How it works

TCG Bolt sells trading card collections whole, as a single lot. Not card by card. Everything below follows from that.

Why whole collections

Cherry-picking strips the good cards out and leaves a remainder nobody wants, priced against a total that no longer applies. Selling the lot intact is faster for the seller, cheaper per card for the buyer, and honest about what is actually changing hands.

It also means there is no listing grind. One listing, one price, one transaction — instead of four hundred auctions and four hundred envelopes.

Buying

1. Find a collection. Every listing carries a manifest — the seller’s list of what is in it — plus photographs and their own stated market value.
2. Buy it, or offer. Where the seller has enabled offers you can propose a price. They have 48 hours to answer; if they accept, the collection is held for you for 24 hours while you pay.
3. You pay into the seller’s account, locked. Your card is charged to the seller’s own account with our payment processor and the money is locked there — they cannot take it out while they ship. The seller is told to ship and has 3 days to do it — miss that and the order cancels itself and you are refunded, without you asking.
4. Check it when it arrives. You have 3 business days from delivery to compare the lot against the manifest, and 5 on a larger one — 500 items or more, or 50 or more graded cards and sealed products together. The listing says which. The window starts on its own when the carrier marks the parcel delivered — there is nothing to tell us.
5. The seller is paid. When your window closes, or sooner if you confirm it matched. If it did not match, raise a dispute before the window shuts.

Selling

1. List the collection. Enter the manifest by hand or import a CSV — exports from collection trackers read straight in. Photograph the binder pages, and the individual cards above a value threshold.
2. It goes through review. Nothing reaches the marketplace without a moderator reading it. We aim to answer within 24 hours and may ask for changes.
3. It sells whole. Listings run between $100 and $10,000.
4. Ship within 3 days. You get the buyer’s address once they have paid. Tracked, packed for the value.
5. Get paid. 11% comes off as our fee, or $12.00 on a smaller sale. Funds are released after the buyer’s inspection window and reach you 3 to 5 business days later. See fees and payouts.

This page is the explanation, not the contract. What a buyer is owed is the Buyer Protection Policy, what a seller agrees to is the Seller Agreement, and both sit under the Terms of Service. Where this page and those differ, those govern.

What we do and do not do

We do: hold the money, review every listing before it appears, decide disputes on the manifest and the photographs, and collect sales tax where the law makes that ours to collect.

We do not: own, store, appraise or authenticate anybody’s cards. The seller has them the whole time and ships them directly to you. Stated market values are the seller’s own arithmetic, labeled as such everywhere they appear — we do not price collections and nothing here is a valuation.