"You're giving away WHAT now?"

In my latest Blog Poll, the option of "Box-toppers? Really? Don't you have anything ELSE to give away?" narrowly edged out the 9th Edition Hell's Caretaker box-topper for the next giveaway prize. This meant I had to go find something besides a box-topper to give away (which I would have had to do eventually, once I ran out of them, but I thought I'd have a few more months).

Then I remembered that I had a box of these beauties sitting around:
These are cardboard punch-out counters and tokens intended to accompany the Fallen Empires set. They were originally included in an issue of The Duelist Magazine (issue #4 to be exact). Here's the Magic Arcana article from Daily MTG that covered these for those possessed of incurable curiosity.

Fallen Empires was a set notorious for generating lots of different token creatures (1/1 White Citizens, 1/1 Green Saprolings, 1/1 Blue Camarids, 0/1 Black Thrulls and 1/1 Red Goblins) from lots of different cards (such as Icatian Town, Elvish Farmer, Homarid Spawning Bed, Breeding Pit and Goblin Warrens, respectively). It also made lots of different counters (Spore, Credit, Time, Javelin, Net and Tide as well as -1/-1, +1/+1 and a variety of +/- combinations that are no longer used in Magic at all) for lots of different cards (Spore Flower, Icatian Moneychanger, Tourach's Gate, Icatian Javelineers, Merseine, Tidal Influence, respectively, as examples).

So, to help with all these different tokens & counters, WotC included these in with The Duelist.

When I rediscovered these, I Tweeted to my followers the above photo and asked if these were junk, or an awesome giveaway. The overwhelming response as "awesome giveaway". So, this coming Thursday (October 28, 2010 for those who may be reading this later) I will be giving away some subset of my collection of these beauties to a random winner chosen from amongst the subscribers to my email newsletter (I say subset because according to my inventory & this handy website detailing the exact contents of one of these sheets, I have 2+ sheets worth of these guys).

Not already a subscriber? Visit my home page at www.DonsMagicAndSundry.com and sign up - it's free and easy and I promise not to overfill your email inbox (I typically send less than a newsletter a month).

All listings - Activate! (?)

Back in the Great Speculator Debate, I explained that my biggest issue with the process was that if these "hot" cards were out of stock in my inventory, they no longer loaded up into Google shopping, and therefore I would miss out on potential business from people searching for these cards.

There were several suggestions on how to deal with the issue, including never letting my inventory drop below 1 (which I find somehow a bit dishonest). The one best solution, I think, is one that I have been debating about with myself for a while.

I could, I believe, with a simple click of a check box, keep inventory active even when out of stock. This should mean that they would still get uploaded to Google, and would definitely mean that they would show up in any search within my store.

So, you may ask, why haven't I done this already? The reasons are many-fold:

1. The biggest impediment is that, since I use only photos from my own "virtual collection" of Magic cards, if I have never owned a card before, I have no image to go with that listing. This is particularly a problem with foils, as I am nowhere NEAR close to finishing off my collection of those. As I explained in this post about potentially trading with me, I am fairly close to completing my virtual collection of non-foil Magic (my current needs list can be found here). So a giant hurdle I need to overcome is what to do with the listings I don't have pictures for yet. Do I make a "image forthcoming" placeholder for these? Do I raid images from magiccards.info or Gatherer? I'm not sure what to do for these.
2. There are many stores out there (I suppose it would be unprofessional of me to name them) that list every possible card, even if they're out of stock. Most of these somehow tell you right away [like it will say "Quantity in Stock: 0" or something like that) but on some you can't even find out until you try to put the item in your shopping cart. Fortunately mine would show Quantity: 0, but not until you got to the listing. So if someone Google searches for something & sees my listing, then clicks on it only to find out I'm out of stock - would there be hard feelings, like they were somehow tricked into my store?
3. Searches of my store (theoretically) would take longer. If I normally don't have a card in foil, only regular, then when you search for it you only get one hit. But if everything is active you'll be guaranteed at least two hits for any card since they started making foils. That's more stuff to filter through looking for what you want.
4. Second biggest headache: I have trouble enough as it is keeping up with the current prices for what I DO have in stock - if I keep everything active I need to keep track of prices of stuff I don't even have available (or mislead folks if I just don't keep up with them). Perhaps I just have a policy that an out of stock item has a price of $0?

So, anyway, these are the hurdles I need to overcome before I make every card active regardless of whether it's in stock or not. Any and all comments & especially suggestions on getting over these hurdles are massively welcome!

Musings on yesterday's post

Yesterday's post (on a store's side view of speculation) ended up becoming much bigger deal than I ever anticipated. In the last 24 hours I've had more page loads on this blog than ever before in the same period of time. The post also generated more comments than my entire blog up until this point (even if you don't count my comments which were replies to others' comments). My post and the post that inspired it were each linked to begin a thread in the MTGSalvation forums, and (my biggest shock of all), the post was featured on ManaNation's This Week in Magic. I am humbled and honored by the response. At least I can say it got people thinking :-)

I've had some thoughts about the comments left that have been percolating in my mind, and I thought these deserved a post of their own, so I'm jotting them down here. Two posts in two days is quite something for me, so hopefully this comes across as coherently as yesterday's seemed to. So, in no particular order...

1. It has been recommended that I limit the quantity of a card to some number (likely 8) to help combat the issue of being bought out entirely by a "speculator". This has the added advantage of the fact that if/when someone buys 8 copies of something (especially if that's ALL they buy) I can quickly price-check that item and make sure it's a reasonable market price. This won't 100% solve the situation. I only had 2 copies of Personal Tutor in stock when it went, and only 7 of Pyromancer Ascension - and while I had 19 Polymorphs when they were snatched up, I had less than 8 of any given version, so they still would have flown. Also, someone could come in and make several purchases of 8 each. But, I am looking into whether this can be automated in ProStores or if I will just have to have a posted store policy like the unfortunate store that canceled the alleged speculator's order.
2. It was recommended that I follow @mtgmetagame and Kelly Reid over @quietspec and folks like that that deal with these issues, so that I can hopefully be ahead of the game and catch these card bumps as they happen (or before) and not have the problem. I actually do already follow these folks (nice guys and savvy in the biz), but it doesn't always help. Sometimes it's my own darned fault (really, I seriously don't know what the heck was wrong with me on the Pyromancer Ascension card - that was just dumb!) but sometimes its out of my hands. Kelly Reid tweeted his recommendation on Polymorph approximately 20 minutes before every copy I owned was bought out at $0.75 each. This all happened after midnight, when I was sound asleep. Ditto when Kozilek was spoiled on DailyMTG and the price of Eye of Ugin skyrocketed. I awoke to an email showing that every copy I had was sold to one buyer. So, I do what I can, but I am only one man. I have to sleep sometimes!
3. It's been recommended that I keep my inventory active even when I'm out of stock. It's actually easy to do this, and I may have to ultimately go this route - but there are reasons I have not done so before. This topic I feel is deserving of its own post (because it's full of all sorts of convoluted Don-think) so I won't elaborate here. Suffice to say I probably will have to do this, but I'm gonna need the community's help in ironing out some wrinkles (you all as a whole are great at helping out and wonderfully creative at problem-solving).
4. I want to apologize for my use of the phrase "greedy bastard" in my post. I think I did a pretty good job overall of not coming across as nasty and spiteful (because, really, I didn't want to start a flame war or anything like that - just wanted to present a side that I felt hadn't been yet), but that one phrase really stands out like a sore thumb. I considered editing the post, but to do so would be disingenuous, and would also make the comments that refer to the phrase make no sense. So, I leave it in, but want to acknowledge that I could have certainly phrased things better.
5. I have finally come to believe that there really is a place for this Blog out in the MTG Blogosphere. There's blogs on strategy, on flavor, on trading, on just about everything else there is to do with Magic - but I don't know of any (and feel free to direct me to the one(s) I undoubtedly have missed) that discuss what it's like to run an online Magic store. So I want to try to be better about getting posts up that actually have more potential meaning than just "I added cards to inventory today" which is what my Twitter feed is for :-)
6. Did anyone get the joke in the title of the post? Hint: I meant volume as in sound, not amount of cards.
7. I am, first and foremost, a Magic player. I am a casual player (a phrase that may make some like @the_stybs cringe) who somehow ended up running an online store as a sideline to make a little extra money for himself and his family. It is not my family's only source of income, mouths do not go unfed if I mess up a pricing issue. For me it's all personal - which is why I wrote the piece I did, to share my feelings from the other side of the shopping cart. I am glad that it was, almost completely, taken in the spirit it was intended.

Okay, enough rambling for now. I have The Great Foil project to get back to (repricing and adding inventory due to a collection of hundreds of foils I recently purchased). I only have the Kamigawa and Time Spiral blocks left to process. Then, due to your vote in my blog poll a few weeks back, it will be time to start getting the hundreds of non-English cards (mostly Chinese, Japanese and Korean) up into inventory - good news for anyone who is a lover of non-English Magic.

A Case Against Speculation (of any volume)

This is a topic that I have been thinking of writing about for quite a while now, ever since the first time I got burned by a speculator (who shall remain nameless, as this is not about casting blame, but hopefully to offer an alternate point of view to my readers). What made me finally get off the fence and write about it? This blog post was the final nail in the coffin.

First of all, to clarify - what do I consider speculation? Sometimes also called hoarding, the basic idea is this: I have a card for sale on my site that is cheaper than it should be listed at, or cheaper than it will soon be listed at. Most likely cause: a deck (or decks) has hit the scene that is winning tournaments, and a key card or cards in that deck, being a previous "unknown" as it were, suddenly sees a peak in popularity, and therefore price. Secondary possibility: some decision made by the DCI has caused some card to somehow become more desirable (as in the recent case where the banning of Mystical Tutor lead to a leap in price for a similar card, Personal Tutor). Someone then comes along to my site, and buys out every single copy of that card, with the intent of selling or trading that card for a profit - not for personal use in decks of their own.

As a store owner, I have a massive problem with this. And it's not completely the problem that you would automatically think it is. Yes, I will admit, it hurts to have 8 copies of a card sell for $0.75 when the prevailing market price is more like $2.00. And that is certainly a reason I don't like this practice. But there are other issues here that I think need to be discussed from the store owner's point of view that the speculators may not think of. So, in no particular order, I share some thoughts...

1. The most common response when I gripe about this behavior is that I should just be better at keeping track of prices. I fully admit that this is my least favorite part of running a store, and I don't keep up as well as I should. In my case my store has a single employee: ME. My two sons sometimes help me with sorting cards, but that's about all they can handle (they're only 7 and 10 right now, after all - maybe when they're older I can hire them on with more responsibility). In addition to this store, I am essentially a full-time stay-at-home, homeschooling Dad. I have a part-time job that occupies me one day a week. In other words - I have a lot on my plate. Those who follow this blog or my Tweets on Twitter know that I rarely have time to sit and work on store stuff beyond pulling orders - and when I do, it's usually getting new inventory listed. It takes a long time to reprice inventory, and a great deal of time to try to follow the many blogs, tournament coverage, etc. that I would have to follow to stay up-to-date on what the hottest deck tech is, and therefore what the hot cards are. Time I usually don't have. Sometime this leads to kick-myself-in-the-pants moments (how many days did I hear about the freaking Pyromancer Ascension deck and not keep up on the price of that damned card?!?! ARGHHH!!!!!).
   
2. My personal biggest grief (even more than loss of potential income) is loss of hits. What do I mean? The vast majority of the hits on my web site come from Google searches or something similar. People looking for the hot new card for their own personal deck will Google search for that card. But if I don't have a card in stock, I don't show up in that Google search. Which means a potential new customer (who would possibly have bought more than just the hot new card, and may have become a long-term return customer) never finds my site. All because one greedy bastard came by and bought every copy I had. THIS is the part that really steams me: when you come and buy me out of a card, you come to me only when it serves your wallet. Potentially, then, people who MIGHT come to me because I offer amazing service, reasonable prices, quick shipping, etc. may never even know my site exists because YOU bought every copy I had. it's not JUST the card in question that you burned me on - who knows what all business you may have robbed me of?
   
3. Unlike some stores out there, I do not limit the number of copies of a card you can buy, nor do I (nor will I ever) cancel an order I deem to be "speculative". Sure, I'll whine about it on Twitter (and have), but I honor my commitments, even if it hurts and I'm ticked off at the speculator.
4. I take it as a personal insult when someone only buys at my site for speculative purposes. We sellers can tell who these people are. A very famous speculator has bought from me several times - and only for these purposes. I'm good enough to make a quick buck off of, but not for anything else. That hurts.
5. If you want companies like mine to stay in business, don't be greedy. If you find a cheap card that's hot or about to become hot, buy 8 or so (so you can make SOME profit) then be a nice guy and write to them to bring the low price to their attention. Everybody wins - you make some profit, and they get to adjust their price to make it reasonable and still potentially draw in traffic.

Okay - those are the things I wanted to get off my chest. I know I probably come across as a whiner, and hard-core speculators will probably just say "screw you, man - if you list a card low I'm gonna buy 'em all 'cause that's how I roll" or some such BS. But, hopefully, at least one reader will possibly think a little differently about the situation hearing the other side of it.

Comments welcome!