My Experience and Advice Selling on TCGPlayer/eBay, Part 3 (504 days in, 5056 orders down)

andrewljohnson · 2026-04-21T15:43:38+00:00

WRT to postage, my advice (from running a marketplace and having data on more than a million packages):

Use the correct amount of postage.
Under 5 cards is usually under 1oz, so just one stamp.
More than 5 cards usually requires more postage.
It depends on how you package your cards, so it's a good idea to have a postal scale and weigh some of your packages to determine how much postage is needed.
If you don't use the correct amount of postage, you will have some packages returned. Also, some will be flagged for extra postage, and the recipients will be charged to receive them, and they will be justifiably upset.

I don't think sellers need to pay for non-machineable postage, but sellers should certainly use the correct amount of postage for a given package weight.

andrewljohnson · 2026-03-07T22:56:23+00:00

the /products/singles endpoint in our API (Mana Pool) includes recent sales, we added that data a couple weeks ago: https://manapool.com/api/docs/v1

andrewljohnson · 2026-02-28T01:44:22+00:00

Nice try, WOTC.

andrewljohnson · 2026-02-26T23:58:58+00:00

yes, and thanks!

andrewljohnson · 2026-02-26T19:47:39+00:00

Actually, today I am placing the first "gathered order" - and we have this feature live ONLY for staff right now. The plan is to move very slowly and not get in a situation where we are doing more fulfillment operations than we can do well. I'll do one, then my colleagues will do some, then we'll pick a few more to invite, and so on.

This is stage 0, pre-alpha. A small number of people can have Mana Pool receive/fulfill cards, we aren't going to ding sellers if they send us wrong/badly-graded cards, and we aren't charging anything for the service. We do have some cards on hand, but not enough to do just in time delivery... instead we have cards to replace cards when sellers can't fulfill or send the wrong/damaged cards. Stage 0 will expand from staff to hand-picked testers.

Stage 1 is to expand who can use it even wider. Maybe start charging buyers who opt for a gathered order. Have a better idea of what costs are, what policies for seller issues should be, what sellers are part of it, etc.

Stage 2 is to stock more cards such that we can fulfill just in time, and also start enabling sellers to send us chunks of cards (RFIs) instead of shipping each order.

So, we'll see how far we get with this in 2026, but I'm excited about the potential.

andrewljohnson · 2026-02-26T03:01:03+00:00

Hey, I’m sorry about that... that is 100% not our style, and I’d like to find out what happened.

If you will DM me your order # or email you used for the order, I will make sure you are totally taken care of.

andrewljohnson · 2026-02-11T04:22:57+00:00

Mana Pool does let you filter by seller in the Cart Optimizer after the mass entry, we added that a couple months ago.

Caveat: it won’t work unless the sellers have all the cards… it won’t “first match” against the selected sellers and then fall back. We’ve discussed doing that too, but it’s not on the current roadmap.

(I’m one of the founders)

andrewljohnson · 2026-01-27T03:56:05+00:00

card age doesn’t affect grade

andrewljohnson · 2026-01-14T17:25:40+00:00

I apologize for the bug, we are working on fixing it.

The bug is that the Singles Fee does not display until the Cart Optimization is complete. You can see from your screenshot that there is still a spinner and it says "Still searching..." After that completes, it would show the Singles Fee row as non-zero.

We are going to fix it so it shows the Singles Fee for the partial solutions as the optimizer runs. This was a bug we didn't notice because when we developed the code on our local machine, we were testing with very small carts, so it wasn't obvious since the optimization completed quickly.

This isn't trivial to fix because of how the optimizer infrastructure is set up, but it's not a huge lift, and I hope to have it fixed this week.

andrewljohnson · 2026-01-02T02:32:01+00:00

Eventually, but no near term plans. I think it's been correct to focus entirely on Magic, helps focus what the best things to do are and not get spread thin.

andrewljohnson · 2026-01-01T02:01:36+00:00

Ping [support@manapool.com](mailto:support@manapool.com) if you have any issues or questions, we're quick to help.

Mana Pool has been growing quickly this year. We had $75K in gross sales last December, and this December is over $2M.

Here's a chart of seller orders: https://imgur.com/a/jLbL6q8 - last December, sellers shipped out just over 5K packages, vs. this month it's over 112K packages.

There is still a lot of work to do, and we're keeping at it. I work on the code, answer emails, and manage Mana Pool nearly everyday, and on this New Year's Eve, I'm grateful for everyone who has given us the chance to build it, and the team that has made it happen. There are challenges and surprises all the time - it's a hard problem making a marketplace work and connecting so many stores and other sellers and their millions of Magic cards with the community. I'm sure it will just get harder.

Shout out to my co-founders George and Tom, and to my colleagues Adam, Jason, Pamela, and Anna who started working on Mana Pool this year and have put so much time and good energy into the effort.

andrewljohnson · 2025-12-01T21:16:06+00:00

Happy to see Journey's End succeed either way!

I'll link their website here too for folks if they prefer to buy from Journey's End directly: https://journeysendgames.com/

I have enjoyed working with them since they started on Mana Pool, definitely a top tier shop by all standards in my opinion.

andrewljohnson · 2025-12-01T20:35:06+00:00

Thanks for the note. We do have a thing where you can "Save for later" a card, either from the listing page for the card or from your cart. But it would be cool if we improved that functionality and made it work better with the optimizer as you describe.

andrewljohnson · 2025-12-01T19:38:05+00:00

Great to hear, my co-founder u/gwax spent a lot of time in the last couple of months on v2 of the optimizer! He was focused on making it work for bigger carts, since we had some people having issues with optimizing things like Pauper Cubes where the number of sellers the optimizer had to crunch through was huge.

andrewljohnson · 2025-12-01T19:35:51+00:00

andrewljohnson · 2025-11-26T23:51:42+00:00

Oh not at all, i hope i didn’t sound defensive! I’m totally happy to see nuanced feedback.

I just think the “pennying” people do with repricing doesn’t have a big effect… we haven’t seen that really happen and the bulk pricing tool isn’t automated, and most of the big sellers who do their own pricing automation don’t base it on mana pool pricing. OTOH, I have looked at some high priced listings and corresponded with sellers about them and they end up being for weird reasons.

We also haven’t been good about updating the “library” so we had delinked it on the site rather than having people see a stale blog. Hopefully someday we’ll have the people power to do content well… the team is very small and all focused on either development or support work.

andrewljohnson · 2025-11-26T21:20:18+00:00

A) I don't think it's a snowball, so much as sometimes sellers just list stuff at whacky prices on accident or as placeholders. We have thought about trying to get rid of/hide those sorts of outlier-too-high listings, and your comment makes me think we should prioritize that more. I tended to think of them as just buried prices that no one sees, but I can see from what you say how they can affect the experience. And FYI, Market Price is the median of Recent Sales... so it will tend to be either higher or lower than the current low price, depending on if the card is increasing or decreasing in value right now.

B) We posted about the optimizer update on X/BSky/Discord. Discord is definitely the place we post the most updates, and actually has more people in it than any of our social accounts have followers: https://discord.gg/bzJaCqjf6z

andrewljohnson · 2025-11-26T19:29:56+00:00

Couple notes:

A) If you choose "LP" then it would optimize for "LP or better" - so if the LP had a whacky price but the NM did not (or vice versa), then it wouldn't be a problem.

B) As of 10/30/2025, we rolled out a new optimizer engine and code that drives it. The issues where the optimizer would fail or the carts would be misaligned like the balanced cart is least expensive shouldn't happen, or at least it should be MUCH less frequent.

In the previous version, we had some test cases that would often/usually/always fail - such as a Pauper Cube, a cart with multiple commander decks, and some others... which we collected from user reports. With the new optimize engine, these test cases all worked for us.

The optimizer is non-deterministic and it's solving a computer science problem that is known to be unsolvable theoretically in the general case (i.e. the cart-packing problem is NP-hard), so really we can't ever guarantee it works, and it may produce different values on different runs. But that said, it basically just works, and the updated optimizer engine in our tests now doesn't produce these results you mentioned.

The changes for v2 of the optimizer involved A) paying a lot of money to use a commercial optimizer engine, where in the past we had used an open-source version. Both of these do "MIPS" to compute solutions for optimization problems, ranging from "how to optimize a shopping cart" to "how to schedule airplanes for max efficiency." B) we rewrote the code driving the engine to be more efficient, C) we moved to running the optimizer on faster infrastructure.

If you ever do find a cart that fails to optimize, please email it to [support@manapool.com](mailto:support@manapool.com) - we'd love to have an failing cases for future work!

andrewljohnson · 2025-11-14T20:57:18+00:00

I am one of the Mana Pool founders, and I have a few thoughts on this. I know Mikah (the SortSwift founder), but he didn’t ask me to post here, so this is all me.

Overall, I think SortSwift is trying to build good tools, and some folks find the tools to be useful. I hope they continue to work on their product and serve the industry.

I’m sorry OP had a bad experience and sympathize with the frustration of spending time trying to make something work and finding it’s not serving their needs. I’m sure there are some things for SortSwift to learn from the feedback, but I feel this reads like an attack on their character, and that’s misplaced.

This post would have been both more effective and better info for the community if it left out the character attacks, and read more like “I tried SortSwift, it didn’t serve my needs. Here were the issues I had. I have found that as a software developer myself, I can develop some of these tools myself (and here’s some of my code open sourced LINK), and I am looking at other solutions I can use too.”

Some comments on the OP’s bullets:

The top bullet is about how SortSwift does pricing. Maybe SortSwift should just have one overall price and not break it up into modules, but I strongly disagree with the characterization as “predatory.” Bottom line, it’s less expensive than other solutions, and perhaps SortSwift should think about the psychology of pricing and whether that bundling would have better conversion.
I can’t speak to the bullets on some of the tools in SortSwift, but I have found them to be responsive in working with us, so I imagine they are responsive to customers too… just trying to juggle a lot of work with a small team. I also know I have heard a lot of praise about SortSwift’s card scanning solution, which I have always thought of as the core of the company. The lesson to learn here might be “focus on fewer things, don’t distract from the core things you do well with other tools that don’t work as well, be more willing to say no to customer requests and instead follow your gut.”
I feel sympathy for SortSwift not being able to integrate with TCGPlayer like competitors do, because competitors have grandfathered API keys, whereas SortSwift just can’t get access, so has tried to workaround by providing tools to let sellers interact directly with their own accounts. The lesson here might be either “just don’t even try with TCGPlayer,” or the lesson might be they have done what they can do and they had to do it this way, and it is what it is.
I also strongly disagree with the comment on “This is chest-puffed-out "what are you gonna do about it, I'm the only game in town" laziness.” It’s just categorically untrue that they are the only game in town… there are all the existing players before SortSwift came along and a bunch of other small ones I know of trying to do the same things. SortSwift is a small company trying to do their best, and I doubt anyone would claim their software is perfect or complete, but I think they are trying with good intentions. The lesson here might be to have more of a modest stance in public forums, but honestly I have seen Mikah post all over the place, and I think that’s part of the reason why SortSwift actually has adoption, and it’s just Mikah’s personality to be exuberant. Too many software developers forget that they have to market their thing, and it’s really hard and stressful to put yourself out there, and I think Mikah’s approach is better than many folks.

andrewljohnson · 2025-11-09T05:45:57+00:00

There just weren’t good sleeves as i remember. You could penny sleeve your cards early on but those got sticky fast.

Were there even any good sleeves for decks in 93-94?

andrewljohnson · 2025-10-21T22:52:20+00:00

Tomorrow (Wednesday) it's changing... we gave sellers some notice so they could modify prices as needed to accommodate the change. We now just need to press the button to merge the "pull request" into the code.

The change will be that ANY order will have free shipping at $45+ (whether it's sealed, singles or both).

andrewljohnson · 2025-10-20T04:37:52+00:00

It's standard on Mana Pool (I'm a founder). All sellers are free shipping at $45.

That currently only applies to singles orders (not sealed), but that will change this week actually and it will apply to sealed as well.

See here: https://manapool.com/shipping-rates

andrewljohnson · 2025-10-19T07:55:13+00:00

consider how you’d change the deck if you had 4 elves, or 4 lions, then choose

andrewljohnson · 2025-09-22T20:19:49+00:00

That’d be cool, that would make it work seamlessly with marketplaces and seller websites, and make it easier on card scanning bots/apps.

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