How Ebay’s Trading Card Marketplace TCGPlayer Is Using Xerox to Expand, Maintain ‘Trust’ With Magic: The Gathering, ‘Pokemon’ and ‘One Piece’ Gaming Communities
From Magic: The Gathering players to “Pokemon” card collectors, TCGPlayer CEO Robert Bigler is on a mission to expand the online trading card market with new products and features for buyers and sellers — but promises it will not be at the expense of the quality of those very pricey collectibles.
Last month, the eBay-owned TCGPlayer debuted the Roca Sifter, which it describes as “a professional-grade automation device designed to help trading card game sellers, hobbyists and collectors instantly identify, price, and sort cards through a more affordable and portable solution.”
An instant concern among the trading card community with this innovative offering was, is the risk of putting their cards through a device that could potentially damage them worth the time they’d save in digitizing and cataloging their collection? The TCGPlayer CEO says yes — because there is no risk, thanks to a company that’s an expert in this field.
“A foundation of everything we do has to be trust. But within digitization, it’s trust that my cards will not be damaged when it goes through,” Bigler told Variety. “And our sifter is one of the only ones on the market that you can run it through in [card] sleeves. So that’s a product feature. And we have a sorter now, which is big — sorter is designed for like the back of the game store to not only digitize, but to sort the cards so that the game store could put it away in the warehouse. But the sifter we wanted faster and we wanted to not damage it. So that’s why we partnered with a company that was very good at moving paper, which is Xerox. So we brought all the knowledge that we had from the sorter of identifying cards, storing cards, sorting cards, pricing cards, and we combine that with Xerox’s expertise and moving paper without damaging it, moving it quickly without damaging it. And they’re very good at manufacturing as well. So we’re able to bring the price points down to something that’s very affordable for a game store, and it moves the paper, without damaging the paper, quickly.”
While TCGPlayer’s main customers are longtime trading card players across the biggest communities, like Magic: The Gathering and “Pokemon,” Bigler says they are looking to serve the new players entering the space through recently launched card games tied to popular IP.
“I think another trend that we’ve seen is the emergence of stronger secondary players in the marketplace, which is bringing in new buyers, which is a lot of fun,” Bigler said. “A whole bunch of new players have come in with ‘One Piece’ or ‘Riftbound’ or [Disney’s] ‘Lorcana’ or ‘Star Wars: Unlimited.’ That brought a whole new set of players into the market. And then they start and they’re like, Well, what’s this ‘Magic: The Gathering’ game? Let me try that. Or because ‘Star Wars: Unlimited’ is super fun, and I’m a Star Wars nerd, let me shift over and see what’s ‘Riftbound’ all about? What’s ‘One Piece’? So you get a diversification of games that I think is fun for the entire community.”
TCGPlayer was acquired by eBay in 2022 for nearly $300 million. Since then, the marketplace has received some criticism for the ways in which eBay might be altering its way of doing things. Bigler is prepared to push back on that concern.
“Similar to TCGPlayer, I would say eBay loves the community,” Bigler said. “They’re super supportive of small business throughout all their focus categories, everything. How can we support small business? How can we democratize commerce? Since eBay’s founding 30 years ago, [it’s said] let’s use e-commerce to democratize business, and that’s part of eBay’s culture and TCGPlayer’s culture. That support for the community is massive and big, and that’s what has helped us as TCGPlayer experiment, try things, because they’ve been supportive of us continuing to be the best the TCGPlayer can be.”
One change under eBay leadership was the move of TCGPlayer’s headquarters from Syracuse, New York to Kentucky last summer. The decision to shut down the facility affected more than 200 employees.
“It was a hard thing to do. It was a very, very tough decision to make,” Bigler says. “What it has impacted is by moving the fulfillment center that was there to Louisville, we’ve decreased the amount of time it takes our sellers to ship cards to the fulfillment center, and we’ve decreased the amount of time it takes us to ship cards out to the buyers for that. And now we’re at a point where that fulfillment center is hitting the quality standards that we used to have and starting to hit the volume throughput that we had before. The new facility is huge and it has potential to expand, and so we’re starting to see that growth coming in now, which is what we had expected. But it’s better for the sellers and buyers, too, because it’s more centrally located.”
Bigler adds that “from a fulfillment perspective, TCGPlayer was remote starting in like 2018/2019.” “So from my management perspective, engineering, product, all the other teams have largely been remote for eight years, even before Covid,” he said. “And so not much has changed from that perspective, because it’s not like everybody was going into the office every day anyway.”
Last month, the eBay-owned TCGPlayer debuted the Roca Sifter, which it describes as “a professional-grade automation device designed to help trading card game sellers, hobbyists and collectors instantly identify, price, and sort cards through a more affordable and portable solution.”
An instant concern among the trading card community with this innovative offering was, is the risk of putting their cards through a device that could potentially damage them worth the time they’d save in digitizing and cataloging their collection? The TCGPlayer CEO says yes — because there is no risk, thanks to a company that’s an expert in this field.
“A foundation of everything we do has to be trust. But within digitization, it’s trust that my cards will not be damaged when it goes through,” Bigler told Variety. “And our sifter is one of the only ones on the market that you can run it through in [card] sleeves. So that’s a product feature. And we have a sorter now, which is big — sorter is designed for like the back of the game store to not only digitize, but to sort the cards so that the game store could put it away in the warehouse. But the sifter we wanted faster and we wanted to not damage it. So that’s why we partnered with a company that was very good at moving paper, which is Xerox. So we brought all the knowledge that we had from the sorter of identifying cards, storing cards, sorting cards, pricing cards, and we combine that with Xerox’s expertise and moving paper without damaging it, moving it quickly without damaging it. And they’re very good at manufacturing as well. So we’re able to bring the price points down to something that’s very affordable for a game store, and it moves the paper, without damaging the paper, quickly.”
While TCGPlayer’s main customers are longtime trading card players across the biggest communities, like Magic: The Gathering and “Pokemon,” Bigler says they are looking to serve the new players entering the space through recently launched card games tied to popular IP.
“I think another trend that we’ve seen is the emergence of stronger secondary players in the marketplace, which is bringing in new buyers, which is a lot of fun,” Bigler said. “A whole bunch of new players have come in with ‘One Piece’ or ‘Riftbound’ or [Disney’s] ‘Lorcana’ or ‘Star Wars: Unlimited.’ That brought a whole new set of players into the market. And then they start and they’re like, Well, what’s this ‘Magic: The Gathering’ game? Let me try that. Or because ‘Star Wars: Unlimited’ is super fun, and I’m a Star Wars nerd, let me shift over and see what’s ‘Riftbound’ all about? What’s ‘One Piece’? So you get a diversification of games that I think is fun for the entire community.”
TCGPlayer was acquired by eBay in 2022 for nearly $300 million. Since then, the marketplace has received some criticism for the ways in which eBay might be altering its way of doing things. Bigler is prepared to push back on that concern.
“Similar to TCGPlayer, I would say eBay loves the community,” Bigler said. “They’re super supportive of small business throughout all their focus categories, everything. How can we support small business? How can we democratize commerce? Since eBay’s founding 30 years ago, [it’s said] let’s use e-commerce to democratize business, and that’s part of eBay’s culture and TCGPlayer’s culture. That support for the community is massive and big, and that’s what has helped us as TCGPlayer experiment, try things, because they’ve been supportive of us continuing to be the best the TCGPlayer can be.”
One change under eBay leadership was the move of TCGPlayer’s headquarters from Syracuse, New York to Kentucky last summer. The decision to shut down the facility affected more than 200 employees.
“It was a hard thing to do. It was a very, very tough decision to make,” Bigler says. “What it has impacted is by moving the fulfillment center that was there to Louisville, we’ve decreased the amount of time it takes our sellers to ship cards to the fulfillment center, and we’ve decreased the amount of time it takes us to ship cards out to the buyers for that. And now we’re at a point where that fulfillment center is hitting the quality standards that we used to have and starting to hit the volume throughput that we had before. The new facility is huge and it has potential to expand, and so we’re starting to see that growth coming in now, which is what we had expected. But it’s better for the sellers and buyers, too, because it’s more centrally located.”
Bigler adds that “from a fulfillment perspective, TCGPlayer was remote starting in like 2018/2019.” “So from my management perspective, engineering, product, all the other teams have largely been remote for eight years, even before Covid,” he said. “And so not much has changed from that perspective, because it’s not like everybody was going into the office every day anyway.”