To all of you who have a store or LARGE inventory I am curious

I am starting to accumulate a large inventory(my goal) and I am running into a problem...

I have always used binders to store my cards worth greater than $1 putting up to 8 cards in a slot(ultra pro sleeves). I have always had around 4 binders. But now I am starting to get near 50 copies of some cards and many cards up into the 10+ copies range. So therefore my binders keep getting bigger and multiplying. I feel as if I keep using this system I will damage cards soon or I will just have TONS of binders... And then with so many binders order processing time will go up alot...

Any advice here? I have considered using boxes and sleeves, but i feel like organization would be harder as well as processing time.

As long as you keep them sorted in whatever way makes sense to you (by set, by color, whatever else floats your boat) it's fine. No need to worry about getting too many of a certain card that won't fit where it goes, meaning resorting the entire binder. Easy enough to find what you need as long as your categorization makes sense to you and boxes are labeled appropriately. My collection has easily gone from 10 to 20 to 30 boxes full of cards without much hassle in the least. Keeping binders organized for taking to the local shop was much more difficult.

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I sort by color first for binders and then alphabet. I went with this mentality: ask yourself how many cards can you see at once if you store them in boxes (5 rows or whatever), then ask yourself I can see 9 cards at a time in the binders. If you pass over a card it is only a couple of pages, pass over in the 5 row and you may have to go through that entire section again.

I store them in binders, into pages and then I put them in a bookcase sitting upright. A few cards have gotten damaged over time so I put the most valuable ones in the center parts of pages.

I have all of the 5k sorted in alphabetical by set and then again by titles after that.

I am not opposed to a box and sleeves system but have 2 problems with it.

1) Many of my sales from in store customers come from people browsing through the binders... I cant have them look through my boxes

2) As slurpee said, order processing time has to go up exponentially as instead of looking at nine cards at a time you must run through a row(or at least some of one).

Also, I only stock cards worth greater worth greater than .75(TCGMID) so my volume is lower but that being said I still have near 30k singles

quote:

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Originally posted by headumpire:
Hmm interesting opinions here.

I am not opposed to a box and sleeves system but have 2 problems with it.

1) Many of my sales from in store customers come from people browsing through the binders... I cant have them look through my boxes

2) As slurpee said, order processing time has to go up exponentially as instead of looking at nine cards at a time you must run through a row(or at least some of one).

Also, I only stock cards worth greater worth greater than .75(TCGMID) so my volume is lower but that being said I still have near 30k singles

More opinions and responses appreciated

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Simple solution, have binders with no more than 4x of any card, use boxes for surplus, will take a bit more work, but if you get a good amount of sales from Binders, it seems it would be worth it.

Also what I have started doing since running into the same issues

quote:

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Originally posted by headumpire:
Hmm interesting opinions here.

I am not opposed to a box and sleeves system but have 2 problems with it.

1) Many of my sales from in store customers come from people browsing through the binders... I cant have them look through my boxes

2) As slurpee said, order processing time has to go up exponentially as instead of looking at nine cards at a time you must run through a row(or at least some of one).

Also, I only stock cards worth greater worth greater than .75(TCGMID) so my volume is lower but that being said I still have near 30k singles

More opinions and responses appreciated

---

Do you honestly have customers that flip through dozens of binders to find cards that they want? Seems strange to me, but so be it. The way the store that I go to does is is that they have a binder full of printed pages of cards that they let customers look through. This has 2 advantages of not handing inventory directly to a customer who now has to be watched relatively closely and it minimizes damage from customers who don't know how to handle binders properly.

If the boxes are stored in any sort of logical order, the time to find cards is not really any different than flipping through binders. The time saved by seeing 9 at a time instead of 1 is lost by having to be slightly careful with a binder to avoid damaging cards. If you're ever in a position where you have to look card by card by card to find something rather than finding it based on color/alpha sort criteria or the like, you've already lost.

__________________
There's no need to fear, UNDERDOG is here!

All your Gruul Nodorogs are belong to me. Trade them to me, please!

Report rules violations.

2. If they browse and don't know what they are looking for (or more often then not, don't know the name of the card) then that is a bit more complicated. You could have a database set up where they could look it up by what the card does. For ideas, head over to card kingdom.com and check out their advanced search engine it is really nice to find cards that you can't quite remember the name. In both instances, you'd have to organize the cards and get them.

Or you could set up a free for all box where they are just cards and let them rifle through them and pull out what they want. You don't do anything with them, just refill them if they sell out.

Or you could make up grab boxes. The shop I used to work at did that very successfully. They'd get boxes of anywhere from 100 to 500 and put random cards (of all 5 colors) and sell them as is. They always sold out.

In this whole scenario, I am only inventorying cards worth GREATER than $.75 on TCGMid. Thus the volume is lower than most singles inventories.

I liked the idea of only have 4 each in a binder(i might do 6) then the rest in boxes.

Do you sell repacks? They are a gold mine for moving cards that typically don't move. And if you follow the formula of 1 good card (worth 8.00) per 10 packs, one additional card worth 15.00 per 25 packs, and one additional card worth 20-25 per hundred, and one additional card 25+ per 200 and so on, you will have people drooling to spend a dollar to try to win a Gaea's Cradle or whatever you have. My sis and I did this for Yugioh and man, let me tell u, the kids would spend their last dollar to win that big card.