Right, heaps to talk about this week, unfortunately it's been a bit of a rough week for us with the post-sale blues making it a bit of a challenge for us to meet basic needs like wages and rent =/.
How many of you are familiar with mtgsingles.co.nz ? It's been great for both stores and customers, allowing you to search all the NZ stores simultaneously for any card you want.
Unfortunately, it's recently been a race to the bottom as far as prices on higher-end cards go. Around the start of March (when some stores changed from BinderPOS to Storepass), Calico dropped their prices by ~15%, and other stores, including us, have been trying to keep pace to avoid losing too much sales. On our end, we've gone from our prices being competitive somewhere in the middle to having the highest prices in all of NZ.
Our plan for this has been to drop the sell prices on our higher-end cards, and increase the bulk prices to their final resting place (60-cent commons, 75-cent uncommons, $1 rares). This also allows us the freedom to go through a lot of our commons/uncommons over time and add them all to the store without feeling like we are losing money (Something I discussed in an article earlier this year).
I played a lot from Mirrodin through to Dragons of Tarkir, and we have a lot of bulk commons and uncommons from this era that I will eventually be able to get to with the new bulk pricing.
Sadly, we've been running into a couple of issues with BinderPOS as they've been trying to update their backend. In a twist of super awkwardness, at the time of me writing this, our bulk prices have gone up, but we are still waiting for our higher-end card prices to come down =/. Also, the store credit taking infinite time to load bug is back, but we are working on fixing that too.
*NOTE The higher end prices have come down now Yay!
On the topic of Storepass, some of you may have wondered why we haven't changed over ourselves. The truth of the matter is that we got in early with BinderPOS, and our Monthly fee for their services is REALLY cheap. It'd cost us about 2-3 times more money each month for us to switch over to the basic storepass plan.
Some of the biggest issues with BinderPOS that others have had also don't affect us. We don't sell a multitude of different card games, we don't run events, and we don't sell card accessories. So long as BinderPOS updates its prices regularly, we can work around everything else.
So the last thing I wanted to mention, but I think at this point I will just mention it and go into detail another time, is Salubrious Snail on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@salubrioussnail . If you are a fan of Commander, this guy is worth watching. After decades of playing the format, each video I watch of his is making me rethink and reevaluate my commander deckbuilding process.
