Three Competitors

    Upon conducting some research, I was able to identify three competitors to my business idea for selling Magic The Gathering (MTG) cards as individual cards by themselves. This is commonly referred to as "selling singles". If Magic Greeting Cards is to get off the ground, it'll have to be able to go toe to toe with these other companies selling singles. Lets take a look at the following businesses. 

  1. The Magic Cove
    • An eBay only business that purely sells MTG cards. What you see is what you get, and there isn't much depth to this particular business. However, there eBay page has 7.2 k sales and 99.9% positive ratings.
  2. Card Kingdom
    • The business that I used to work for opening card packs. Card Kingdom has 4 physical storefronts and their own online website. Their website offers not only card singles, but pre-made starter decks. However, all of their starter decks are currently sold out. Each sales page for a given cards has a number of recommended products, much like Amazon's "people who bought this, also bought" recommendations. 
  3. Laughing Dragon MTG 
    • A store with a singular store in Issaquah, WA, that also has an online shop and an eBay presence. Laughing Dragon resells official MTG booster packs as well as sells MTG singles. Their website is much more simple than Card Kingdom, but their eBay page has 80K items sold with 99.6% positive feedback.

Looking at these competitors, it seems like their is enough business to allow multiple companies to do business in this market. There's plenty of small eBay sellers alongside these larger competitors. However, I do want to compete, and I think that there are a few key ways to do that. One is to have starter decks, and to keep them in stock. Only one competitor, Card Kingdom, assembled their own starter decks -- but they don't currently have them in stock. Another key competitive strategy is to focus on keeping the most popular cards in stock. Many of these companies had cards that were "out of stock", which means that for the rarest cards people will need to shop around. Making sure to have the most popular cards might take some extra money to buy out eBay listings or other marketplace websites, but it'll pull people to our website. Once they plan on purchasing one card from us, it's highly likely that they'll purchase their other cards from us as well to avoid having to pay for shipping from multiple companies. 

Lastly, I'll stay competitive with a hybrid model that synergizes with storefront shops, rather than competes with them. I'll sell my company as a service to manage the inventory of Magic The Gathering cards for comic shops in the area so they can focus on their other products. That way, I can tap into the business of people who want to support their local shop.

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