, and shown one at a time.
- Record every sale as it happens. "I'll remember" does not survive a busy afternoon.
After
Reconcile the same day while you still remember. Cards that came back, cards that sold, cash taken versus cards missing — the gap is what you need to find while it is still findable.
How this works here
Create the show as an event and allocate stock to it, then sell from that stock at the table. A card allocated to a show sits on no other channel, so nothing in your box is simultaneously listed in your shop window or on eBay — you cannot sell the same card twice, and the day reconciles itself against your inventory rather than against your memory.
One thing to plan around: selling runs in the same web app as the rest of your stock, so you need a connection at the table. Offline selling is not available yet — the server side is built, but the vendor mobile app that would use it has not shipped. If the venue turns out to be the concrete box you were expecting, take the details on paper and enter them when you are back online. See shows and POS.