Why TCG Bolt

Somebody with a real collection has two bad options: sell it card by card over months, or take a wholesale offer that assumes the worst about everything unlisted. This is the third one.

If you are selling

One listing, not five hundred

You describe the collection once and sell it once. No per-card photographs, no per-card postage, no evenings spent answering questions about a single common. The unit here is the collection, which is why the price it fetches is a collection price rather than a bulk-lot price.

The 11% seller fee, and what else comes out

One fee, taken from the sale: 11% of the price, never less than $12.00 — that floor only reaching a sale under $109.10. Nothing to list, and nothing at all if it does not sell. We pay the card processing out of it, so there is no separate cut for that.

Two things are not in it and are not ours either. The buyer pays the postage, quoted live at checkout. The parcel’s insurance comes out of your sale at 1.25% of what it is insured for, which is what the insurer charges us — we add nothing to it. A promoted listing costs more, and the sell page says exactly how much before you promote one.

Your existing export is the manifest

Columns are matched by name, so a file from whichever tracker you already use imports as it is. Tabs, commas and semicolons all work. Before anything is created we tell you which columns we read and which we ignored, because the question you are actually asking is whether we understood your prices, not whether the upload finished. If you have nothing to export, take the blank template.

We buy the shipping label

You do not choose a service, declare a value or remember signature confirmation. The label is insured for the sale price, tracked, and requires a signature at or above $1,000. The buyer pays the postage, so it does not come out of what you receive. For most sellers this is the most valuable parcel they have ever sent, and it is not a good moment to be learning how carriers work.

Every lot covered to its full value

Insurance runs to $10,000 a parcel, and no listing may exceed that — the ceiling on what you can sell here is set to what one parcel can actually be covered for, rather than to an appetite for risk. If a parcel is lost in transit we file the claim, and whatever the insurer pays goes to you whole. We take no fee from a settlement: our fee is for a sale that completed, and that one did not.

The cards stay with you

We never take possession. Nothing ships until the buyer’s payment is sitting in your own account, locked until they have checked the collection, and if the listing does not sell you have lost nothing but the hour it took to upload.

If you are buying

Your money is locked, not handed over

Your payment goes into the seller’s account and is frozen there — they cannot touch it, and neither can we. The seller is paid 3 business days after the collection reaches you — 5 on a big or slab-heavy lot, which takes longer to go through — once you have had it in your hands. Every listing says which of the two it carries. Neither side is asked to go first.

The manifest is a guarantee

It is not a description of what is roughly in the box. Every row is a claim the seller is held to, and a lot that does not match it is returnable. You can search it, sort it by value, condition or grade, and filter it — so “is this card in here” is one question rather than five hundred lines of reading.

Photographs of what matters, checked by a person

Front and back of every card stated at or above $30, one of every sealed product, plus photographs of how the collection is stored. A moderator compares the manifest against those photographs before the listing is visible to anybody, usually within 24 hours. That review is slower than letting listings go straight up, and it is the reason the manifest means something.

One small fee, shown up front, and delivery at cost

You pay the collection, a flat $2.99 TCG Bolt marketplace service fee shown on the listing before you check out, the carrier’s own price for insured tracked delivery, and sales tax. Nothing else. If an order is canceled or a dispute goes your way, all of it comes back — not the price with the postage or the fee quietly kept.

Questions are answered in public

Ask on the listing and the answer sits there for the next person. There are no private messages here, deliberately: a private channel between two strangers with a four-figure lot between them is a place where somebody suggests doing the deal off-platform — where the seller is paid before anybody has inspected anything, the manifest guarantees nothing, and there is nobody to appeal to.

What we are not

We do not own, store, appraise or authenticate anybody’s cards. Stated market values are the seller’s own arithmetic and are labeled as theirs everywhere they appear — we do not price collections, and nothing here is a valuation or investment advice.

How it works, step by step · Fees and payouts · Buyer protection · Sell a collection