Alternative to TCGplayer Seller Store: Fees Compared

The strongest alternative to a TCGplayer seller store is your own branded storefront, backed by inventory software that still syncs to the marketplaces you already sell on. InVelocity does this starting at $49.99/mo for up to 2,500 items: a branded shop at invelocity.app/shop/your-store, Stripe checkout, and a 0.5% platform fee on storefront sales on top of Stripe's own processing rate. You are not really choosing between TCGplayer and your own shop. The dealers who come out ahead run both off one inventory and push their best-margin cards to whichever channel leaves them holding more.

Last updated: September 2026

Everyone knows the pitch. Almost nobody prices it out.

"Build your own store, stop paying marketplace fees" is advice you have heard at every show table. It is also the part most dealers get wrong, because it treats the fee as the whole cost. A TCGplayer seller store hands you something your own shop does not ship with: buyers who were already there, already searching the exact card, already comfortable with the checkout. Replace the storefront and you also have to replace the demand.

If you tried this once and it stalled out, that's why. The advice was never wrong about the fees. It just left out the harder half of the job and let you find it on your own.

That doesn't make your own store a bad idea. It makes it a different job with a different P&L. Here is what that actually looks like.

Give the marketplace its due

• The traffic is real. Someone searches a card name, lands on a page, and your listing is on it. You did nothing to earn that visit.
• Condition language is standardized. NM/LP/MP plus a visible market price means fewer arguments and fewer "is this really near mint" messages.
• Buyers trust the checkout. They have used it before and they know what happens when something goes wrong.

Any honest alternative has to say what replaces those three things.

The fee math, told straight

Two different fees get mixed together constantly, and which one you mean changes the answer.

The marketplace commission is what TCGplayer takes off the sale itself. TCGplayer Pro is the seller software subscription that sits on top of it, priced at 2.5% plus marketplace fees. Those stack. If you have been comparing "2.5%" against a full platform's monthly price, you have been comparing the software layer to the whole building.

That commission is 10.75% for a standard Marketplace Seller account (Level 1-4) — TCGplayer's own current published rate, raised from 10.25% effective February 2026 — before Pro's 2.5% is even added on top.

On your side of the ledger, an InVelocity storefront costs the monthly subscription, plus 0.5% of storefront sales as a platform fee, plus Stripe's processing rate on the card itself. Anyone selling you a "fee-free" storefront is not counting something. Processing is never free, and a platform that claims it takes nothing is usually taking it somewhere else.

The number that decides this isn't the percentage anyway. It is the percentage times your channel mix. A dealer doing nearly all their volume through marketplace search saves very little by bolting a storefront onto the side. A dealer with a local base, an active Discord, a YouTube channel, or a steady show circuit can move real volume through their own shop and keep the spread.

Sync timing is the part that actually bites

Here is the failure every multi-channel dealer eventually hits. A card sells at a Saturday show, and it is still listed online Sunday morning. Now you are refunding a buyer, eating the fees, and taking a feedback hit on a sale you never wanted.

Adding a second storefront multiplies that risk unless the inventory underneath is genuinely one inventory. InVelocity syncs quantities across eBay, Shopify, the storefront, and in-person POS sales off a single stock record, so a storefront checkout deducts the item and pushes the new quantity out to the other channels. That is the entire reason to run your own shop through inventory software rather than standing up a generic web store beside your existing setup.

This is also where "just use Shopify" falls down for card people. Shopify is a strong e-commerce platform at $39/mo and up, but it has no concept of set, card number, finish, or condition as first-class fields, no eBay sync built in, and no way to identify a card from a photo. You end up building the TCG half yourself.

Don't give up the show table to get a website

Card shows are not a side channel for most dealers. They are the channel. Any storefront plan that makes show weekends harder is a downgrade no matter what it saves in fees.

That means point of sale has to live in the same system, not beside it. InVelocity's POS runs in-person sales with customer records, store credit, tax calculation, and receipts, drawing down the same stock the storefront sells from. If you are already tracking credit on paper or in a notes app, the store credit system for card shops breakdown covers that piece on its own.

Pricing at the table matters just as much. A tcgplayer price check against live market data beats a guess every time someone opens a binder in front of you.

It has to cover the whole case, not just Pokemon

Pokemon drives the search volume, so most software gets pitched at Pokemon sellers and then quietly struggles with everything else in the case.

If you run Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, Lorcana, One Piece, sports, or the long tail nobody writes blog posts about, your storefront needs the same fields and the same identification across all of it. InVelocity supports 25+ TCG games and identifies cards from a photo down to name, set, variant, finish, rarity, and TCGPlayer market price, including reprint disambiguation, which is exactly the case that breaks naive card matching.

Slabs need their own handling too. Graded pricing — branded in-app as Invelocity Price — carries nine price points per card, running from ungraded through PSA 10, BGS 10, CGC 10, and SGC 10, synced daily across 350K+ cards. A storefront that prices a PSA 9 off the raw market number is going to cost you money in one direction or the other.

What it costs

Four tiers, sized by how many items you carry, with every feature included at each one:

• Starter, $49.99/mo: up to 2,500 items
• Growth, $79.99/mo: 2,500 to 5,000 items
• Professional, $99.99/mo: 5,000 to 10,000 items
• Enterprise, $149.99/mo: 10,000 to 20,000 items

Over 20,000 items is a custom quote. Every tier includes 1,000 AI credits a month, eBay and Shopify sync, the public storefront with checkout, and the rest of the feature set. No per-feature upsells, which matters when the storefront is the thing you are buying for.

Onboarding currently runs through a consultation call rather than self-serve checkout, so getting started means booking time rather than entering a card.

If you are still deciding between platforms rather than between channels, the best software for card dealers comparison is a better starting point than this post.

Should you actually do this?

Run your own storefront if you have a following that already knows your name, you sell at shows regularly, you carry enough volume that a few points of fee is real money, or you are tired of a marketplace owning the relationship with your own repeat buyers.

Stay marketplace-first if nearly every sale comes from someone searching a card name they have never associated with you. A storefront will not fix that, and adding one before you have demand just gives you a second place where inventory can go stale.

Most working dealers land in the middle. Marketplace for discovery, your own shop for repeat buyers and the cards where the margin is worth defending. You don't need to pick a side to start, and the dealers who treat it as a loyalty test usually leave money on both tables.

FAQ

Can I run my own storefront and keep selling on TCGplayer and eBay? Yes, and that is the setup most dealers should want. InVelocity syncs quantities across eBay, Shopify, your branded storefront, and in-person POS from one inventory record, so a sale on any channel draws stock down everywhere. The goal isn't to leave a marketplace. It's to stop maintaining the same stock in four places and hoping they agree.

What does InVelocity charge on storefront sales? A 0.5% platform fee on sales through your branded storefront, on top of your monthly subscription and Stripe's own processing rate. Stripe handles the payment directly, so no card data touches InVelocity's servers. That platform fee applies to storefront checkout specifically, not to sales you make on eBay or at a show, where the marketplace's own fees apply instead.

Will my own store get traffic the way a marketplace does? No, not on day one, and any tool promising otherwise is overselling. A marketplace listing borrows the marketplace's search demand. Your storefront runs on the audience you bring to it from shows, socials, a Discord, or repeat buyers. Plan it as a margin play on demand you already have, not as a discovery channel that finds you new customers by itself.

Does it work for games other than Pokemon? Yes. 25+ TCG games are supported, including Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Lorcana, and One Piece, alongside sealed product, accessories, and graded cards. Graded pricing pulls nine price points per card, branded in-app as Invelocity Price, covering ungraded through PSA 10, BGS 10, CGC 10, and SGC 10.

How long does it take to get a storefront live? Your shop sits at invelocity.app/shop/your-store with your logo, banner, accent color, and announcement banners, and it sells from inventory you have already loaded. The slow part is almost always getting inventory in, not configuring the shop itself. Onboarding currently runs through a consultation call rather than self-serve signup, so the first step is booking that call.