Police Register for Secondhand Goods: A Buyback Duty

A customer walks in with a binder of Pokemon cards. You quote a price, you pay, the deal is done. One step usually gets skipped: traceability. As soon as a shop buys secondhand goods to resell them, and card buybacks count, it falls under a specific obligation: the police register for movable goods. It's rarely a TCG owner's first reflex, yet it's the thing that can cause trouble during an inspection.

What is the police register?

The police register is a record that merchants buying secondhand movable goods for resale must keep. Card buybacks fall squarely within it: you buy a used card from an individual, you put it back up for sale. That's exactly the kind of operation it covers.

Its purpose isn't paperwork for its own sake. The register exists to fight against handling stolen goods: it lets authorities trace an item's origin and the identity of the person who sold it. A stolen card that resurfaces in a shop must be traceable back to its seller.

What to record at every buyback

The register must make it possible to identify both the item and the seller. In practice, at each buyback transaction, you note:

• The seller's identity: name, and a note that an ID document was presented
• A description of the item bought back: what it is, in quantity and in kind
• The purchase price of the transaction

For a TCG shop, that means not settling for an amount scribbled in a notebook. A used Magic card, a batch of Yu-Gi-Oh! duplicates, a sealed display bought from an individual: each entry must link an identifiable item to an identified seller and a price.

Keeping, retention and inspection

The register must be kept available to the authorities. Police and gendarmerie can review it as part of efforts against handling stolen goods. So it has to be retained and accessible, not reconstructed from memory the day someone asks for it.

The exact terms, the cases precisely concerned, the required entries and the retention period can depend on the applicable regulations and any local obligations. The safest move is to check with your prefecture or town hall to confirm what applies to your situation and your municipality. Don't assume a register kept by instinct covers everything.

Automating the register so nothing slips

The trap, at the counter, is the rush. Mid-day, between two sales, you buy back fast and forget to note an ID or a description. A few weeks later, the register has gaps. The good practice is to tie the buyback entry to the register entry: one action, not two.

That's Echo TCG's approach: for every buyback recorded in the software, the electronic police register is generated automatically, with the seller's identity, the item description and the price. Traceability follows the transaction instead of depending on a separate manual entry.

The police register isn't an optional formality of buybacks: it's the direct counterpart to the right to resell secondhand goods. Better to keep it cleanly from the first transaction than to rebuild it later. Check what applies specifically to your shop, then build the habit into your counter routine.

This article is informational and does not replace the advice of an accountant or a lawyer.