How to Create an Online Card Shop (Dealer Setup Guide)

Creating an online card shop comes down to four pieces: a catalog that holds real TCG fields (set, card number, condition, finish), a way to take payment, inventory that stays accurate everywhere else you sell, and a fast way to get cards into that catalog. InVelocity does all four in one setup — a branded store at invelocity.app/shop/your-store with Stripe checkout, cart, and shipping or pickup options, running on the same inventory as your eBay and Shopify listings and your card show sales. No coding, no theme building, no second stock count to reconcile at the end of the night.

Last updated: September 2026

Building an online card shop has gotten unnecessarily complicated. Strip it back and there are two or three things you have to get right. Everything else is decoration you can add in month three.

Start with the problem the store is supposed to solve

Almost nobody sets out to build a website. They set out to stop doing this: updating listings on three different sites, then finding out after a show that a card they just handed across the table went out the door on eBay four hours earlier. Now it's a refund, an unhappy buyer, and fees you already ate.

That's the actual job. If you're tired of updating three sites and still getting it wrong, a storefront that doesn't fix that just adds a fourth place to update. So the first question to ask about any setup isn't "can I pick my colors" — it's "when something sells here, what happens to the count everywhere else?" On InVelocity, storefront checkout deducts the item and pushes the new quantity across your connected marketplaces. Updating your listings everywhere stops being a task you do and starts being a thing that happened.

For a game-specific walkthrough of the same setup, see custom online store for mtg cards.

What dealers actually want from having their own shop

The reason to build one isn't vanity. On your own store the customer is yours — they browse your stock instead of a search page with eleven other sellers underneath you, and they can save cards to a wishlist for later. You set the presentation: logo, banner, accent color, and an announcement banner across the top when you're running a show special or a preorder.

Marketplaces are still worth having. They bring volume you won't get on day one. But a marketplace listing is a transaction; a storefront is a customer list. For which channels sync live and which don't, see online card shop with inventory sync.

The three pieces to get right first

A catalog that speaks TCG. Generic e-commerce software thinks a product is a title, a price, and a size. A card is a set, a card number, a condition, a finish, and often a grade. If your catalog can't hold that, you end up jamming it into the title and your customers can't filter for anything. InVelocity's inventory covers single cards, sealed product, graded cards, and accessories, with cost basis and margin tracked per item, across 25+ games — Pokémon, Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Lorcana, One Piece and the rest. Graded stock gets its own pricing, branded in-app as Invelocity Price, nine price points per card from ungraded up through PSA 10, BGS 10, CGC 10 and SGC 10, so a slabbed copy isn't priced off its raw market number.

Checkout that actually moves stock. Stripe handles the payment side, with cart, shipping or local pickup, and automatic inventory deduction the moment the order clears. The deduction is the part that matters — a checkout that takes money but leaves you to adjust counts by hand is where double-sales come from.

A way to fill the catalog. Most people don't realize this is the piece that decides whether the store ever opens. Photographing three hundred cards is an afternoon. Typing three hundred cards in, one at a time, is a week you never find. Photograph a card in InVelocity and it comes back identified — name, set, variant, finish, rarity, and current TCGPlayer market price — ready to add to inventory or push straight to an eBay listing with a generated title and description. Bulk photo import and batch identification exist for when you're working through a box rather than a single card.

Your show table is part of the same shop

Ignoring in-person is how most "how to build an online store" advice falls apart for this business. Card shows are a serious share of revenue for a lot of dealers, and the sale you ring up at a table has to hit the same inventory as the one that happens at 2am on your website.

InVelocity's point of sale runs the show side — ringing people up, customer records, store credit, tax, receipts — against the same stock. Sell the card at the table, the storefront listing goes away. If you sell at shows at all, that's not a bonus feature, it's the whole reason the counts stay honest.

Trade-ins turn a storefront into a buying channel

A shop that only sells is running at half capacity. Customers submit trade-ins through your store with photos or a CSV, the cards get identified, and you make a tiered offer — with a loyalty bump if you want one — paid out as store credit or cash, with status they can track. Figuring out what somebody's collection is worth stops being sticky notes and a spreadsheet you don't trust.

What it costs to run

Four plans, priced on how much inventory you're carrying rather than which features you want. Starter is $49.99/mo for up to 2,500 items, then $79.99 up to 5,000, $99.99 up to 10,000, and $149.99 up to 20,000. Past 20,000 items it's a custom quote. Every tier includes everything — storefront, eBay and Shopify sync, point of sale, trade-ins, card identification, team accounts — plus 1,000 identification credits a month. The one cost that isn't folded into the subscription: a 0.5% platform fee on sales made through your storefront specifically, on top of Stripe's own processing rate — sales on a marketplace or at a show through POS aren't charged it. There's no per-feature upsell beyond that, which is worth checking for on anything else you're comparing.

Onboarding is by consultation right now rather than self-serve signup, so the first step is scheduling a call rather than entering a card. If you're mostly moving Pokémon singles, the pokemon card dealers page walks through that workflow specifically. For a platform-by-platform look at where a storefront fits against the marketplaces, see best online store for trading card sellers, and for the wider tooling picture, best software for card dealers.

Common questions

How long does it take to get a card shop online? The store itself is configuration, not construction — logo, banner, accent color, and your inventory is already the catalog. The real timeline is getting your stock into the system: a photographed batch import moves a lot faster than typing items in one at a time, and total catalog size is what actually decides how long that takes. There's no fixed number to give here since it comes down entirely to those two things.

Can I use my own domain name? Your store lives at invelocity.app/shop/your-store by default, branded with your logo, banner and accent color — and you can attach your own domain instead from your storefront settings. We give you the DNS records to add, and the store starts serving from your domain once it verifies.

Does having my own store mean I should stop selling on eBay? No. eBay brings buyers who were never going to find your site. The two-way sync exists so you can run both: list from the same inventory, pull orders back in, handle Best Offers from the dashboard, and auto-relist when a sold-out item is restocked. Your store is where the margin is better; the marketplace is where the traffic is.

What does it cost me per sale on my own storefront? Payments run through Stripe, so Stripe's processing fees apply to each order, plus a 0.5% InVelocity platform fee on storefront sales specifically. Sales you make on a marketplace or at a show through POS aren't charged that platform fee.

Can my employees use it without wrecking my counts? Team accounts have Owner, Manager and Employee roles, activity is attributed to whoever did it, and team members run under the store owner's subscription rather than paying separately.

Ready to see it against your actual inventory? Schedule a consultation and walk through it with your own stock.