How it compares

If you sell trading card singles on eBay, two things are already doing this job: a spreadsheet, and however your shelf is sorted. Here is what each one is good at, and where it stops.

The spreadsheet

Almost everyone doing this starts with one, and for a hundred items it is the right tool: free, instant, and it does exactly what you tell it.

It stops being the right tool at a few thousand items. Three problems arrive together:

One purchase has to become many costs. Splitting a $400 box across sixty rows is arithmetic you do by hand, and changing your mind about the split means doing it again. Stowdesk splits it, and moves the unsold ones if you re-split — without changing the cost already attached to anything you have sold.
The fees are not what you estimated. A spreadsheet holds the fee you assumed. Stowdesk reads what eBay actually charged and compares the two, then names the orders where they disagree.
You have to find the thing. A row cannot tell you which box it is in.

Keep the spreadsheet if: you hold a few hundred items, sell slowly, and can find anything in under a minute. It is faster than any software and it costs nothing.

Your current filing system

The usual ones are sorted — by set, by number, alphabetically — or they are a stack of boxes and a memory. Sorting is the honest attempt, and it is the one that gets expensive.

A sorted shelf has to stay sorted. Every intake means opening the boxes it belongs in and making room, which is re-filing work that grows with the shelf and produces nothing. Sell out of the middle and you leave a hole; fill the hole and you have re-sorted again.

Stowdesk files densely instead: an item goes wherever there is room, and carries the address of where it went. Nothing is ever re-sorted, because nothing depends on the order. Finding an item is reading its address rather than searching, and the pull ticket walks the shelf in shelf order — one box off the shelf, every line for that box, box back.

Each item's location ends in its fluid position: its place behind the divider, counted fresh each time Stowdesk shows it. B001-A-04-15 is the 15th item in section B001-A-04. Pull six items in front of it and it reads B001-A-04-09. New items go in at the back, so adding stock leaves older numbers alone. The number on the pull ticket is where the item stands today, and nobody renumbers a section after a pull.

Sellers call this chaos sorting. The chaos sorting guide sets one up by hand, keeps it filled as cards sell, and pulls a day's orders from it.

The cost is that you cannot browse. You cannot flick to the box where one set lives, because no box belongs to a set. If you look things up by name on the shelf rather than by selling them, that is a real loss.

Keep your filing system if: you pull stock by hand for shows or trades more often than you post it, or the collection is small enough that everything is one reach away.

Your listing tool

Not compared, because it is not the same job. Stowdesk does not scan or list, and it never changes a listing, a price or your stock — the one thing it writes to a marketplace is a tracking number, for a parcel you posted yourself. It keeps the half after: what each item cost, where it physically is, and what the sale earned once eBay had taken its cut. If you list with CardUploader, its export carries the same SKU into here.

What neither of them does

Neither one tells you what an item earned. Not what it sold for — what it earned, after the marketplace fee, the postage label, and the envelope. That figure is the reason this exists, and it cannot be arrived at without both halves: the cost that followed the item in, and the money the marketplace actually paid out.

What switching costs

Nothing, to find out. The free plan takes no payment details and does not expire, and a sample shelf — sixty items out of one lot, filed across six sections, eight of them sold — loads in one press, so you can read a pull ticket and a margin figure before typing anything of your own.

Paid plans are priced by how much you hold rather than by which features are switched on; every plan has all of them. Plans and pricing, or the questions people ask first.

Who builds this

Stowdesk is written by a card seller. The store is Archive of Legends — on eBay since 2000, 654 positive reviews, 100% positive.

Start free. Bringing what you already have is one CSV: your columns, in your order.