What to put on a public shelf
Somebody saw one of your cards, liked it, and tapped the link. What they find in the next four seconds decides whether you hear from them. Almost everything written about selling cards online is about what a card is worth. This is the question underneath that one: which of your cards belong on a page a stranger opens, and what has to be on each one before a price becomes a sale.
It applies to any public shelf — a Facebook shop, an Instagram highlight, a Whatnot profile, a link in a bio. Nothing in sections 1 to 7 needs particular software.
In this guide
1. A shelf is not your inventory
The first instinct with a public page is to put everything on it. More cards, more chances. It does the opposite. A stranger scrolling four hundred cards is not shopping, they are being handed a filing cabinet, and the usual response to a filing cabinet is to close the tab.
A public shelf does one specific job. Somebody has already seen one card of yours somewhere — a marketplace listing, a post, a table at a show — and the link answers what else have you got without you typing it out again. That is the whole function. It is a good answer to that question, not a complete one.
Thirty cards that each make sense to a stranger beat four hundred that only make sense to you. The cards you leave off are not hidden; they are still yours to sell at a table, in a trade, or one at a time on a marketplace where a single listing gets its own audience.
2. Which cards earn a place
A card earns a place on a public shelf when a stranger can want it without asking you anything. In practice that is four tests, and a card has to pass all four:
- It is recognisable. Somebody who is not you can tell what it is from the name and the picture. A famous character, a known set, a sealed product with a box people have seen.
- It photographs honestly. You are willing to show it at full size. If the real reason a card is cheap is a crease you would rather not photograph, it belongs in a lot or at a table, not on a page where the photo is the entire sales pitch.
- You know what it is worth today. Not roughly, not "I'd have to look". If you would need an hour to answer, a buyer who asks gets an hour of silence, and they will not wait.
- It is actually still yours. Not promised to somebody at the last show, not half of a trade you have agreed in a message thread, not sitting at a grader. A shelf that shows a card you cannot send is worse than a shelf without it.
Three kinds of card quietly cost you if you put them up anyway:
- Cards you would rather trade than sell. Listing one at a number invites an offer at that number. If what you actually want is the thing somebody would swap for it, the public page is the wrong room for that conversation.
- Bulk. A hundred commons at a dollar each is a hundred rows a buyer scrolls past to reach the two cards they came for. If you want to move bulk, move it as one lot with one price and one photo of the stack.
- Anything you are unsure about. Uncertain authenticity, uncertain grade, uncertain whether the variant is the valuable one. Uncertainty costs more on a public page than it does in person, because in person you can say it out loud.
3. The blank that stops it working
A shelf with no prices on it is a catalogue, and a catalogue does not sell anything. It converts every interested stranger into somebody who now has to message you to find out whether they can afford the card — and most of them do not message. They were curious, not committed. The price is what turns curiosity into a decision, and without it there is no decision available to make.
This is worth saying plainly because leaving prices off is almost never a decision anybody makes on purpose. It happens by default. Price is usually an optional field, it sits next to the fields you have to fill in to get the card into your records at all, and nothing goes wrong at the moment you skip it. The consequence shows up later, on a page you are not looking at, to a person you never hear from.
Worth separating: what you paid and what you are asking are two different numbers, and only one of them is anybody else's business. Keep the cost attached to the card for your own margin, and keep it off the page. If your records only hold one number per card, you will eventually either publish your cost or lose track of it.
If you genuinely do not want a number on a particular card, that card has failed test three in section 2. Take it off the shelf rather than publishing it priceless.
4. What a price has to clear
Two numbers decide a price, and most advice only covers the first one.
The market number comes from what the card actually sold for, not what it is listed at. Asking prices are what people hope; sold prices are what happened. Match the variant, the set, the printing and the condition exactly — the same character in a different set, or the reverse holo instead of the regular, is a different card with a different price. For graded cards, the grade and the grading company both move the number, and a 9 is not a 10 in a slightly worse mood.
The floor is yours, and it is not what you paid. It is what you paid plus everything it took to get the card to the point of sale:
| What goes into the floor | Why it is easy to forget |
|---|---|
| What you paid | Obvious, and often unrecorded by the time you are pricing. |
| Grading | Per-card fee plus the shipping both ways. It belongs to this card, not to the month. |
| Platform fee | A percentage of the sale, so it rises with the price and never appears on the invoice you paid. |
| Shipping and materials | Sleeve, toploader, mailer, postage. Small per card, and the reason a cheap card can lose money. |
A price above the market number does not sell. A price below the floor sells and costs you money, which is worse, because it feels like a good day. The usable range is between them, and when the floor is above the market number the honest answer is that this card is not for sale yet.
This is also the argument for keeping what you paid attached to each card rather than in a pile of receipts. A floor you have to reconstruct is a floor you will not check, and a floor you do not check is a floor you go under. There is more on that in the bookkeeping guide, and on the grading half in the money that is at PSA.
5. What else has to be on the card
A stranger decides from four things, and all four have to be there before the price can do its job.
- A photo of the actual card. Not a stock image from a database. People buying singles are buying this copy, and a stock image reads as either carelessness or something being hidden. Plain background, even light, no flash, fill the frame.
- The set and the card number. This is what makes a card findable and comparable. "Charizard" is a character; the set and number are the card.
- Condition, in the words everybody uses. Near Mint, Lightly Played, and so on. If you are not sure, say the thing you can see — a soft corner, a surface scratch — rather than picking a grade you might have to argue about afterwards.
- For graded cards: the company, the grade and the certification number. The cert number is the one that matters, because it is the only part a buyer can check themselves before paying you. Showing it converts trust into verification, which is a much cheaper thing to ask of a stranger.
6. Taking things off
The fastest way to make a public shelf useless is to leave sold cards on it. Somebody opens the link, finds the card they wanted, messages you, and learns it went at a show two weeks ago. That costs you more than the sale — it costs you the next time they would have checked.
The rule worth keeping is that a card comes off the shelf at the moment it leaves your hands, not at the end of the day and not when you next sit down with the laptop. In practice this is only sustainable if the same action that records the sale also takes the card off the shelf. If those are two separate jobs, the second one is the one that does not get done, and a shelf that is wrong is worse than no shelf.
The same applies to a card you have sent for grading. It is gone for months and it cannot be bought, so it should not be shown as available.
7. Where the link goes
A public shelf earns nothing sitting there. It works in three places, and all three are moments when somebody has already shown interest:
- At the end of a marketplace listing. One line: more of my cards, with the link. The person reading it is already looking at one of your cards.
- In your profile. The bio link on whichever account people find you through. It is the only place a stranger can look you up without asking.
- In the conversation. When somebody asks whether you have anything else, the link is a better answer than a list typed from memory, and it stays correct after the conversation ends.
One link that is right beats thirty posts that go stale. That is the entire argument for a shelf over a feed: a feed is a record of what you had, and a shelf is a statement about what you have.
8. Where the software comes in
Everything above works with a notebook and a free marketplace account. What software changes is whether the shelf stays true without you maintaining it, which is section 6's problem and the one that actually decides whether this is worth doing.
Clody publishes a storefront from a selection you make — you choose which of your cards go on it rather than publishing your inventory — and it shows only cards still in stock. Record a sale at a table and the card is off the public page as part of the same action, because the sale and the shelf are reading the same record.
The storefront price is its own field, separate from what you paid. Cost stays private and never appears on the public page. The price field is optional, which is section 3's trap in the product as much as anywhere else: a card with no price set appears on your shelf with nothing where the number should be. If you take one thing from this guide into whatever you use, let it be that filling that field in is the difference between a shop and a catalogue.
Two honest limits. There is no automatic pricing in it — the market number in section 4 is yours to decide, from sold comps, and nothing here looks it up for you. And the storefront is part of the paid plan, so if a plan lapses the page goes quiet while the link stays live; if you have put that link in a bio, it is worth knowing which way that fails.
Next: listing the cards you already have, which covers the other half — the marketplace listing that sends people to the shelf in the first place.