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Major Updates to Trade Routes! Turn your cards into cash faster than ever before.

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Greetings from the rainy, windy mountains of Western Montana!  I'm spending the week here, just outside Helena, parked in a field by a lake.  Yesterday we saw a giant double rainbow.

What better place to hole up inside, squashing Trader Tools bugs and adding awesome new features?

Photo Credit: Anna Edgren, Small House Big World
Photo Credit: Anna Edgren, Small House Big World

No, that's not a stock photo.  That was the view from my living room window last night.

Anyway, while I'm traveling around the US in my motorhome, I stop into game stores and troll Craigslist for Magic collections.  I had to sell most of my collection to purchase this RV, so now I'm in the process of rebuilding.  As much as I love Magic cards, I also like to be able to enjoy the beautiful places I visit, so I don't want to spend all my free time sorting and selling cards.

What Is Trade Routes?

Before I get to the new features and bugfixes, I realize not everyone knows what Trade Routes is or what it does. Quite simply, it's probably the most powerful tool that QS offers Insider members.  It's saved me--personally--hundreds of hours of pointless labor, and it allows me to extract the most value out of my cards every week.   If you're not familiar with Trade Routes, watch this quick video that shows you how it works.

One of our core beliefs at QS is that you should only ever have to inventory a Magic card once.  To that end, we've invested many hours of developer time into automation tools that ensure no one has to waste time managing their collection.

Our importer can take your spreadsheet and quickly turn it into a Trader Tools list, helping you correct errors along the way.  Of course, you can always create a new List within Trader Tools, which is how I prefer to work, as it's faster than creating a spreadsheet from scratch.  You can also import your PucaTrade inventory.

The point is, you can take lists you already have and use them without having to waste time re-entering cards.

Once you have a list in Trader Tools, that's where Trade Routes comes into play.  Trade Routes is a way to turn Magic cards into cash, quickly and easily.

It does this by taking a list of cards, checking their prices against our robust database of buylist and retail prices, and intelligently splits up the list based on which merchants are paying the most for your cards.

So far, so good.  That's one more layer of intelligence than you had before!  I remember the days, back when I was running a retail game store, when I had half a dozen buylist tabs open and had to manually check every single one for every single card I had.  I cannot tell you how many nights out with friends I skipped because I had  buylisting to do, or how many Saturday afternoons in the park with my girlfriend I missed because I was too busy trimming down my overstock.  It was a massive waste of time!

So, Trade Routes fixes that problem.  But, if we stopped there, we'd still have to manually go to the merchant's buylist website and enter each card, one by one.  I forget who said this, but it's one of my favorite quotes - "Copy and Paste is not a scalable business solution". This is where Trade Routes gets good;--we've taken the time to dissect the internals of how each merchant's buylist works, and our tool automatically outputs data in a format they'll recognize.

With some merchants, like ABU Games, Card Kingdom and AdventuresON, we have a direct link to their shopping cart system.  Once Trade Routes has divided up your collection, you can go to each of these merchants' tabs and press one button to populate your buylist cart on their site.  Then you can check-out as normal, without having to re-enter cards.  This was another process that wasted countless hours of my precious and quickly-fading youth.  

The problem with a system this fast and efficient is that sometimes it'll try to sell cards that aren't worth selling, or cards you don't want to sell.  Sure, you could split up your list manually before sending it to Trade Routes, but come on, ain't nobody got time for that.

We added a minimum price filter so that you could tell TR to ignore all those 2 cent cards that ABU Games likes to buy.

 Pro Tip:  In packages up to about 13 ounces, a Magic card costs about 1.5 cents to ship.

That's great, too, but we can do better, and that's where today's updates come into play. Between doing my own buylisting and listening to our Insiders' suggestions on our Forum, I found a few workflow problems that could be solved with a few days of developer time.  The description of the problems and their solutions are below, along with some screenshots showing how to make use of these new additions.

The Updates

Problem: Trade Routes is trying to sell cards that aren't worth selling.  The existing solution to filter out cards by minimum price got us half-way, but what about expensive cards that still aren't worth selling?  This is where we teach our Insiders to look at the card's Spread, which is a short-hand for understanding how much less than retail price you'll be getting when you sell to a buylist.

Reminder: 50% spreads are basically average.  Spreads smaller than 30% are very favorable, especially since many of our merchants pay out 25-30% more in store credit.  As a rule, I don't sell cards with spreads wider than 60%.  I will be patient and wait for a buy price that reflects a narrower spread.

Solution: Trade Routes now allows Spread Filtering.  You'll see a new box on the Trade Routes screen that asks you for a maximum spread, defaulting to 50%.  This ensures you're not selling cards for way less than they're worth.

Screen Shot 2015-07-27 at 11.17.40 AM


Problem:  After submitting buylist orders, I had to go back and manually remove cards from my list.  This was obviously a non-starter, as Trade Routes is at its best when you're dealing with large quantities of Magic cards.  In a system designed to work at massive scale, having this bottleneck was just unacceptable and was wasting hours of user time.

Solution:  Now, after you click the Start Selling button, you'll be given a link on the confirmation screen, to a new list that Trade Routes created on your behalf, minus all the cards that are being sent out.  If you decide not to send out the orders, or were just testing out Trade Routes, no problem--you can just ignore that list.  Otherwise, just click it to make it your active list.

Screen Shot 2015-07-27 at 11.18.40 AM


Problem: Troll and Toad wasn't set up for Trade Routes automatic integration (also known as Direct-to-Cart).  The way their buylist was set up, we couldn't use the normal technology we developed to do one-click integration.   This meant that Insiders who wanted to sell to Troll and Toad had to do the dreaded re-entry.  I know that I have often disabled TNT in my Trade Routes for this exact reason, as I'd rather take a little less money on my cards than waste time re-entering them into someone else's site.

Solution:  We found a way to utilize TNT's CSV buylist uploader that allows Trade Routes to talk to it effectively.  It's not quite as easy as the one-click solutions for Card Kingdom, ABU Games and AdventuresON, but 2 clicks is good enough for me!  On the Trade Routes cart screen for TNT, you'll see a button that'll let you save a properly-formatted CSV, along with a link where you can upload it.  Disregard steps 1 and 2 in the example below, since Trade Routes will auto-generate and edit the file described in the first 2 steps.

Export the CSV as a file by clicking the nice green button.
Export the CSV as a file by clicking the nice green button, then...
Screen Shot 2015-07-27 at 11.17.02 AM
Upload the file via the uploader on TNT's Site (Trade Routes lets you start at Step 3!)

 


Problem: Sometimes, the right way to out a card is through PucaTrade.

Solution: Easy!  We added an option to dump your entire list to into your PucaTrade "have" inventory.   This won't affect the list in Trader Tools, so if you choose to send a card via PT, you'll want to remove it manually.

Screen Shot 2015-07-27 at 11.23.04 AM

Copy the output from Trader Tools...
Copy the output from Trader Tools...
Then just paste it into PucaTrade
...Then just paste it into PucaTrade

 


Problem:  I want to be able to import my MTGO collection!

Solution: So, now Trader Tools can import from MTGO lists.  We plan to add MTGO prices in the very near future, so this is just one small step.  MTGO-specific editions will need to be added, so for now, work around that by choosing a different edition.

Screen Shot 2015-07-27 at 2.16.14 PM


So, that's what we've been working on lately! We have a whole pipeline full of interesting things that'll make your Magic trading faster, easier and more profitable. We're really excited at how efficient Trade Routes is becoming, and I've been using it almost every day to crunch through my overstock. As I said in the video, I'm saving up store credit from buylisting low-end cards that I'll never need, and hope to buy some Vintage staples and / or Power soon!

Kelly Reid

Founder & Product Manager

View More By Kelly Reid

Posted in Buylist, Finance, Free, Timeless Info, Trader Tools, TTDevBlog

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14 thoughts on “Major Updates to Trade Routes! Turn your cards into cash faster than ever before.

  1. Adding my two cents into this:

    First off LOVE the new trader tool updates. Made my life so much easier and Ill break down why (I just did a massive bulk common/uncommon sell)

    1) My biggest pet peeve for the old TT is that once you hit trader tools it would omit strikezone and move all the cards from strikezone into another buylist. I didn’t know this and then made a strikezone order. Well I double dipped and sadly to say when I went to fill the strikezone order, I was missing a lot of cards.

    With the new one, it the cards into the stores for you and you can have a breakdown of everything. Made it super easy.

    2) LOVE the Troll and Toad CSV file that you can download and then re-upload onto their website. Made Troll and Toad much much easier to deal with

    *My only grip… find a way to do the same thing with strikezone and Im yours forever.

    Also when you buylist to strikezone, it only shows how much they want and not the amount you have for them on TT when you click the trader route. So you gotta double back and check you list.

    3) The minimum amount to send is a god send because sometimes prices change everyday and its good to omit those items who price fall below a certain point. The spread I haven’t dealt with yet because all the cards I just wanted to get rid of but Im sure it has it’s use

    4) Wanted to ask this, but is there a way to mass delete trader list? Sometimes I generate multiple list (5x) buy omitting different vendors and clicking trader route and see what the total price is. If there’s an option to delete multiple list at once instead of clicking active list and then view and then delete it would be helpful.

    All in all Great work for sure. Love this new tool

    1. Awesome feedback, thanks! I’ll check out that bug with Strike Zone, I think I know what’s causing it.

      Mass deleting /editing lists is coming soon. It’s high up on my to-do list, to create a List Management page where you can edit / trash lists without having to open them up.

  2. For a while there I was wondering if this site was improving as much as it did the last two years. This post clearly shows just how much effort you’re all putting into this. Definitely keeping my subscriptions. Thanks for all your work.

    1. Thanks! Things were a bit slow around Feb-April, since I was moving out of my apartment in Chicago and into my RV, but now that I’m all set up with my new mobile office I’m back in action and trying to do as much as I can to make the site amazing.

  3. This thing is the bomb! You guys have made a slick, fast, amazing interface. I’ve worked in I.T. for 15 years in multiple areas – system and database administration, and utility software development, so I know what it takes to pull this kind of thing off. Very cool – thanks a bunch!

  4. Wait, so you bought an RV and are digital-nomading around the country?! That’s amazing, and should be a non-insider post all in itself.

    Very excited to hear that MTGO implementation is coming soon, I’ve let my insider subscription lapse, but once MTGO is included I’ll probably snap off a year sub. Do you have a general timeline for that feature?

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