Selling guide

1. Open your shop

To sell, apply to sell on Trading Card Lane. Tell us about your business, choose your shop name and a web address, then verify your identity and bank details with Stripe. We review every application and email you when your shop is approved. Once approved, your shop lives at your-name.tradingcardlane.com as well as on the marketplace. While you wait you can design your shop and add draft listings, but nothing is public until we approve you. You can change the look later in your shop settings: logo, banner, colours, a theme and the sections on your home page, such as featured cards and collections like "Meta staples".

2. Set up payouts with Stripe

We pay sellers through Stripe. From your dashboard, choose Connect with Stripe and follow Stripe's steps: your name or business details, date of birth, address and the bank account to be paid into. Stripe checks your identity, usually within minutes.

You can save drafts straight away, but listings go live only once Stripe has approved your account.

3. List a card

1. Go to New listing and search the catalogue by card name or set code (for example LOB-EN001). Pick the exact printing and rarity.
2. Choose the condition honestly using our condition scale, plus edition and language. For graded slabs, add the grading company, grade and certificate number; we check certificates where the grader allows it.
3. Choose fixed price (set a price and quantity) or auction (a start price and a length of 1, 3, 5, 7 or 10 days). The lowest price is £0.50. The fee preview shows exactly what you'll receive.
4. Add a description and any photos of your own, then publish.

Once an auction has bids, only its description can be changed.

4. Live Verify your cards

A Live Verified badge tells buyers you have the exact card and shows its real condition. Verified listings appear first in "Newly verified" and can be filtered for in search, and the captures are your best evidence if a buyer opens a dispute.

1. In Listings, click Verify on a listing. A QR code and a short code appear on your computer.
2. Scan the QR code with your phone camera and open the link in Safari or Chrome (not inside Instagram, WhatsApp or similar apps).
3. Write the short code on a piece of paper and place it next to the card.
4. Take the front, then the back, then a 3-second video tilting the card so the foil catches the light. The phone tells you if a photo is blurry or has glare.
5. Your computer updates as each capture arrives, and the badge appears when the card is done.

Verifying many cards at once

Tick several listings and choose Verify selected. Your phone walks you through them one after another; you can skip a card and come back to it.

Good to know

• Open the QR link within 10 minutes. Only the first phone that starts the camera can use it.
• Photos can only be taken live; uploads from your camera roll aren't possible, and reused photos are rejected.
• A verification lasts 60 days. After that the badge shows "Verification expired", and we send a daily reminder with a one-click session to re-verify all your expired cards together.
• Use soft, even light and take cards out of shiny sleeves to avoid glare.

5. Postage and dispatch

• Set your postage price, an optional free-postage threshold and your dispatch time in your shop settings. You keep all postage; there's no fee on it.
• Buyers pay one postage charge per shop per checkout, however many of your cards they buy.
• Pack every card in a sleeve and a rigid top-loader or card mailer. Use a tracked service for valuable cards.
• When you've posted an order, mark it as shipped in Orders and add the tracking number.

6. Getting paid

• We release an order's money when the buyer confirms delivery, or automatically 10 days after you mark it as shipped.
• Stripe then pays it into your bank account on your payout schedule. See every payout and fee in Payouts.
• Fees and refunds are explained on the fees page. If your income from sales passes HMRC's reporting threshold, we report it to HMRC as the law requires and send you a copy. We ask for your tax details when you get close to it: add them in Store → Tax info.

7. Reviews and disputes

Buyers can review you once an order is delivered. If something goes wrong, they can open a dispute up to 14 days after delivery. We email you, hold the payout for that order and you can reply from the order page with tracking, packing photos or anything else that helps. Our team decides using your Live Verified captures as evidence. See buyer protection.

8. Your own web address

Want your shop at an address like shop.yourcards.co.uk? You need a domain from any registrar (for example 123 Reg, Namecheap or Cloudflare).

1. On your domain settings page, enter the address. We recommend a subdomain such as shop.yourcards.co.uk rather than the bare yourcards.co.uk.
2. At your registrar, add a CNAME record: name shop, value tradingcardlane-web.onrender.com.
3. Back on the domain settings page, check the status. DNS changes can take from a few minutes up to a day. We set up the secure certificate (https) automatically.

If you must use the bare domain, your registrar needs to support ALIAS or ANAME records, or you can add an A record pointing to 216.24.57.1. With an active domain you can also make your own address the main (canonical) address for search engines.

9. Ad tracking and product feeds

In Marketing, paste your Meta Pixel ID, Google Analytics and Google Ads IDs, and TikTok Pixel ID. You only enter IDs; we add the official tags for you. They load only on your shop and checkout pages for your items, and only for shoppers who accept cookies. Add your Conversions API and Measurement Protocol keys too and we'll send purchases from our servers as well, for more reliable measurement.

The same page gives you product feed links for Google Merchant Center and Meta Commerce Manager. They update automatically: sold cards show as out of stock straight away, so you don't pay for ads on cards you no longer have.

10. Promoted listings

In Promotions you can boost listings to appear in the Sponsored slots above marketplace search results. You pay the extra percentage only when a boosted listing sells through the marketplace. The fee preview shows the combined fee before you confirm. More on the fees page.

Prefer to work by chat? Connect an AI assistant such as Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor to your shop.

Stuck? Email [email protected].