Thanks for the link to the repo!

Re: lessons learned from my failed anime TCG card business.

So what I was doing was I was buying bulk card lots from Yahoo Auctions Japan. I focused on Precious Memories, a very niche TCG which was sold only in Japan. I'd buy lots of cards from collectors. Some lots were just commons, uncommons, rares, probably leftovers from searching booster packs, other lots were from collectors moving on from the game. Lots of cards at low price, then I'd list them individually on eBay.

Nobody in the US was selling it when I started. I was getting lots of sales from US collectors who hadn't heard of the TCG, but saw their favorite characters and had to buy.

Early 2020 I saw $2000 in sales in a month, thought that was pretty good. Unfortunately it was all downhill after that. US sellers started doing what I was doing. Sales dropped off so I had to lower prices to keep them coming.

2020 there were massive shipping delays. I was having to wait 3 months to get new product. It wasn't like I was sold out though. I had 30,000 cards and almost 10,000 listings at one point. If you searched, "Precious Memories" on eBay at the time, you'd see hundreds of my listings. Mostly $3-$10 commons, but I was getting one or two sales a day.

I had work ethic, photographing/listing/sleeving, but I didn't have a good business plan. Time went on and I kept taking on more responsibilities that didn't have any ROI. Things like building wikis, translating player manuals from Japanese to English, and sleeving every single card for storage.

I ignored what worked for other people and tried to do my own thing. I think there are 2 ways you can make it selling cards on eBay. 1 is selling a high volume, 2 is selling high value cards. I was going for option 2, trying to extract the highest possible dollar amount from each card. With mostly low value cards. That's why I had 30,000 cards and low sales.

In hindsight, I wish I would have minimized my inventory by doing fire sales more often. My mission statement was, "bringing Precious Memories to the USA" but I wasn't focusing on getting the product into people's hands. I wasn't trying to help the players, I was trying to help myself.

I had a lot of customers who would message me asking for cards featuring specific characters. Some obsessive fans would pay up to $70 per card if it featured their waifu. They'd ask me to get more and check back later.

I wish I had branched out to Etsy, or some other selling platform that offered subscription boxes. Most of my returning customers would buy cards with the same characters over and over, and I think they would have subscribed to a monthly drop service. I never got that far though, I was only on eBay.

Hope that helps! Maybe it gives you some ideas for your journey!

Oh, another thing I just thought of. That coin photographing machine you made-- have you thought of selling a version of it? B2B kind of a thing? I'm reminded of the gold rush and the people who made their fortunes selling tools. Just a thought!

Keep up the good work!