Buylist software: why 30 seconds a card is too slow

Three vendors currently own the search results for "buylist software": Storepass, SortSwift, and ShadowPOS. Each publishes a features page. Each page describes what its own product does. None of the three publishes a real, independent speed comparison against the other two. A store evaluating buylist software today has no neutral source that says which one actually processes a card faster.

That gap matters because buylist software isn't really being sold on features. It's being sold on speed. The features (offer calculation, price sourcing, payout method) are close to identical across all three vendors. The difference that shows up on a store's floor is how many seconds it takes staff to move one card from the customer's stack into a priced, logged buylist entry.

The number to measure against: 30 seconds a card

TCG Sync states the benchmark plainly: if intake takes more than 30 seconds per card, the buylist is bleeding staff time. That's a useful line to hold software against, because it turns a vague complaint ("buylist is slow") into a number a store can actually clock with a stopwatch on its own counter.

Thirty seconds covers scan or lookup, price display, condition call, and log entry, done once per card. Under that number, a staffer clears a 40-card walk-in stack in about 20 minutes. Over it, the same stack runs past 30 minutes, and the customer at the counter notices before the store does.

Where the 30 seconds actually goes

Intake speed isn't one step, it's four: identifying the card (scan or manual lookup), pulling a price (cached or live), calling condition (visual check against a tier), and logging the entry. Buylist software claims to speed up all four. In practice, the biggest single lever is usually the first one, because a bad scan or a manual name lookup adds seconds to every card in the stack, not just the slow ones.

Scanners that actually work for bulk intake covers that first step directly. Intake speed depends on which scanner is doing the identification, and a scanner that mis-reads or requires a manual correction adds seconds back onto every card it touches, no matter how fast the software behind it calculates a price.

Vendor claims worth reading carefully

Storepass cites more than 350,000 buylist submissions processed through its platform. That's Storepass's own claim about its own volume, not a number verified by an outside source, and it describes total submissions, not a per-card speed figure. A high submission count says the product has users. It doesn't say how many seconds each of those submissions took.

That's the pattern across all three vendors: real feature lists, real claimed scale, no benchmark that lets a store compare intake speed directly. Until one exists, time the software yourself against the 30-second line, on your own counter, with your own stack of cards.

Intake speed is half the physical bottleneck, not all of it

Buylist intake and outbound order pulling are the same underlying problem: getting a physical card in or out of the store as fast as the software will allow. Hoard's Pull Sessions workflow was built for the outbound half of that same bottleneck, moving a card off the shelf and into an order as fast as intake is supposed to move it off the counter and into inventory.

Once a card is intaken and priced, it doesn't stay static. It eventually sells, and then pulling and shipping orders once inventory is synced is a separate bottleneck, covered in Hoard's fulfillment content. Fast intake without fast fulfillment on the other end just moves the slow point further down the chain instead of removing it.

Sources: TCG Sync: TCG Inventory Management Guide · Storepass