English has plenty of options for cheap singles. Troll and Toad, tcgplayer, even ebay will have the cheap cards at $1.
Japanese has no online store that sells singles for cheap. Troll and Toad doesn’t have much inventory and prices are high. Tcgrepublic has a lot of inventory, but the minimum price is $3/card and you don’t get a discount for buying multiple on the same order. Seems like there is an opportunity for someone to create a shopify website or something and sell Japanese bulk singles for like 25 cents a card. Charge a flat shipping fee. Seems like there would be a lot of buyers out there.
There are stores that do this in Japan, it’s no secret. You cannot do it cheaper than someone in Japan.
Nobody in an English speaking country would have enough product to make the offering viable. You would never have stock and restocking would be difficult and you need to open thousands of boxes so the value of the singles averages out. How much will you pay to have the product sent to you quickly while a set is still hot? The more you order the more expensive it becomes to ship internationally. Then you have a fat customs fee on top of that because there’s no way you’re going to be able to under-declare 10+ cases of product without customs poking around.
It’s extremely time intensive to mass open product and then offer singles. If you’re fast it takes about half an hour to open a case of 6 English booster boxes. Japanese products get less hits per packs opened so it will take you much longer than opening English.
Labor costs. How many people will you need to hire to sort and list cards for you? 3, 4? Where will you find thee people in the current economic climate? Will you be able to trust them to not take a five finger discount on a big Charizard?
You would be better off middlemanning boxes for the time it would take you.
English cards are cheap due to the volume of product opened in North America, that’s it. Supply greatly outweighs demand with modern product.
There might be a lot of buyers out there for cheaper cards but as you level up in this space your time becomes much more precious and dealing with low value items does not scale well.
I should clarify, I am not talking about modern cards. I am talking about out of print cards. Cards that are $4 on ebay, but should be $1. Also, no customs charges importing into the USA.
Thats my point. People are willing to pay $5 for a card on ebay that could be $2 on this website I am suggesting. If anyone makes this website, cards would be selling like crazy
TCGPlayer has an option to add pictures/descriptions to your listings, what people do with Japanese singles is that they list them with pictures and specify they’re Japanese like this:
This just sounds like a lot of time an effort for little to no reward. Why would someone take all the time, work, effort to import cards and sell them for less? Also its difficult to buy inventory at a consistent quantity and price. Not to mention this value range is the biggest headache to ship & buyer pool. It just sounds like a pipedream, hence why it doesn’t exist. This is coming from someone who actually has the inventory, and I will just sell it in bulk to TT or another larger business.
This is the feedback I was looking for. I remember in one of your videos a year or two ago that you had a ton of Japanese cards that wouldn’t be worth the time to sell, and that is what got me thinking of why there isn’t a USA based online card shop for Japanese singles.
I’ve thought about it many times, as there is a demand. The convenience alone of buying domestic. You’d have to scale it out, and basically become a full time brick and mortar. As you would need a place for employees to do intake, scan, catalog, list, price, etc.
Basically TT or similar sized businesses are ideal. They do occasional Japanese cards. I remember selling a box of mixed Japanese holos and promos to Rusty awhile back. I think he listed most through TT. Ironically I ended up buying a few back for a binder collection.
You can call me crazy; but, I thoroughly enjoy selling “bulk” cards Individually within my eBay Store - everything from WotC too Modern. This business-model takes a TREMENDOUS amount of time and effort; however, like I said, it’s something that I truly enjoy doing! So, the actual time-factor that’s being brought-up isn’t the “problem” (for me at-least).
This is going back a couple of years (Pre-2020 Poke-Mania); but, I used to have a fairly large WotC-Era Japanese Inventory of C. / Un. Cards - all being NM Condition. At one point, I had every Japanese Base through Team Rocket and majority of the Gym and Neo C. / Un. Cards listed with QTY as Individual Cards within my eBay Store. My issue with these cards was the fact that they just didn’t sell nearly as well as their English Counter-Parts… I don’t mind putting-in the time / effort for single-cards that I know will sell well; however, when you’re putting-in that much time / effort and not getting the “rewards”, it’s just not worthwhile. I stopped listing Japanese Bulk as Individual Cards for this reasoning.
Now, as mentioned, I haven’t done anything with Japanese Cards for awhile (maybe things have changed); and, I’m definitely more-so an English Seller on eBay; so, maybe I just didn’t have the correct clientele. I don’t know what the reasoning was; but, Japanese Bulk Cards always sold A LOT slower than English Counter-Parts from my experience.
That is a great perspective of English vs Japanese pre-pandemic. Since then, I think a lot of casual collectors realized that cards look awesome in Japanese with improved border color and better quality. I think you would have much higher sale rates in the current market when compared to pre-2020 with Japanese cards.
I sell loads of japanse singles on my cardmarket store, however the amount of sales has not changed from before the pandemic to the current market (for me anyways). Maybe the USA market is different than the European market?.
I list everything and that takes a crazy amount of time and sales are not consistent at all (maybe due to shipping costs within the EU?). It’s something I enjoy doing in my free time but as a business I would never start (in the EU anyways).
As mentioned before, English is waaaaay more in demand, even though Japanse cards have seen a rise in demand, that does not really count for Bulk cards. More for promo cards and chase cards.
So the clear feedback has been it’s not worth the time and effort to make an online card shop and list cheap Japanese cards since the margins are low and the sale rate is slow. I can get behind that.
I will add to my original question. Why doesn’t Tcgplayer open up their website to include Japanese cards? The seller’s do all the work once the item description (name, set, number) is set up.
I have considered undertaking this at times myself. The problem is, as many others have mentioned, scaling the business afterwards. The time factor would make it almost impossible to do on your own. Hiring employees isn’t cheap. Finding trustworthy people working at minimum wage is not easy. Then you need a place for them to congregate to sort, list etc which adds in a rent expense. The other point you make regarding price point doesn’t make much sense to me. As a business if the lowest price out there for a card is $5 I would be pricing that item right around that. Lowering that price to $2 is great for the consumer but makes no business sense. You need that margin to pay your employees and build the business… Your last post relating to a preexisting marketplace adding templates for Japanese bulk makes the most sense. They already have a consumer base, sellers and infrastructure to support this. It would be much less work than you or I starting this from the ground up. Many businesses have an “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it approach” which leads to missed opportunities/potential revenue generators such as this idea.
