Are You Stocking the Wrong Price Range?

Ask a vendor what price range sells best at their table and you will usually get an answer.

The problem is that the answer is often a guess.

We have asked vendors carrying hundreds, and sometimes more than a thousand cards, which price range performs best for them. Most could not say with confidence. Some guessed based on what they remembered selling the most of. Very few were actually tracking the data.

That can be misleading because the price range with the most sales is not automatically the price range performing best.

Sales Volume Only Tells You What Sold

Suppose you bring 200 cards priced between $20 and $50 and sell 30 of them.

You also bring 25 cards priced between $100 and $250 and sell 10.

Looking only at sales volume, the answer seems obvious. You sold three times as many cards in the $20 to $50 range.

But now look at sell-through.

• $20 to $50: 30 sold out of 200, or 15% sell-through
• $100 to $250: 10 sold out of 25, or 40% sell-through

Now the story changes.

Your lower-priced cards generated more transactions, but your $100 to $250 inventory was moving much faster compared with the amount you actually brought.

That is information you can use.

Sell-Through Helps You Find Inventory Gaps

Sell-through measures how much of your available inventory actually sold.

If you bring 100 cards in a price range and sell 10, your sell-through is 10%. If you bring 20 and sell 10, it is 50%.

That difference matters because every card in your case represents money tied up in inventory.

Imagine you sell a lot of cards under $25 and assume you need more of them. But you already carry 500 cards in that range and only sell 50 per show.

Meanwhile, you bring 40 cards priced between $50 and $100 and regularly sell 16.

You may not need another 200 cheap cards. You may actually need more inventory in the $50 to $100 range.

Without sell-through data, the higher volume of cheap-card transactions can hide that opportunity.

The Same Problem Happens With High-End Inventory

Vendors can make the opposite mistake with expensive cards.

High-end slabs look great in a case. They attract attention and can help establish the type of vendor you are.

But they can also tie up a lot of capital.

If you consistently carry 25 cards above $1,000 and rarely sell one, while your $100 to $300 inventory keeps disappearing from the case, that should influence your buying strategy.

It does not mean you should eliminate high-end inventory. Some cards create attention, credibility, and opportunities for larger trades.

It means you should know how much of your money is sitting in slow-moving inventory versus inventory customers repeatedly buy.

Use the Data When You Restock

This is where sales-by-price-range data becomes more than an interesting report.

It can help you decide what to buy.

If cards between $50 and $100 consistently have strong sell-through at your table, that gives you useful information when someone brings you a collection.

You may be willing to buy more aggressively in that range because you already know you have customers for it.

On the other hand, if a certain price range constantly sits in your cases, you may want to be more selective before putting additional money into similar inventory.

Now your purchasing decisions are based on what your customers actually buy from you, not what you think they buy.

This Is Why VendorStax Tracks Price Ranges

We built the Sales by Price Range report into VendorStax because this becomes difficult to track manually once you have hundreds or thousands of cards.

VendorStax breaks your sales into price ranges starting at $5 and below and continuing through $5,000 and above.

More importantly, it tracks sell-through so you can compare the number of cards sold against how much inventory you actually had available in that range.

You may discover that your $25 to $50 cards generate the most transactions while your $100 to $250 inventory has the strongest sell-through.

Those are two different pieces of information, and both matter.

Do Not Let One Number Run Your Business

Sales count, revenue, profit, and sell-through answer different questions.

One $2,000 sale may generate more revenue than twenty $50 sales, but that does not automatically mean you should fill your next case with $2,000 cards.

Likewise, selling fifty inexpensive cards does not automatically mean inexpensive cards are where you should put your next inventory dollars.

Look at what sold, how much you had available, what margin you made, and how quickly that inventory moved.

The vendors we spoke with who were guessing about their strongest price range were not doing anything unusual. Most small vendors simply have not had an easy way to track it.

But once you have the data, guessing becomes unnecessary.

The goal is not simply to know which price range sold the most cards. It is to know which parts of your inventory deserve more of your money.