Jump Ship Carefully

I’m going to make this very brief, because it’s super-late and I am EXHAUSTED.

TCGPlayer just announced TCGPlayer Pro. It looks to be a hastily-designed Crystal Commerce killer. The limitations so far are that it does not have a POS solution, and it does not support multi-channel integration, meaning that you can’t use it to sell on Amazon or eBay.

For many small stores, however, this is just the thing.

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The retailer forum threads predictably caught on fire and are still burning brightly at 200+ posts. Many of the posts are from retailers saying that they are getting up early tomorrow morning to go into work and switch immediately to TCGPlayer Pro. I have some advice for my tier:

  • DON’T jump immediately. You have waited this long, so you can wait three or four more days. The next 48 hours are going to be the sort of madness you can only get by announcing a major rollout and declaring that it’s available RIGHT NOW. You don’t have to do anything right now. You can afford to wait to make sure you’re doing it right.
  • DO immediately do a backup/export of your inventory and sales data. Assume that your Crystal Commerce data could become temporarily or permanently unavailable at any time. This is going to be a period of fundamental change for Crystal Commerce, and whether they will survive it is an open question. I will say only that I backed up my data in 2012 before I told Crystal Commerce that I was intending to leave, and I wound up being very happy that I did so.
  • DO remember to be a professional and a human being. From a business perspective, a company has to do a lot of things wrong to get to the point where 150+ of their customers will sit in a conference room and cheer their demise. Crystal Commerce did it to themselves. From a personal perspective, these are real people with real needs and fears. Not everyone at that company made the decisions that caused you to hate them. PLEASE be professional in your contacts with them, because you’re a professional. If that appeal doesn’t resonate, I’d ask you to treat them humanely, because you’re both humans. Your business has nothing to gain from you kicking them on your way out the door.
  • DO talk to your TCGPlayer onboarding person about your POS options. Right now those aren’t there. I don’t know if TCGPlayer is planning a POS rollout, but my hope is that they would move toward openness in allowing others to integrate with their platform. That would allow me to keep using my point of sale software. It would allow IMP POS to pivot into a POS solution that works great for retailers. It would allow retailers still on software like Lightspeed to have modules developed that allow for integration. Your voice will matter for this. They are listening. (Also, tell them that Paul from Too Lazy To Fail wants to fly out to them and talk to them about their plans for Video Game integration. We can make a lot of money together, guys! Let’s do this.)