Our Growing TCG Singles Advanced Course
A guide to LGS Net Income's most popular series of articles
By far the most-read paid-exclusive articles here at LGS Net Income, and the ones that bring in the most subscriptions, are the articles dealing with advanced methods and practices regarding the TCG Singles side of the hobby/comic/video/game store business. Magic singles, Pokemon singles, and now things like Lorcana, One Piece, and Star Wars Unlimited are in the mix, plus Yugioh which I don’t emphasize here because my store did not participate in that subcategory.
I’m going to put the lede right here at the front: Here is a quick links list to the TCG Singles process and methods articles here at LGSNI:
Check out Deep Dive Analysis: TCG Singles Deployment at Million-Unit Scale for exhaustive instructions on how to set up this entire framework, from commercial square footage configuration to furniture to filing methods.
Check out Deep Dive Analysis: Triage and Ingestion of TCG Singles for the next steps on how you take this amazing deployment you just set up, and make sure it efficiently and functionally fills up with cards!
Check out Deep Dive Analysis: Auditing TCG Singles at Larger Scale for more details than you ever wanted on how to audit a million-unit TCG singles inventory, and of course it works for smaller inventories too.
Check out Key Expertise: Advanced Magic Singles Psychology for deeper instruction on how to buy the best and most valuable cards!
Check out Key Expertise: Buy and Trade-In Protective Process for a comprehensive look at how to Cover Your Posterior when it comes to buying product over the counter from the general public, which in this industry mostly means TCG singles.
Check out Efficient Resale of Bulk Magic Cards for a method to keep your millions of singles lean and mean and quickly profiting out of the ones not worth keeping!
Check out Selling TCG Singles Online with a Price Floor for a dive into the mechanics and rationale behind pricing vast inventories of singles and how to avoid losing all your profit in sunk labor costs!
It should be no surprise that the singles-focused mechanism is of interest to store owners and operators. Secondary-market goods in general allow stores to forfeit the predictability of sourcing and inbound specific items, for the very positive trade-off of having much more control over the Cost Of Goods. In an industry where margins on new product continue to grow narrower, it makes sense to try to position the store in a large category where product expertise provides access to a wider lever of margin control.
Moreover, TCG singles are more liquid than most other secondary market goods. Shipping for singles is cheap and mostly easy, once a seller masters a handful of best practices. Singles are small and lend well to scaled storage arrangements. Software does a good job overall of tracking market price movement and volume at a fine-grained level.
The big hazard of the singles market is that the barriers to rudimentary entry are low, and the barriers to being in a committed, dominant position are difficult to discern. So from the vantage point of a mid-market medium-sized Friendly Local Game Store that’s hitting most of the industry best practices at the center of the bell curve, singles represent a source of frustration, a source of worry, and a bit of a live wire that can provide power but might also shock and injure. And that FLGS has a difficult time seeing a beneficial path toward establishing better position in the category. How exactly do you dig that moat and climb into the stronger situation?
Articles about deep/heavy/committed singles processes, psychology, methods, and more, here on LGS Net Income, are meant to be as great a benefit as possible to owners and operators who are stuck in that Unstable Frontier where singles are a revenue line, but one that constantly demands resources and attention or else it could turn vicious and dangerous, much like trying to keep a wild animal as a pet. And it is my hope that those articles will also be of benefit to owners and operators slinging singles at large scale, a chance to brush up on your technique and make sure you aren’t missing any load-bearing practices.
Deep/heavy paid-exclusive singles articles won’t necessarily appear every month, but they will continue to appear here on LGS Net Income as I continue to recognize areas where I can expand the “crash course” and/or “advanced course” aspects of this Substack. The floor is always open if you have ideas for areas where you’d like to see some analysis, or portions of the topics I’ve already covered where you’d like to see a closer look at some aspect.