Software for a Pokémon Card Shop: What It Must Handle

In nearly every French card shop, Pokémon is the range that moves the most. It is also the hardest to manage: frequent releases, tight allocations, and thousands of single cards that differ in condition, language and set. Here is what software must do to keep up.

Sealed: displays, ETBs, boxes

Sealed product behaves like ordinary stock, with one catch: references look alike and change every couple of months. A set's display, its Elite Trainer Box and its bundle carry similar names at very different prices.

What software must bring: a catalogue already filled in, with the product image. Searching for a set name and seeing the box on screen prevents entry mistakes on a busy Saturday.

Single cards, the real subject

A Pokémon shop selling singles easily handles several thousand references. Each exists in several conditions, several languages, sometimes several printings. This is where a supermarket till stops.

• Condition: NM, LP, MP, HP, DMG — two copies of the same card are not worth the same.
• Language: French, English and Japanese differ in demand and in value.
• Set: a card from an old set has nothing to do with its reprint.
• Grading: a card in a PSA or CGC slab is a product of its own, with its own price.

Software must therefore carry a card catalogue, with the image and a reference price from Cardmarket, rather than a free-text field the clerk fills in by hand.

Buying from private sellers

Buybacks are a serious margin lever on Pokémon, because collections have been sitting in cupboards for twenty-five years. Two obligations apply in France.

• The police register: every second-hand purchase from a private seller must be recorded, with the seller's identity.
• Margin VAT (French art. 297 A): on second-hand goods, VAT applies to the margin, not the sale price.
• The legal cash ceiling applies as it does to any purchase.

Software that does not keep both registers leaves the work to you by hand, and the mistake shows up at an inspection, not at the sale.

Releases and pre-orders

Pokémon ships several sets a year, and the quantities received are rarely the ones ordered. A pre-order then becomes a commitment: if you promised ten displays and six arrive, you need to know who paid first.

Good practice is to reserve stock as soon as the order is taken, collect a deposit, and alert the customer on release day. Without a reservation, the product stays sellable on the shelf and goes out twice.

Tournaments

To be precise: official Pokémon results go through TOM and Play! Tools, The Pokémon Company's own tools, which expose no API. No shop software replaces them.

What software can do is the rest: sign players up, take entry fees through the till like any sale, track prizes, and export the participant list.

And compliance

In France, any POS software must be NF525 compliant: sales are tamper-proof, chained, and a daily Z closing is produced. None of this is specific to Pokémon, but none of it is optional.

Echo TCG was designed and studied for card shops only: built-in Pokémon catalogue with images and Cardmarket prices, conditions and languages, buybacks with a police register and automatic margin VAT.