Producing Product, Getting It to Market, Getting It to People

Most posts on this blog are about the systems — the inventory engine, the pricing engine, the proxy infrastructure. This one is about the journey. The decisions, the mistakes, the things that worked and the things I'd do differently if I were starting today. It's the post I wish someone had written when I was figuring this out.

Stage 1: From buyer to seller

I was a Pokémon collector first. Sealed product, mostly modern, mostly because I liked the sets. The pivot from collector to seller happened when I realized I was sitting on a stack of Booster Boxes whose secondary-market value had quietly doubled while I wasn't paying attention. I sold a single box on TCGPlayer, then five, then twenty, and the operation was born accidentally.

Lesson: Don't romanticize the start. The story sounds clean in retrospect — "I always knew I'd build a wholesale operation" — but at the time I was just trying to figure out whether I could clear the next box without losing money on shipping.

Stage 2: First channel discipline

The temptation when you start selling is to be on every platform immediately. eBay! Mercari! Facebook Marketplace! Discord! TikTok!

Don't. The first 90 days should be spent learning one platform deeply. For me that was TCGPlayer because it's the deepest market for sealed Pokémon TCG. I learned how the verified-seller system works, how feedback compounds, how the "pro seller" tools differ from regular listings, what shipping carriers/methods get you the highest customer satisfaction scores.

Lesson: The compounding wins in this business come from reputation. Reputation only builds when you focus.

Stage 3: Sourcing — beyond retail arbitrage

Walmart and Target will only get you so far. The real unlock is getting onto a distributor's eligible-buyer list. That requires a resale certificate, business banking, and proof of volume. It also requires picking a distributor that actually wants to work with operators your size — a few of the big ones won't talk to you below a certain monthly spend.

The first wholesale order I placed was terrifying. Five-figure check, weeks-long lead time, no guarantee the SKU would still be selling at the price I'd modeled when it arrived. It worked out. It also taught me to never commit more capital than I could afford to be wrong about.

Lesson: Going pro on sourcing is the single biggest leap. It changes everything from margins to working-capital needs to your relationship with the platform you sell on.

Stage 4: Multi-channel

Once D2C on TCGPlayer was running cleanly, eBay was next. Different audience, different pricing, different fee profile. Listing the same product on both channels with channel-specific pricing roughly doubled my sell-through rate without doubling my workload.

Lesson: Multi-channel only works if your back-end is unified. If TCGPlayer and eBay show different inventory states for the same SKU, you'll oversell on at least one of them. This is what eventually pushed me to build the in-house inventory engine.

Stage 5: D2B / wholesale

This is where SantahsCards stopped being a shop and started being a business. Wholesale customers are different — they expect quote turnarounds in hours, ship dates in days, and consistency in everything. They also pay for that consistency, which is why wholesale margins per unit are smaller but volume is dramatically higher.

The first wholesale customer I landed came inbound — a vendor saw my TCGPlayer feedback rep and reached out asking if we'd quote a 200-box order. I had to figure out wholesale pricing on the fly that week. Now there's a proper portal for it.

Lesson: B2B is a relationship business in a way D2C isn't. The first six months of a wholesale relationship is more important than the first six months of any single SKU. Treat it accordingly.

Stage 6: Building the platform

By the time I was running multi-channel D2C plus wholesale, the spreadsheet that started this operation was actively dangerous. One mis-keyed quantity could cost thousands. So I rebuilt the whole thing as a real platform — Airtable as the source of truth, Next.js for the storefront, custom TCGPlayer scraping for live pricing, residential proxies to keep the scraper alive, an internal API for both the public storefront and the wholesale quote flow.

Lesson: Every operator overestimates how long they can run on a spreadsheet. The right time to build the system is roughly when you're starting to dread the spreadsheet — not when it's already broken.

What I'd tell my past self

• Start with one channel. Go deep.
• Get on a distributor's list as soon as you have the volume.
• Build the systems before they're load-bearing.
• Never confirm an allocation you don't physically have.
• Reputation is the only durable moat. Protect it like it's the asset it is.
• Stop over-engineering. The 80/20 in this business is "ship cleanly, every time."

Where this is going

SantahsCards is not a venture-funded company and never will be. It's a real business that pays for itself, employs zero people other than me, and has clear unit economics. The next phase is more of the same — bigger allocations, tighter operations, deeper distributor relationships, more shops on the wholesale list.

If you're early in this and trying to figure out what to do next, my best advice is the same advice nobody wants to hear: be patient, ship cleanly, and let the compounding do the work.