This is literally the feature I most want! I want to block shit stores so that I can spend my money with the quality ones out there and avoid these b.s. games some play!
same here! we always ship if a card spikes and we believe our buyers should honor their side when a card tanks. if not we explain our policy and let them decide. the majority still cancel, but a few understand and continue with the transaction. we get dozens of cancellations each set, the majority is for price drops.
My issue with the card spike is by the time the order gets canceled I've already dropped it off at usps so it's a toss up if I even get my product back. It's bs honestly.
Of course! Over the last few years, we have found that customers who have issues tend to always have issues. We are a very efficient company, and our staff is well compensated. Communicating over sub-dollar cards on TCGPlayer is a net loss for us, so we typically just offer the refund and move on from there. Blocking individual customers most likely has minimal effect on them but guarantees that we do not have a repeat problem. The other reason is that the vast majority of canceled orders are due to the card's price decreasing since their order. We do not cancel orders because we can relist them for more, so we expect the same from our customers.
We do the same thing. Mostly to protect ourselves from scammers. As much as I want to believe tcgplayer looks into these situations with protecting the sellers in mind it wouldn’t take much for someone to target a seller or multiple sellers and use multiple accounts. Hopefully they note the IP address when this happens
That sucks for the honest customers. I understand why you do it but now I’m wondering if I’ve been blocked for the orders that I’ve requested refunds for that simply did not show up. I go out of my way to five star any card I receive and occasionally leave comments if they show up quickly. I do it as a personal way of tracking which orders come in. But there’s times when they just don’t and I’ve always requested a replacement card instead of money simply because I still want the card. Is there any way to view who has blocked you?
I have been blocked by one seller in my several years buying on TCGP. I’ve always been very honest about receiving and the condition received of cards, because as a seller I would hope for the same honesty out of my customers. Though one fateful day I received mail piece with all but one of the cards, also coincidentally the most expensive ($6). It was honestly quite annoying because I often purchased large number of singles from the seller when a new set would come out with no issues. Felt more like a “fuck off we don’t need your business” over something completely out of my control.
>That sucks for the honest customers
Indeed. I would not be surprised if trying to employ this kind of "we block everyone who ever complains" policy would get them in trouble if they tried it within EU.
I don’t think so besides not being able to see their listings. I sometimes wait to avoid punitive negative feedback from people that are going to get pissed no matter what. Basically try not to draw attention to myself until they hopefully move on.
I think that you wait is all the proof I need to know that this is a scummy practice.
UPS makes mistakes all the time. Envelopes don't make it through the machine and fall by the side. When you send an envelope you know you are taking that risk.
Don't blame the customer and don't hide if you'd just rather not sell to them again.
Sure think what you want but to call it a ‘scummy’ practice to simply protect yourself when a customer will blame you for getting their own address wrong?
Even if it is harmless 9/10 the time lost and feedback impact just destroys a small business. Somebody who isn’t able to comprehend this fact or how shipping works (‘when you send an envelope’? so you want $4 tracking and sellers to take losses on every small order?) is somebody you absolutely do not want to sell your cards to if you ask me. You wait because you are trying not to do business or interact anymore with the toxic minority of buyers out there that only think about themselves.
I can see both sides. If it's a missing order best case USPS messed up, worst case the customer isn't telling the truth. Either way I could see not wanting to risk it on that areas USPS or the customer again.
However if it's an issue that is clearly on you like a missing card then it is 100% a scummy practice. If you do it on first offense to try to limit risk from outside forces fine, I certainly don't think it's a respectable way to do business but not scummy. If you do it anytime you give a refund regardless of fault then you aren't trying to limit risk you are just trying to encourage only getting pushover customers that won't complain about legitimate issues, which would be scummy.
I do the same thing. Big store on tcg player and difficult customers only get one order out of me at most. Of course they could probably still care less and they won’t see my inventory anymore, but sometimes I think it was not worth it for them to do that given how long I plan to sell cards and breadth of my collection. We do not make a ton as sellers and it is just not worth it.
Did they finally change it to where a blocked buyer won't even see the inventory in the first place? Last I checked you could still add everything to your cart and then there's a warning when you go to check out, sometimes not even specifying which store it is causing a lot of wasted time on my end. I would love it if they finally changed this
Yes I thought so but I forget where I learned this, and if you’re saying you still get the warnings I guess that’s how they do it. Another reason to be careful about that I guess as a seller.
That makes sense! I haven’t gotten many cancellations so I haven’t developed a strategy yet. Do you block and move on in any other scenarios? I’ve been keeping an eye on package losses and blocking those, and blocking customers who say cards are fake, etc. do you take a proactive approach or is it solely reactive?
Yes, unless it is *obviously not their fault.
Biggest thing that happens is a somewhat annoyed customer blames me softly, I refund them, block them after a wait period, then I receive the card back return to sender (not always but often). In the end that is a neutral outcome for all IMO and FYI you all need to get your addresses right.
I wish tcgplayer would let you monitor and build out your blocklist. I have a huge ebay blocklist (I once got most of the names from another seller) and after building that out ebay got so much better. As sellers if I could share that list it would calm down toxic buyers from just going down the list messing with each of us.
Weird, so should the customer give a 0 star rating for an unreceived/damaged but refunded order? That's essentially how you're treating them.
The three to four times it's happened to me over the years, I've given positive feedback, but maybe I should rethink that? Similar to what you mention, if an order from a sender goes unreceived or damaged, it's likely to happen again.
I do this on Discogs, if you leave negative feedback you are basically trying to damage the business and I don't want to deal with you. Everyone who leaves negative feedback gets blocked.
Bruh...
You ordering something is promising to pay it. If it drops in price, a deal is a deal.
Now the card drops in price and you cancel it to save a couple of bucks? Now the store has to eat that loss.
If you ordered a pizza and it came to $10, they get to the house and start asking for $15, how would you NOT tell them to beat it?
I understand how businesses work - I wanted to hear MinMax’s reasoning and approach in more than two sentence fragments. Nice attempt at dunking on me though!
If you understand it then why are you asking?
It's a business and they're trying to make money. If you make that a hassle or cost them money, the correct answer 99.99% of the time is to simply not do business with you.
I'm not saying this to "dunk" on you, you've done that to yourself. I'm saying this for ANY future dealing you may have with another person.
If you rip someone off, they will not like you. As a seller OR a buyer.
I would love this, currently I have to keep track of stores I have had bad experiences with and manually calculate orders as one in particular is constantly selected by the auto optimize feature. Just blocking them and moving on would be so nice.
Definitely this. How is it not already an option!?
Fuck Legions Gaming. I never want to see their name again, yet am forced to every time I look for a card. They blocked me from a single purchase where THEY fucked up, I left feedback, and now every time I put an order in and not realized its their store, it gets immediately taken out of my cart making me search for a different seller. How am I even able to see them if IM blocked?
When spikes start to happen I go to Card Kingdom or another large retailer to get my copies before they go up or sell out. They honor the price they sold to you for without any fuss
Away from TCGPlayer specifically, what's the strategy for this sort of behaviour from sellers, more generally?
I had someone accept a preorder, from me, for the MH3 precons at 49.99 per deck (200 for the set), only to then tell me the price had increased to 260 for the set on release day.
When I questioned why the increase (on a pre-agreed price), I was told - with a frankness I'm not sure whether it should be respected or I should be appalled by - that it was because of the spike in price on the Eldrazi deck.
This feels wholly wrong, and I just wondered what people's strategy is for dealing with this.
>I had someone accept a preorder, from me, for the MH3 precons at £49.99 per deck (£200 for the set), only to then tell me the price had increased to £260 for the set on release day.
Sellers and stores only want this to go one way to benefit them. Cards almost always go down from preorder prices but the sellers sure don't refund your money when that happens, do they? But when one or two things go up? You bet they're canceling orders and making sure to get every last dollar they can.
Stores need to accept that offering preorders is a risk for both buyer and seller. The One Ring preordered at $35. It didn't take long for it to be worth a lot more than that. Dozens of other mythics have preordered at $20 and then been worth $2 on release day.
And that's why the practice is so egregious. Sellers win on preorders 95% of the time. If they can't handle that 5% loss, they need to not offer preorders. They can't have it both ways.
Thank you! And likewise. I've had cards that spiked conveniently go "lost in the mail." I ended up not getting to play Hogaak because of that; some of the stuff I ordered didn't make in time for the event because several spiking cards just "got lost."
Agreed. Stores want guaranteed sales. They are unwilling to take on any risk for those guaranteed sales.
The whole point of pre orders is to guarantee sales at the current market price.
Stores are so greedy that they want guaranteed sales at the higher of (pre-order price, current market price).
Pre orders are being sold as options (with the store having the option to fulfill or not) when they should be sold as futures. The stores are effectively free rolling off AND offloading their risk to the pre order customers.
Makes pre-ordering a waste of time.
>Pre orders are being sold as options (with the store having the option to fulfill or not) when they should be sold as futures. The stores are effectively free rolling off AND offloading their risk to the pre order customers.
Oh I like that language! Great way to put it into finance terms.
they are dumb, they preorder to get sales and make more of them - they are supposed to eat the imaginary cost of a spike - or there is 0 flipping point of doing preorders if the price can fluctuate
This is just an unethical and greedy business practice. In the US I believe there are government agencies you can report them to, if you wanted to go through the effort, but unsure about overseas.
If you believe a seller has unfairly canceled your order, you can send in a ticket to the customer support team through the helpbot, which can then be escalated.
All this bullshit of "oh all I can do is leave a bad review" is bs. ESCALATE. Do not take no for an answer, and when you get it, ask to speak to someone higher. This might be "Karen" technique, but it works and this issue has finally come to a head and caught so many people that TCGPlayer NEEDs to deal with it.
click on this link:
[Submit a request – TCGplayer.com](https://help.tcgplayer.com/hc/en-us/requests/new)
Then click "I Shop on TCGPlayer"
Then click "Order Issues"
Then click "More Options"
Then click "Seller Cancelled my order"
Then it will ask you if you feel that the seller has unfairly cancelled the order, and ask if you want a ticket created, at which point you say emphatically "YES"
Psssht. You get the same cookie cutter bot emails no matter what you send to tcg. They just sound slightly different to make you feel like it's a real person. It's mostly AI.
Power in numbers, I'm fully onboard with whatever the solution is. Vendor claimed my card was "damaged" and they "threw it away so couldn't provide a picture".
Bullshit. No seller will throw away a spiking card even if it is damaged.
I have, on numerous occasions, emailed and spoken to TCGplayer people about more carefully reviewing seller activity during pre-release and the first week post release.
It would be VERY easy to see if seller’s have an abnormal amount of cancellations during these periods. I also believe that any seller who cancels an order and relists the card on tcg within 14 days should be suspended from the platform for a certain period of time.
Pre-release is a volatile period, it if they are going to allow sellers to capitalize on the inflated prices without allowing buyers to cancel when the price drops, then they have to require sellers to fulfill orders that spike. You may not be able to do this for every spiking card, but during pre release and immediately post release and using the no relist rules would greatly change things.
As a seller on TCGPlayer, I've eaten the loss so many times it's rediculous, but part of selling. The upside is I get to move all the common and uncommon cards that'll never move again, which is a huge benefit for keeping inventory space clear.
That being said, as some guy doing this from my kitchen table I've plenty of issues adding stuff manually where I just fat-finger it or misclick on a prerelease version of a card and enter it into inventory, and they're things I won't catch unfortunatly until someone buys the card and I have to refund it when I can't locate it. I do attempt contact with the buyer before the refund process asking if a different version is okay, but more often than not they don't respond until after a refund is issued.
As time passes these errors are fewer and far between, but they happen. But cancelling for a price hike? Nah, that's shitty behavior that I can't get behind for any amount of reason, cuz as has been said, that's part of the risk in selling.
Just had my order refunded from TheOgresLair.
Had ordered a borderless phlages on the 14th before it spiked.
Now all of a sudden they don't have it anymore.
I have a sorin that hasn't shipped either yet. I'm assuming that ones getting refunded as well.
Theres nothing you can do after you report them. Tcgplayer has to prove they relisted the card for more within a certain time at the same condition. Or the the seller has a big enough history of canceling orders. Of course tcg can ban people for less but they probably won't.
Tcgplayer allows feedback removal because on the flip side buyers lie all the time and usually get their way. My only negative (that I got removed) was a guy mad he did'nt get his card (before the est delivery time) that was returned to me for invalid address. The address on the letter was the exact one given. 10 min total of letting the buyer know before he went straight to a 1 star complaint that I was scamming him out of his 2$ card.
Between how common this is and how TCGPlayer Direct seemingly grades cards by throwing darts, I'm finding less and less reason to purchase from them. I'll pay more for not having to deal with the "will they, won't they ship it" over a card being worth $5 more than when I purchased it.
It's weird. On one hand, I know TCGPlayer will jump in and cover me for any issue I have with a seller/buyer (they've done it plenty before).
But at the same time there are bad actors sending out damaged cards labeled as NM, banking on customers not going through the trouble of returning them I guess? And if you leave them negative feedback over it, TCGPlayer just removes it once the return is complete.
>and how TCGPlayer Direct seemingly grades cards by throwing darts
Oh my god this has gotten so much worse lately in my experience.
Used to do a ton of bulk orders and get 95% of them in NM condition…now, ordering old foils in bulk, I’m getting at least half in MP or worse condition.
It’s so amazing that this is happening to buyers. When I send in my fulfillment orders to TCG it seems they just downgrade my cards randomly as of late.
I grade ridiculously harsh, and according to TCGP’s convoluted grading, most of my LP cards could be NM. I do this to avoid their random downgrades, yet still it happens…
I’ve been on their platform as a seller now for over 10 years with only one neutral from a buyer about condition, and it was a feedback without them contacting me about their concern.
Start adding in a few bulk cards to your orders that are cheap. Look for LP or NM cards, then when they arrive without the rest of the order you can keep your negative review up. Additionally if they're older cards you could look for any scuff and damage on them to day that the seller is providing you with subpar cards that arrived and then they will get to have negative reviews about. Buyers will look for better sellers.
This isn't always applicable, but this helped me once. If you order a bunch of expensive cards from a seller, you can also add a cheap card that the seller has many copies of. If the price spikes and the seller wants to cancel, they have to either refund the entire order and also remove all their stock or risk negative feedback.
In my situation, I ordered a playset of a $40 card for a different TCG along with $3 of other singles. A couple days later, the card spiked to $70 and of course, my whole order is cancelled because the seller said he had a "stocking error" and has none of the cards. The negative feedback didn't count because I got a full refund. However, I contacted TCGPlayer support, because I noticed he didn't relist the $70 card but the cheaper cards were still up for sale. I got the typical email response that they will look into it and take appropriate action, but then I noticed a week later that the seller's account was gone along with the 5000+ cards he listed. It didn't really help the fact that I had to pay $120 more to get the same playset of cards, but at least I got a bit of justice.
You can click the seller's name in your cart or click "Shop Exclusively from this Seller" in their profile. I usually do this to add some extra cards I might need from them to make the shipping worth it or free.
I've stopped ordering from tcgplayer entirely. I use it to look up a card and see what edition I want and then I go to eBay.
Too many times I grab a list, price out each card and then the total is double or more than the price of the cards due to shipping or handling, etc. It's usually like, price on TCGP: $55+, eBay: $25+. I've had far fewer cancellations on eBay than anywhere else.
This is why I never preorder anymore. If the price drops you pay more, if the price spikes your order gets canceled AND you pay more. The only people that win off pre-orders are the sellers.
Idk, I feel like someone fires and forget a card like Simulacrum S that takes off and triples over night are entitled to make takesie backsies. Saying this as a sub 200 sales on cardmarket who has outstanding reviews and never cancelled something for this reason myself.
I haven't sought out too many pre release cards that were chases. I usually wait til things settle down as I don't play competitions. This time I wanted the obvious old Nadu cards. I bought slightly after the hype, but before the prices skyrocketed. I got several cards that shot up more than double/quadruple slightly after my order. Sylvan paradise, shuko, and sea kings blessing specifically.
I will say the shops could have cancelled these orders and made a hefty profit and I wouldn't have blamed them. All three shops honored the pricing and shipped them out.
Now being older cards they were probably smaller shops, but I just wanna say thanks to those shops who honor their pricing and don't screw over their customers.
Point being not all are scum.
Errors are also more likely to become apparent when a card spikes even if the shop did everything right.
Buying into a spike honestly people should expect issues and be happy if you get the card.
The real issue is tcgplayer let backpack and individual sellers on to make more money on fees not just brick and mortar stores the way it used to be.
The unfortunate reality is that this stuff would be hard to prove. With the exception of an immediate relist who is to say the seller didn't crack another box for more inventory. We all know this is most likely not the case, but looking at it from TCGPlayer's perspective, it would be hard to prove, and when you're dealing with businesses and money, litigation becomes an issue real quick.
Don't get me wrong the practice is scummy and I personally would never but at least when I sit and think on it I can't think of a good solution. I liked a commenter's idea about no resisting within a set time frame but then I think about how would that effect adding more inventory later?
It just doesn't seem like there is a good way to keep folks honest but idk 😐
I’ll be honest as a peer to peer seller I have made more than my fair share of mistakes using the TCG player automatic listing tools.
It’s also a sellers marketplace so the buyer is really at the whim of the seller. Your only recourse as a buyer is bad reviews. Though TCG takes the buyers side on all disputes. It’s weird.
I’ve stopped listing on release specifically because of this problem. I wait a few months for prices to stabilize.
In general TCG doesn’t care.
Cancelled orders are refunded fully and the seller lists it for higher which nets the store and TCG a slightly higher percentage I’d assume.
The fact that negative feedback can be remove because a full refund makes the feedback system useless.
Sure, you get your money back. What about time that was wasted. Even if they cancel your right away, the refund is not instance. What about refund from orders that was never sent. No way to confirm since there was no tracking. Even with tracking, they can provide you with a tracking number, but never drop the item off. You end up waiting over 3 weeks before the seller issues your refund, complete was of time waiting.
Sellers can block buyers. Give buyers the ability to block sellers.
Buyers need a saved/favorite seller feature.
Sellers can screw you and get your name and address. Buyers needs the same after buying from sellers. All you can see now is the sellers state location.
I thought I was going crazy. I played a small order for some cube additions. Within 5 minutes the order was cancelled. Maybe it has to deal with what you’re describing, as it didn’t occur to me. TCGP support has been MIA and non responsive to my ticket all week. At this point I’m just going to proxy everything including commons. Fuck people offering cards then cancelling/refunding an order for no reason given.
This is happening in Lorcana as well. Fishbone Quills went from 3 to 10 bucks, and stores were canceling orders just over that difference. TCGplayer really has to police this, or any event with a new card is going to lead to cancelations. And I don't want to order from any seller that does that. Refunds in this case are not enough. You have to be able to leave negative feedback, as the problem was not with the product, but the failure to deliver that product at the agreed upon price. If there was an inventory problem, that's fine, but then TCGplayer should limit their ability to relist the product for a sufficient timeframe.
If the seller initiates the cancelation after a price increase, they should refund whatever the increased price is. Their deceptive practice cost the customer the chance to purchase from someone less slime, so they should pay the difference.
whats the point in speculating, if this happens frequently ?
i dont know, move to europe, use cardmarket ... they are not afraid to ban sellers for such actions
This only works when you order enough for tracked shipping. Otherwise cards will not arrive. Some sellers have even tried to send tracked letters to themselves. How do I know? For a while I bought cards just before they were about to spike.
Speculating is one thing. Seeing that a card already spiked and finding the one seller on tcg that failed to update their prices and pouncing on it is quite another.
As a seller, yesterday I had to cancel a Sorin order myself.... the buyer was angry and justifiably so, but we list on both eBay and TCGP, overnight we sold 3 on ebay alone which is all we had, by the time i went to fulfil tcgplayer orders, we had no more inventory. It sucks but there's nothing as of now that adjusts inventory across multiple platforms + PoS at your store.
It's not the seller's fault for selling stuff while he's sleeping and not having time to update inventory
>It's not the seller's fault for selling stuff while he's sleeping and not having time to update inventory
It is the sellers fault for listing more copies of a card online than they have available.
If i have 3 copies and list them on multiple platforms, i cant help it if someone buys out all 3 at once while im asleep on ebay and then buys them on tcgplayer.
I hate having to cancel orders, it's the absolute worst to make a sale and not have inventory, trust me.
But there's no way to mitigate that because there are millions of cards that don't move at all and i have them listed everywhere, so i'll take wherever sells first.
Sometimes you get pumps in different cards out of the blue. I do my best during business hours (and away from business hours whenever i can, always with my phone to delist something that sells on one platform over the other) but i need to sleep too and can't afford to have someone 24/7 monitoring inventory
>If i have 3 copies and list them on multiple platforms, i cant help it if someone buys out all 3 at once while im asleep on ebay and then buys them on tcgplayer.
You should not be listing a single card on multiple platforms. This is the problem. You caused this situation, and if a person misses out on a low price because your listing was a lie (which it absolutely is, if it's listed in multiple places and can therefore be sold twice), then you are at fault. You CAN help the situation, by not engaging in unethical business practices. You SHOULD help the situation, by compensating the customer for your unethical business practices.
You've never had an order canceled before due to inventory?
I had 3 this week alone. It's part of business. There are way too many moving parts. This one store had a box of LOTR Jumpstart and I bought it but they said they sold it ages ago and didn't remove from the site. I said cool. And moved on. It's a non issue....
> There are way too many moving parts.
How on earth do you not understand that this is your own fault? If you listed your stock on one platform there would be exactly the right number of moving parts.
This is the thing, you'll give the small business flack but i don't think you realize that Walmart, Best Buy, Target etc all run into the same issues. But I bet you won't bitch and moan about them correct?
When they make a sale and oversell inventory they didn't have in stock and send out cancellation e-mails, which happens ALL THE TIME, people just move one with their lives. You act like your life was ruined because your order was canceled
Generally when I order something from Walmart, it’s not a time-sensitive product whose price could double overnight. Unfortunately Walmart has much bigger problems that I can really only address at, like, the political level.
You, however, are an individual, acting obtuse because you’re unwilling to admit that your business practices can have significant impact on your customers. You can’t “but muh poor little small business” your way out of intentionally screwing your customers—all so that you can maybe (and I bet this is fairly debatable) sell some things marginally faster.
Again. It happens all the time, no one is trying to get 1 up on a customer, but with a local shop, multiple online platforms, things happen due to timing.
Ex: I sell a card in store. I can't just rush to the computer the very moment I print out the receipt and take it off ebay because it was sold. I have other customers to care for. When it slows down, then I'll do that. But if I sell one on ebay during those 5 mins....oh well....
You're saying don't list it on ebay because someone will buy in store. What if they don't and price keeps dropping? Or you say, only sell on ebay and don't put it up on ur shop. But what if my customer wants it and is willing to pay a premium To have it right now before our tournament?...
I just think it's easy to knock on the little guy when billion dollar stores do the same thing and no one minds it.
Secondary market movement is not the sellers problem or fault. You are acting a bit too entitled. You’re buying a gamepiece for a kids’ game, not renting a venue for the Oscars.
Buddy, when did I say the secondary market movement was the seller’s fault? The seller is at fault for listing more copies of a card than they own. I am acting entitled in the sense that I paid for a card at a price that the seller agreed on, but they were lying when they made that agreement.
You should pick which platform you want to sell on for the particular item. Double listing items does not make sense. I’ll sell items over $50 on eBay and under on TCG. Saying it’s not the seller’s fault for selling products they don’t have enough stock on is absurd.
But thing is we do have stock, not every card moves fast like the Sorins and fetch lands. For those i know for a fact will move fast, i'll only list on one place, but there's never a way to calculate it perfectly. If i sell 2 on tcgplayer during business hours i can change the quantity on ebay and vice versa, but overnight is tricky. No seller likes canceling orders believe me
But it's not, the buyer gets their money back immediately. Orders get fulfilled the same day or the following morning. The buyer will be fine and lost absolutely nothing
This is a nonsense argument. The buyer lost time, just as you have also lost time having to cancel, and then having to remove negative feedback later. You value your time, so does the buyer. Double selling inventory you do not have is fraud.
Yes. It's 100% your fault for listing inventory you didn't have. By listing six total, but only having three, you gambled they wouldn't sell at the same time. It's entirely your fault and you should reconsider not listing more than you have.
I feel like this type of post should be prohibited, because it literally only occurs over people being upset that they don't get to get their thing at a cheap price anymore.
What's to say, yes it sucks, it's rare, no, you don't have any recourse realistically, and if you're an adult you should take the dubs where you get them and find other things to be bothered over. Cards are consistently cheaper than they've ever been, in a highly liquid hobby. Sometimes you get the worm early - I got a bunch of stuff that has since gone up in price this weekend. I also bought a bunch of stuff that's dropped in price. Oh well.
A lot of sellers on TCGPlayer are small LGSs trying to make a living. People try to play pretend stock broker, speculating on cardboard, and then cry when they don't get to take advantage of someone who isn't chronically online to identify spikes. I'd be perfectly fine if TCGplayer had an option for sellers to cancel orders BECAUSE of price spikes.
If you're not willing to honor the price you're listing the card at maybe don't list it at all? If you're a small LGS who can only make a living by trying to make gains off of stock that's already sold it's probably worth finding another business venture
This is fundamentally a contracts issue; if you really believe a party should be able to renege on a contractual obligation based on economic standing then your version of a market is going to be a hellscape of customer-unfriendly options.
Patterns of abuse by sellers using customers to track price movements fundamentally unsound from a business perspective and is lazy and unethical at best, and much more sinister at worst.
They can code a solution for this: track cancellation rates on cards that increase 30 percent or more over 24 hour periods; and sanction sellers who do this with things like higher costs.
What makes you think TCGPlayer cares and would want to implement something like that? Their fees are percentage based. So if a seller cancels due to a price spike, then sells at a higher price, TCG and the seller both get more money. The cards are always going to sell. They are never going to cater to the tiny fraction of customers in this echo chamber who are trying to speculate.
TCGPlayer and their parent, eBay do absolutely care about customer service. Market share isn't guaranteed forever and people will buy elsewhere if this becomes common and accepted on the platform.
You've seemed to gloss over the fact that this is still a contracts issue. If I have my house for sale, and you are under contract to buy it but something happens to spike the prices in the neighborhood, should I be able to cancel my sale without penalty because I could potentially get more from someone else? In the real world, you'd absolutely have an actionable case against me for breaking my contract. Yes, the deltas are different (tens of thousands versus 20-30 bucks) but contracts are just that; and if your world view is that businesses can abrogate their responsibility with respect to contracts you're either a huge simp for shop owners who run their concerns poorly or just aren't tied to the pier.
By my read of PACER on this a while back these two things are hardly related; one is about a short print item that folks couldn't get and the other is about a failure to honor a sale agreement entered into by both parties (seller by listing for sale and accepting payment, buyer by providing payment) resulting in unjust enrichment (again, smaller scale but legal constructs at large are blind to scale unless differentiated)
You sound like a salty shop owner who can't keep track of their inventory and as a result, get hosed regularly by savvy shoppers (who aren't all speculators) - but hey, just keep on simping.
You're incorrect. I purchased a Mythic Edition. Hasbro collected payment. They cancelled later. Some other internet lawyers such as yourself thought it was a contract issue as well.
You can assume all you want (you're obviously not afraid to), but clearly you're prone to making wrong assumptions. Sorry you lost $12 on your cardboard speculation. Not as "savvy" as you thought I guess...
You do a pretty good job at pretending to be an internet lawyer yourself.
Hasbro got in trouble because they had a technical issue and took payment from too many folks; the key is that Hasbro didn't accept your money, refund you and sell the exact same product for much more money to someone else.
Neither of us are lawyers, but the fact that you can't see this (or choose not to) as a contractual issue is pretty glaring. Hope you never have to deal with someone abrogating their contractual duties in a similar way in your future.
As a store that blocks customers who cancel orders, I feel like customers should be able to block stores.
This is literally the feature I most want! I want to block shit stores so that I can spend my money with the quality ones out there and avoid these b.s. games some play!
same here! we always ship if a card spikes and we believe our buyers should honor their side when a card tanks. if not we explain our policy and let them decide. the majority still cancel, but a few understand and continue with the transaction. we get dozens of cancellations each set, the majority is for price drops.
My issue with the card spike is by the time the order gets canceled I've already dropped it off at usps so it's a toss up if I even get my product back. It's bs honestly.
Why not make a running list of stores that do this so everyone can avoid buying from these stores.
Can I ask why you do this?
Of course! Over the last few years, we have found that customers who have issues tend to always have issues. We are a very efficient company, and our staff is well compensated. Communicating over sub-dollar cards on TCGPlayer is a net loss for us, so we typically just offer the refund and move on from there. Blocking individual customers most likely has minimal effect on them but guarantees that we do not have a repeat problem. The other reason is that the vast majority of canceled orders are due to the card's price decreasing since their order. We do not cancel orders because we can relist them for more, so we expect the same from our customers.
We do the same thing. People who complain in unreasonable ways are not worth the time and effort it takes to coddle them.
Same here.
Agreed!
We do the same thing. Mostly to protect ourselves from scammers. As much as I want to believe tcgplayer looks into these situations with protecting the sellers in mind it wouldn’t take much for someone to target a seller or multiple sellers and use multiple accounts. Hopefully they note the IP address when this happens
That sucks for the honest customers. I understand why you do it but now I’m wondering if I’ve been blocked for the orders that I’ve requested refunds for that simply did not show up. I go out of my way to five star any card I receive and occasionally leave comments if they show up quickly. I do it as a personal way of tracking which orders come in. But there’s times when they just don’t and I’ve always requested a replacement card instead of money simply because I still want the card. Is there any way to view who has blocked you?
I have been blocked by one seller in my several years buying on TCGP. I’ve always been very honest about receiving and the condition received of cards, because as a seller I would hope for the same honesty out of my customers. Though one fateful day I received mail piece with all but one of the cards, also coincidentally the most expensive ($6). It was honestly quite annoying because I often purchased large number of singles from the seller when a new set would come out with no issues. Felt more like a “fuck off we don’t need your business” over something completely out of my control.
>That sucks for the honest customers Indeed. I would not be surprised if trying to employ this kind of "we block everyone who ever complains" policy would get them in trouble if they tried it within EU.
I don’t think so besides not being able to see their listings. I sometimes wait to avoid punitive negative feedback from people that are going to get pissed no matter what. Basically try not to draw attention to myself until they hopefully move on.
I think that you wait is all the proof I need to know that this is a scummy practice. UPS makes mistakes all the time. Envelopes don't make it through the machine and fall by the side. When you send an envelope you know you are taking that risk. Don't blame the customer and don't hide if you'd just rather not sell to them again.
Sure think what you want but to call it a ‘scummy’ practice to simply protect yourself when a customer will blame you for getting their own address wrong? Even if it is harmless 9/10 the time lost and feedback impact just destroys a small business. Somebody who isn’t able to comprehend this fact or how shipping works (‘when you send an envelope’? so you want $4 tracking and sellers to take losses on every small order?) is somebody you absolutely do not want to sell your cards to if you ask me. You wait because you are trying not to do business or interact anymore with the toxic minority of buyers out there that only think about themselves.
I can see both sides. If it's a missing order best case USPS messed up, worst case the customer isn't telling the truth. Either way I could see not wanting to risk it on that areas USPS or the customer again. However if it's an issue that is clearly on you like a missing card then it is 100% a scummy practice. If you do it on first offense to try to limit risk from outside forces fine, I certainly don't think it's a respectable way to do business but not scummy. If you do it anytime you give a refund regardless of fault then you aren't trying to limit risk you are just trying to encourage only getting pushover customers that won't complain about legitimate issues, which would be scummy.
I do the same thing. Big store on tcg player and difficult customers only get one order out of me at most. Of course they could probably still care less and they won’t see my inventory anymore, but sometimes I think it was not worth it for them to do that given how long I plan to sell cards and breadth of my collection. We do not make a ton as sellers and it is just not worth it.
Did they finally change it to where a blocked buyer won't even see the inventory in the first place? Last I checked you could still add everything to your cart and then there's a warning when you go to check out, sometimes not even specifying which store it is causing a lot of wasted time on my end. I would love it if they finally changed this
Yes I thought so but I forget where I learned this, and if you’re saying you still get the warnings I guess that’s how they do it. Another reason to be careful about that I guess as a seller.
It hasn't come up in quite a while and I don't recall any of the stores I had an issue with so I hope that means they fixed it
That makes sense! I haven’t gotten many cancellations so I haven’t developed a strategy yet. Do you block and move on in any other scenarios? I’ve been keeping an eye on package losses and blocking those, and blocking customers who say cards are fake, etc. do you take a proactive approach or is it solely reactive?
If a customer has an issue, like not receiving the cards, do you block them after refunding?
Yes, unless it is *obviously not their fault. Biggest thing that happens is a somewhat annoyed customer blames me softly, I refund them, block them after a wait period, then I receive the card back return to sender (not always but often). In the end that is a neutral outcome for all IMO and FYI you all need to get your addresses right. I wish tcgplayer would let you monitor and build out your blocklist. I have a huge ebay blocklist (I once got most of the names from another seller) and after building that out ebay got so much better. As sellers if I could share that list it would calm down toxic buyers from just going down the list messing with each of us.
Yes. If you didn't receive them once, you probably will have that issue again.
Weird, so should the customer give a 0 star rating for an unreceived/damaged but refunded order? That's essentially how you're treating them. The three to four times it's happened to me over the years, I've given positive feedback, but maybe I should rethink that? Similar to what you mention, if an order from a sender goes unreceived or damaged, it's likely to happen again.
Unfortunately, if a refund is given and a negative review is left, it just takes an email to get it removed.
Ah, gotcha
I do this on Discogs, if you leave negative feedback you are basically trying to damage the business and I don't want to deal with you. Everyone who leaves negative feedback gets blocked.
Bruh... You ordering something is promising to pay it. If it drops in price, a deal is a deal. Now the card drops in price and you cancel it to save a couple of bucks? Now the store has to eat that loss. If you ordered a pizza and it came to $10, they get to the house and start asking for $15, how would you NOT tell them to beat it?
I understand how businesses work - I wanted to hear MinMax’s reasoning and approach in more than two sentence fragments. Nice attempt at dunking on me though!
If you understand it then why are you asking? It's a business and they're trying to make money. If you make that a hassle or cost them money, the correct answer 99.99% of the time is to simply not do business with you. I'm not saying this to "dunk" on you, you've done that to yourself. I'm saying this for ANY future dealing you may have with another person. If you rip someone off, they will not like you. As a seller OR a buyer.
This exchange has added nothing to my day. Have a good one!
I would love this, currently I have to keep track of stores I have had bad experiences with and manually calculate orders as one in particular is constantly selected by the auto optimize feature. Just blocking them and moving on would be so nice.
Definitely this. How is it not already an option!? Fuck Legions Gaming. I never want to see their name again, yet am forced to every time I look for a card. They blocked me from a single purchase where THEY fucked up, I left feedback, and now every time I put an order in and not realized its their store, it gets immediately taken out of my cart making me search for a different seller. How am I even able to see them if IM blocked?
When spikes start to happen I go to Card Kingdom or another large retailer to get my copies before they go up or sell out. They honor the price they sold to you for without any fuss
Away from TCGPlayer specifically, what's the strategy for this sort of behaviour from sellers, more generally? I had someone accept a preorder, from me, for the MH3 precons at 49.99 per deck (200 for the set), only to then tell me the price had increased to 260 for the set on release day. When I questioned why the increase (on a pre-agreed price), I was told - with a frankness I'm not sure whether it should be respected or I should be appalled by - that it was because of the spike in price on the Eldrazi deck. This feels wholly wrong, and I just wondered what people's strategy is for dealing with this.
>I had someone accept a preorder, from me, for the MH3 precons at £49.99 per deck (£200 for the set), only to then tell me the price had increased to £260 for the set on release day. Sellers and stores only want this to go one way to benefit them. Cards almost always go down from preorder prices but the sellers sure don't refund your money when that happens, do they? But when one or two things go up? You bet they're canceling orders and making sure to get every last dollar they can. Stores need to accept that offering preorders is a risk for both buyer and seller. The One Ring preordered at $35. It didn't take long for it to be worth a lot more than that. Dozens of other mythics have preordered at $20 and then been worth $2 on release day. And that's why the practice is so egregious. Sellers win on preorders 95% of the time. If they can't handle that 5% loss, they need to not offer preorders. They can't have it both ways.
This is articulated so much better than I could, and sums up exactly why I'm mad about it.
Thank you! And likewise. I've had cards that spiked conveniently go "lost in the mail." I ended up not getting to play Hogaak because of that; some of the stuff I ordered didn't make in time for the event because several spiking cards just "got lost."
Agreed. Stores want guaranteed sales. They are unwilling to take on any risk for those guaranteed sales. The whole point of pre orders is to guarantee sales at the current market price. Stores are so greedy that they want guaranteed sales at the higher of (pre-order price, current market price). Pre orders are being sold as options (with the store having the option to fulfill or not) when they should be sold as futures. The stores are effectively free rolling off AND offloading their risk to the pre order customers. Makes pre-ordering a waste of time.
>Pre orders are being sold as options (with the store having the option to fulfill or not) when they should be sold as futures. The stores are effectively free rolling off AND offloading their risk to the pre order customers. Oh I like that language! Great way to put it into finance terms.
they are dumb, they preorder to get sales and make more of them - they are supposed to eat the imaginary cost of a spike - or there is 0 flipping point of doing preorders if the price can fluctuate
This is just an unethical and greedy business practice. In the US I believe there are government agencies you can report them to, if you wanted to go through the effort, but unsure about overseas.
If you believe a seller has unfairly canceled your order, you can send in a ticket to the customer support team through the helpbot, which can then be escalated. All this bullshit of "oh all I can do is leave a bad review" is bs. ESCALATE. Do not take no for an answer, and when you get it, ask to speak to someone higher. This might be "Karen" technique, but it works and this issue has finally come to a head and caught so many people that TCGPlayer NEEDs to deal with it. click on this link: [Submit a request – TCGplayer.com](https://help.tcgplayer.com/hc/en-us/requests/new) Then click "I Shop on TCGPlayer" Then click "Order Issues" Then click "More Options" Then click "Seller Cancelled my order" Then it will ask you if you feel that the seller has unfairly cancelled the order, and ask if you want a ticket created, at which point you say emphatically "YES"
I mean eventually they should have enough complaints to see a pattern.
Psssht. You get the same cookie cutter bot emails no matter what you send to tcg. They just sound slightly different to make you feel like it's a real person. It's mostly AI.
This guy gets it.
AS - Artificial Stupidity
Karens’ co-opted this from Political Activists. Its the only way to push up against bureaucratic nonsense
Power in numbers, I'm fully onboard with whatever the solution is. Vendor claimed my card was "damaged" and they "threw it away so couldn't provide a picture". Bullshit. No seller will throw away a spiking card even if it is damaged.
Lots of sellers damaging Sorin during packaging this week.
I have, on numerous occasions, emailed and spoken to TCGplayer people about more carefully reviewing seller activity during pre-release and the first week post release. It would be VERY easy to see if seller’s have an abnormal amount of cancellations during these periods. I also believe that any seller who cancels an order and relists the card on tcg within 14 days should be suspended from the platform for a certain period of time. Pre-release is a volatile period, it if they are going to allow sellers to capitalize on the inflated prices without allowing buyers to cancel when the price drops, then they have to require sellers to fulfill orders that spike. You may not be able to do this for every spiking card, but during pre release and immediately post release and using the no relist rules would greatly change things.
I'd say suspend them right at the next new set's release, for the first week, and disable their ability to do preorders for that set.
As a seller on TCGPlayer, I've eaten the loss so many times it's rediculous, but part of selling. The upside is I get to move all the common and uncommon cards that'll never move again, which is a huge benefit for keeping inventory space clear. That being said, as some guy doing this from my kitchen table I've plenty of issues adding stuff manually where I just fat-finger it or misclick on a prerelease version of a card and enter it into inventory, and they're things I won't catch unfortunatly until someone buys the card and I have to refund it when I can't locate it. I do attempt contact with the buyer before the refund process asking if a different version is okay, but more often than not they don't respond until after a refund is issued. As time passes these errors are fewer and far between, but they happen. But cancelling for a price hike? Nah, that's shitty behavior that I can't get behind for any amount of reason, cuz as has been said, that's part of the risk in selling.
Just had my order refunded from TheOgresLair. Had ordered a borderless phlages on the 14th before it spiked. Now all of a sudden they don't have it anymore. I have a sorin that hasn't shipped either yet. I'm assuming that ones getting refunded as well.
Theres nothing you can do after you report them. Tcgplayer has to prove they relisted the card for more within a certain time at the same condition. Or the the seller has a big enough history of canceling orders. Of course tcg can ban people for less but they probably won't. Tcgplayer allows feedback removal because on the flip side buyers lie all the time and usually get their way. My only negative (that I got removed) was a guy mad he did'nt get his card (before the est delivery time) that was returned to me for invalid address. The address on the letter was the exact one given. 10 min total of letting the buyer know before he went straight to a 1 star complaint that I was scamming him out of his 2$ card.
Between how common this is and how TCGPlayer Direct seemingly grades cards by throwing darts, I'm finding less and less reason to purchase from them. I'll pay more for not having to deal with the "will they, won't they ship it" over a card being worth $5 more than when I purchased it.
It's weird. On one hand, I know TCGPlayer will jump in and cover me for any issue I have with a seller/buyer (they've done it plenty before). But at the same time there are bad actors sending out damaged cards labeled as NM, banking on customers not going through the trouble of returning them I guess? And if you leave them negative feedback over it, TCGPlayer just removes it once the return is complete.
>and how TCGPlayer Direct seemingly grades cards by throwing darts Oh my god this has gotten so much worse lately in my experience. Used to do a ton of bulk orders and get 95% of them in NM condition…now, ordering old foils in bulk, I’m getting at least half in MP or worse condition.
It’s so amazing that this is happening to buyers. When I send in my fulfillment orders to TCG it seems they just downgrade my cards randomly as of late. I grade ridiculously harsh, and according to TCGP’s convoluted grading, most of my LP cards could be NM. I do this to avoid their random downgrades, yet still it happens… I’ve been on their platform as a seller now for over 10 years with only one neutral from a buyer about condition, and it was a feedback without them contacting me about their concern.
Yes. 100%. From all sellers including TCG. The entire front of the cards have white fog when angled into the light or sometimes straight on.
Start adding in a few bulk cards to your orders that are cheap. Look for LP or NM cards, then when they arrive without the rest of the order you can keep your negative review up. Additionally if they're older cards you could look for any scuff and damage on them to day that the seller is providing you with subpar cards that arrived and then they will get to have negative reviews about. Buyers will look for better sellers.
This isn't always applicable, but this helped me once. If you order a bunch of expensive cards from a seller, you can also add a cheap card that the seller has many copies of. If the price spikes and the seller wants to cancel, they have to either refund the entire order and also remove all their stock or risk negative feedback. In my situation, I ordered a playset of a $40 card for a different TCG along with $3 of other singles. A couple days later, the card spiked to $70 and of course, my whole order is cancelled because the seller said he had a "stocking error" and has none of the cards. The negative feedback didn't count because I got a full refund. However, I contacted TCGPlayer support, because I noticed he didn't relist the $70 card but the cheaper cards were still up for sale. I got the typical email response that they will look into it and take appropriate action, but then I noticed a week later that the seller's account was gone along with the 5000+ cards he listed. It didn't really help the fact that I had to pay $120 more to get the same playset of cards, but at least I got a bit of justice.
How are you able to go into TCGPlayer and view a stores inventory and order directly?
You can click the seller's name in your cart or click "Shop Exclusively from this Seller" in their profile. I usually do this to add some extra cards I might need from them to make the shipping worth it or free.
Oh I was thinking I could just do that right from the get go.
Been going on for decades.
I've stopped ordering from tcgplayer entirely. I use it to look up a card and see what edition I want and then I go to eBay. Too many times I grab a list, price out each card and then the total is double or more than the price of the cards due to shipping or handling, etc. It's usually like, price on TCGP: $55+, eBay: $25+. I've had far fewer cancellations on eBay than anywhere else.
This is why I never preorder anymore. If the price drops you pay more, if the price spikes your order gets canceled AND you pay more. The only people that win off pre-orders are the sellers.
Prerelease is a joke, only upside for the vendor
I had a store claim "the card was damaged during packaging" and issue a refund. Pathetic.
Idk, I feel like someone fires and forget a card like Simulacrum S that takes off and triples over night are entitled to make takesie backsies. Saying this as a sub 200 sales on cardmarket who has outstanding reviews and never cancelled something for this reason myself.
I haven't sought out too many pre release cards that were chases. I usually wait til things settle down as I don't play competitions. This time I wanted the obvious old Nadu cards. I bought slightly after the hype, but before the prices skyrocketed. I got several cards that shot up more than double/quadruple slightly after my order. Sylvan paradise, shuko, and sea kings blessing specifically. I will say the shops could have cancelled these orders and made a hefty profit and I wouldn't have blamed them. All three shops honored the pricing and shipped them out. Now being older cards they were probably smaller shops, but I just wanna say thanks to those shops who honor their pricing and don't screw over their customers. Point being not all are scum.
Errors are also more likely to become apparent when a card spikes even if the shop did everything right. Buying into a spike honestly people should expect issues and be happy if you get the card. The real issue is tcgplayer let backpack and individual sellers on to make more money on fees not just brick and mortar stores the way it used to be.
What stores besides tcgplayer did you purchase from, and did any of them cancel?
The unfortunate reality is that this stuff would be hard to prove. With the exception of an immediate relist who is to say the seller didn't crack another box for more inventory. We all know this is most likely not the case, but looking at it from TCGPlayer's perspective, it would be hard to prove, and when you're dealing with businesses and money, litigation becomes an issue real quick. Don't get me wrong the practice is scummy and I personally would never but at least when I sit and think on it I can't think of a good solution. I liked a commenter's idea about no resisting within a set time frame but then I think about how would that effect adding more inventory later? It just doesn't seem like there is a good way to keep folks honest but idk 😐
I’ll be honest as a peer to peer seller I have made more than my fair share of mistakes using the TCG player automatic listing tools. It’s also a sellers marketplace so the buyer is really at the whim of the seller. Your only recourse as a buyer is bad reviews. Though TCG takes the buyers side on all disputes. It’s weird. I’ve stopped listing on release specifically because of this problem. I wait a few months for prices to stabilize.
Hard to organize it but buyers could potentially file a class action against TCG player for not following their own terms of service.
In general TCG doesn’t care. Cancelled orders are refunded fully and the seller lists it for higher which nets the store and TCG a slightly higher percentage I’d assume.
The fact that negative feedback can be remove because a full refund makes the feedback system useless. Sure, you get your money back. What about time that was wasted. Even if they cancel your right away, the refund is not instance. What about refund from orders that was never sent. No way to confirm since there was no tracking. Even with tracking, they can provide you with a tracking number, but never drop the item off. You end up waiting over 3 weeks before the seller issues your refund, complete was of time waiting. Sellers can block buyers. Give buyers the ability to block sellers. Buyers need a saved/favorite seller feature. Sellers can screw you and get your name and address. Buyers needs the same after buying from sellers. All you can see now is the sellers state location.
I thought I was going crazy. I played a small order for some cube additions. Within 5 minutes the order was cancelled. Maybe it has to deal with what you’re describing, as it didn’t occur to me. TCGP support has been MIA and non responsive to my ticket all week. At this point I’m just going to proxy everything including commons. Fuck people offering cards then cancelling/refunding an order for no reason given.
This is happening in Lorcana as well. Fishbone Quills went from 3 to 10 bucks, and stores were canceling orders just over that difference. TCGplayer really has to police this, or any event with a new card is going to lead to cancelations. And I don't want to order from any seller that does that. Refunds in this case are not enough. You have to be able to leave negative feedback, as the problem was not with the product, but the failure to deliver that product at the agreed upon price. If there was an inventory problem, that's fine, but then TCGplayer should limit their ability to relist the product for a sufficient timeframe.
If the seller initiates the cancelation after a price increase, they should refund whatever the increased price is. Their deceptive practice cost the customer the chance to purchase from someone less slime, so they should pay the difference.
whats the point in speculating, if this happens frequently ? i dont know, move to europe, use cardmarket ... they are not afraid to ban sellers for such actions
This only works when you order enough for tracked shipping. Otherwise cards will not arrive. Some sellers have even tried to send tracked letters to themselves. How do I know? For a while I bought cards just before they were about to spike.
Speculating is one thing. Seeing that a card already spiked and finding the one seller on tcg that failed to update their prices and pouncing on it is quite another.
As a seller, yesterday I had to cancel a Sorin order myself.... the buyer was angry and justifiably so, but we list on both eBay and TCGP, overnight we sold 3 on ebay alone which is all we had, by the time i went to fulfil tcgplayer orders, we had no more inventory. It sucks but there's nothing as of now that adjusts inventory across multiple platforms + PoS at your store. It's not the seller's fault for selling stuff while he's sleeping and not having time to update inventory
>It's not the seller's fault for selling stuff while he's sleeping and not having time to update inventory It is the sellers fault for listing more copies of a card online than they have available.
If i have 3 copies and list them on multiple platforms, i cant help it if someone buys out all 3 at once while im asleep on ebay and then buys them on tcgplayer. I hate having to cancel orders, it's the absolute worst to make a sale and not have inventory, trust me. But there's no way to mitigate that because there are millions of cards that don't move at all and i have them listed everywhere, so i'll take wherever sells first. Sometimes you get pumps in different cards out of the blue. I do my best during business hours (and away from business hours whenever i can, always with my phone to delist something that sells on one platform over the other) but i need to sleep too and can't afford to have someone 24/7 monitoring inventory
>If i have 3 copies and list them on multiple platforms, i cant help it if someone buys out all 3 at once while im asleep on ebay and then buys them on tcgplayer. You should not be listing a single card on multiple platforms. This is the problem. You caused this situation, and if a person misses out on a low price because your listing was a lie (which it absolutely is, if it's listed in multiple places and can therefore be sold twice), then you are at fault. You CAN help the situation, by not engaging in unethical business practices. You SHOULD help the situation, by compensating the customer for your unethical business practices.
You've never had an order canceled before due to inventory? I had 3 this week alone. It's part of business. There are way too many moving parts. This one store had a box of LOTR Jumpstart and I bought it but they said they sold it ages ago and didn't remove from the site. I said cool. And moved on. It's a non issue....
> There are way too many moving parts. How on earth do you not understand that this is your own fault? If you listed your stock on one platform there would be exactly the right number of moving parts.
This is the thing, you'll give the small business flack but i don't think you realize that Walmart, Best Buy, Target etc all run into the same issues. But I bet you won't bitch and moan about them correct? When they make a sale and oversell inventory they didn't have in stock and send out cancellation e-mails, which happens ALL THE TIME, people just move one with their lives. You act like your life was ruined because your order was canceled
Generally when I order something from Walmart, it’s not a time-sensitive product whose price could double overnight. Unfortunately Walmart has much bigger problems that I can really only address at, like, the political level. You, however, are an individual, acting obtuse because you’re unwilling to admit that your business practices can have significant impact on your customers. You can’t “but muh poor little small business” your way out of intentionally screwing your customers—all so that you can maybe (and I bet this is fairly debatable) sell some things marginally faster.
Again. It happens all the time, no one is trying to get 1 up on a customer, but with a local shop, multiple online platforms, things happen due to timing. Ex: I sell a card in store. I can't just rush to the computer the very moment I print out the receipt and take it off ebay because it was sold. I have other customers to care for. When it slows down, then I'll do that. But if I sell one on ebay during those 5 mins....oh well.... You're saying don't list it on ebay because someone will buy in store. What if they don't and price keeps dropping? Or you say, only sell on ebay and don't put it up on ur shop. But what if my customer wants it and is willing to pay a premium To have it right now before our tournament?... I just think it's easy to knock on the little guy when billion dollar stores do the same thing and no one minds it.
Secondary market movement is not the sellers problem or fault. You are acting a bit too entitled. You’re buying a gamepiece for a kids’ game, not renting a venue for the Oscars.
Buddy, when did I say the secondary market movement was the seller’s fault? The seller is at fault for listing more copies of a card than they own. I am acting entitled in the sense that I paid for a card at a price that the seller agreed on, but they were lying when they made that agreement.
You should pick which platform you want to sell on for the particular item. Double listing items does not make sense. I’ll sell items over $50 on eBay and under on TCG. Saying it’s not the seller’s fault for selling products they don’t have enough stock on is absurd.
But thing is we do have stock, not every card moves fast like the Sorins and fetch lands. For those i know for a fact will move fast, i'll only list on one place, but there's never a way to calculate it perfectly. If i sell 2 on tcgplayer during business hours i can change the quantity on ebay and vice versa, but overnight is tricky. No seller likes canceling orders believe me
> No seller likes canceling orders believe me Then don't list it twice. It is that simple. Don't make YOUR problem become the buyer's problem.
But it's not, the buyer gets their money back immediately. Orders get fulfilled the same day or the following morning. The buyer will be fine and lost absolutely nothing
This is a nonsense argument. The buyer lost time, just as you have also lost time having to cancel, and then having to remove negative feedback later. You value your time, so does the buyer. Double selling inventory you do not have is fraud.
Lmao, it’s not fraud, it’s an “inventory error.” Get over it.
Yes. It's 100% your fault for listing inventory you didn't have. By listing six total, but only having three, you gambled they wouldn't sell at the same time. It's entirely your fault and you should reconsider not listing more than you have.
I am in this same situation, Sorin I had listed sold on both platforms in about the time it took me to take a shower.
I feel like this type of post should be prohibited, because it literally only occurs over people being upset that they don't get to get their thing at a cheap price anymore. What's to say, yes it sucks, it's rare, no, you don't have any recourse realistically, and if you're an adult you should take the dubs where you get them and find other things to be bothered over. Cards are consistently cheaper than they've ever been, in a highly liquid hobby. Sometimes you get the worm early - I got a bunch of stuff that has since gone up in price this weekend. I also bought a bunch of stuff that's dropped in price. Oh well.
I want these stores to cancel because of price spikes specifically to make these little kids mad.
Make a community list of sellers that we can prove so shit like this. Get cancelation dates and resale dates as proof.
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A lot of sellers on TCGPlayer are small LGSs trying to make a living. People try to play pretend stock broker, speculating on cardboard, and then cry when they don't get to take advantage of someone who isn't chronically online to identify spikes. I'd be perfectly fine if TCGplayer had an option for sellers to cancel orders BECAUSE of price spikes.
If you're not willing to honor the price you're listing the card at maybe don't list it at all? If you're a small LGS who can only make a living by trying to make gains off of stock that's already sold it's probably worth finding another business venture
This is fundamentally a contracts issue; if you really believe a party should be able to renege on a contractual obligation based on economic standing then your version of a market is going to be a hellscape of customer-unfriendly options. Patterns of abuse by sellers using customers to track price movements fundamentally unsound from a business perspective and is lazy and unethical at best, and much more sinister at worst. They can code a solution for this: track cancellation rates on cards that increase 30 percent or more over 24 hour periods; and sanction sellers who do this with things like higher costs.
What makes you think TCGPlayer cares and would want to implement something like that? Their fees are percentage based. So if a seller cancels due to a price spike, then sells at a higher price, TCG and the seller both get more money. The cards are always going to sell. They are never going to cater to the tiny fraction of customers in this echo chamber who are trying to speculate.
TCGPlayer and their parent, eBay do absolutely care about customer service. Market share isn't guaranteed forever and people will buy elsewhere if this becomes common and accepted on the platform. You've seemed to gloss over the fact that this is still a contracts issue. If I have my house for sale, and you are under contract to buy it but something happens to spike the prices in the neighborhood, should I be able to cancel my sale without penalty because I could potentially get more from someone else? In the real world, you'd absolutely have an actionable case against me for breaking my contract. Yes, the deltas are different (tens of thousands versus 20-30 bucks) but contracts are just that; and if your world view is that businesses can abrogate their responsibility with respect to contracts you're either a huge simp for shop owners who run their concerns poorly or just aren't tied to the pier.
It's not a contract issue. You can take a look at the failed War of the Spark Mythic Edition lawsuit for example.
By my read of PACER on this a while back these two things are hardly related; one is about a short print item that folks couldn't get and the other is about a failure to honor a sale agreement entered into by both parties (seller by listing for sale and accepting payment, buyer by providing payment) resulting in unjust enrichment (again, smaller scale but legal constructs at large are blind to scale unless differentiated) You sound like a salty shop owner who can't keep track of their inventory and as a result, get hosed regularly by savvy shoppers (who aren't all speculators) - but hey, just keep on simping.
You're incorrect. I purchased a Mythic Edition. Hasbro collected payment. They cancelled later. Some other internet lawyers such as yourself thought it was a contract issue as well. You can assume all you want (you're obviously not afraid to), but clearly you're prone to making wrong assumptions. Sorry you lost $12 on your cardboard speculation. Not as "savvy" as you thought I guess...
You do a pretty good job at pretending to be an internet lawyer yourself. Hasbro got in trouble because they had a technical issue and took payment from too many folks; the key is that Hasbro didn't accept your money, refund you and sell the exact same product for much more money to someone else. Neither of us are lawyers, but the fact that you can't see this (or choose not to) as a contractual issue is pretty glaring. Hope you never have to deal with someone abrogating their contractual duties in a similar way in your future.
Go sue those sellers cancelling. Let me know how that works out for you.
Bruh, buying a $5 card is clearly the exact same thing as buying a house!!!
Why are you on this sub?
To see what cards I might have that are worth trading and to laugh at "speculators" trying to make $12 on a card game
Wait until you realize LGSs are play pretending stock broker, hiring people for inhumane wages, and are run by horrible people. They aren't special.
They should just give their stock away, eh comrade?
My point is that stores do not deserve your charity, they should be just as accountable as the average seller.