Your shop guide

This guide is for shops only. It explains the panel you see under My shop and, above all, the four or five rules that decide whether your items appear on the site — the ones you cannot work out by looking at the screen.

First, if you have just started

Start with one game, not the whole shop.

Add three by hand with Add item, see how they look on the game's page, and upload the rest in one go with Import catalogue once you are happy. A first attempt at three hundred lines that goes wrong is discouraging; three games that work in two minutes are not.

When one of your items shows

An item appears on a game's page when four things are true at once. The On the site column says SHOWING or NOT SHOWING, and Why shows the three switches that decide it.

  1. For sale. You own it but you are not selling it: a piece of your own collection, something reserved, something you have not priced yet.
  2. In stock. It sold, but you do not want to delete it because it will come back.
  3. Visible. The manual switch, for when you want to pull something for a while without touching anything else.
  4. Your catalogue is up to date. This is the one that surprises everybody, so it gets its own section.

The three switches read the same way: lit means yes. One switch off is enough to keep the item out of sight.

The 45-day rule

If nobody confirms your catalogue for 45 days, your items stop showing.

It is not a punishment, it is the only honest thing to do: somebody drives across a city for a cartridge that sold in the spring, and they do not blame you, they blame this site. A catalogue nobody has confirmed in six weeks cannot be presented as if it were from this morning.

Two ways to keep it counting as current

Work on it. Change a price, flick a switch, add an item, upload a batch. Anything counts, and you do not have to re-import anything.

Or say it is still right. If you hold a thousand rare pieces and this month nothing sold and no price moved, your catalogue is correct and there is nothing to edit. That is what the "My catalogue is still current" button is for: one click, and another 45 days count.

You do not have to touch a thousand items. You never did — but until now the only way out was to fake an edit, and that is not something we want to ask of you.

What you are confirming

That what you have published is still right today: the prices, what you have left, and what is still for sale. It is a statement with your name behind it, so if you know something has gone, take it down first.

You get warned first, and by e-mail

A week before you go dark the notice appears at the top of the panel with the button next to it, and you get an e-mail. If it still slips past you, we write again on the day it happens, and the notice stays in the panel in red with the same button: one click fixes it, with nothing to re-upload.

Two e-mails and no more. What we are asking for takes one button press, and a weekly reminder about that is something you learn not to read.

Adding an item

Add item opens a search. Type the name, pick the game from the list, say which platform and region it is, and price it.

Picking the game from the list matters: that is what attaches your offer to that exact page, which is where your customers will see it.

The condition works itself out

You do not choose "loose", "complete" or "new": you tick which pieces it has — box, manual, complete, sealed — and the rung follows from that. It tells you underneath where it landed.

It works this way because it is the same calculation collectors use to value their own copies. If you decided the rung your way and they decided it theirs, your price and their reference would be talking about different things.

Ticking Complete is usually enough: what a complete copy contains depends on the game, and many recent releases never had a manual.

The purchase price is yours

You can note it down and it stays here. It is your margin: it appears on no page, no customer sees it, and it enters no public figure.

The note, the quantity and the photo

Pressing an item's condition opens its panel, and there are three more things there:

Note about this copy. It shows on the game's page, next to your price. It is what a price cannot say: "spine wear on the box", "German manual", "tested and working", "comes with a protector". It is what makes somebody choose your offer over another one at the same price.

How many you have. Leave it empty if you do not count them — that is normal in retro, where almost everything is one of a kind. If you put a number, the item takes itself off sale when it reaches zero, and buyers are told when you have more than one. Careful: empty and zero are not the same. Empty is "I do not count these"; zero is "there are none left".

Photo of your copy. The big image on the page is the game's cover. This one is yours — the actual cartridge and box you are selling — and in retro that says more about condition than anything else.

Finding things in your catalogue

Next to the search box there are two filters that answer the usual question, "what have I got wrong?":

And a third one by platform, listing the ones you actually hold, so you can work shelf by shelf.

Taking your catalogue with you

Export my catalogue downloads everything in the same format the import reads. So the natural route with a lot of items is export, edit in a spreadsheet, import again.

Your data is yours and you can take it out whenever you like.

Working in bulk

Tick the boxes on the right and a bar appears. As well as raising or lowering prices, you can mark out of stock, mark in stock and hide everything you ticked at once.

After a fair where you sold twenty things, that is the difference between one minute and twenty.

The activity window

Above the funnel you can choose 7, 30 or 90 days. Comparing the week with the month is what tells you whether something is really working or whether it was a spike.

Importing your catalogue

For a big batch or for your whole list. One line per item:

game;platform;region;purchase;sale;for sale;condition;wear

Game, platform and region are required; the rest can be left out. The Download format, regions and platforms button gives you a file with every valid name, which beats guessing them.

The two modes, and the difference matters

Add to what I have. For a new batch. It touches nothing that was there before.

This list is my whole catalogue. Anything not on the list goes out of stock. It is the right mode when you export your whole inventory from your shop software, and it is the one to look at twice.

Check before importing

Check writes nothing. It tells you how many lines can be used, which cannot and why, and — the important one — how many of your items would go out of stock. That number is there so you see it before you confirm, not after.

Rejected lines

A rejected line is an absent line. In "whole catalogue" mode that means the item is withdrawn, not merely left un-updated. That is why the warning separates the two figures: how many go because you took them off the list, and how many go because their line had a typo.

You get all of them on screen with their reason, and a button to copy them so you can fix them wherever your list lives.

"Not found under that exact name"

The name has to match the game in the database exactly. A near miss is not accepted, and that is deliberate: it would put your price on somebody else's cartridge, on a page you are paying to appear on.

When it happens you get Did you mean…? next to the rejection, with the closest titles. Copy whichever is right and upload that line again.

If it goes wrong: undo

For 24 hours after an import, Undo appears at the top of the panel. It puts your catalogue back exactly as it was just before that import.

Only the last import can be undone, and anything you changed by hand since then is lost. It is the safety net for the file exported with commas instead of semicolons, not a time machine.

Changing prices

In the table, a price is edited where you read it: type over it and press Enter.

For several at once, tick the boxes on the right and use the bar that appears: choose Raise or Lower and a percentage. It only affects what you ticked, never "everything that was in the search".

Items with no price are left alone, and it tells you so.

Your price changes are recorded

Every time you change a price, the date and the figure are noted. It goes towards a European price reference by region and condition, which does not really exist today.

Anything published from it is always aggregated and unattributed: it never shows which shop asks what. And nothing is aggregated until at least three different shops sit behind a figure, because with fewer it is not a market, it is one shop's price.

Removing an item

The bin at the end of the row. If nobody has ever seen that offer — you have just added it wrong, say — it is deleted. If it has had views, it is hidden rather than deleted, because those views are part of what you are paying to see.

If you only want it gone for a while, you do not need the bin: turn Visible off.

Where your button goes

Under Your details you choose what happens when somebody presses your offer's button: your website, your Wallapop, your eBay, your Instagram, your Facebook, or your contact details.

Choose where somebody can actually buy. A shop with a shop-window website and real selling through Wallapop was getting the visit exactly where nothing can be bought.

You can only choose a channel you have filled in. If you empty it later the button does not go dead: it falls back to the usual order — website, Wallapop, eBay — and if you have none of those, it shows your contact details.

Activity: what is bringing you people

Appearances is how many times you showed up on a game's page. They opened you is how many times somebody expanded your offer. Contacts is how many times they pressed your button.

Contacts is not sales. The sale happens in your shop and this cannot see it. If it said "sales", the first time you balanced your till you would find it did not match and you would stop believing everything else.

Demand you don't cover is the most useful thing on this tab: games people here have on their wishlists that you do not have in stock. It is a list of what to buy.

Your subscription

Next to your shop's name there is a pill with its status. Press it and you see since when you have been registered and until when.

A month out and a week out it changes colour, opens by itself and shows a warning. You also get an e-mail at those same moments, and another on the day it expires: they are the same thing said twice, not two separate warnings.

When it expires, your catalogue is not deleted. Your items stop appearing on game pages and your shop leaves the directory, but everything stays exactly as it is and comes back as soon as you renew. Your price history is kept too.

Questions we get

Can I see who looked at my offers? No, and it is not a technical limitation: it is not recorded. You know how many, not who.

Can people buy from here? No. This site brings people to your shop; you make the sale, however you like. That is why we neither ask for nor keep any buyer's details.

I have a game that is not in the database. Search for it in Add item: the list includes games that are not in IGDB. If it still does not appear, write to us and we will add it.

Can I list the same game twice? Yes, if they are different copies: a loose one and a complete one are two products and can coexist. Two identical ones — same game, platform, region and condition — no; that is what a stock quantity would be for, and we do not track one today.