Quick disclaimer before we get started: I’m not affiliated with CardTrader in any way- just a lowly US-based species collector too nervous (and honestly, busy) to ask someone to middleman several hundred bulk Piplup cards from CardMarket for them.
Recently I was looking for alternatives to CardMarket for the reasons outlined above, as well as not wanting to pay several dollars per card on the good old eBay for 10 cent commons in European languages I still needed for my species collection. Since I’m in the US, CardMarket isn’t an option, so I went searching for other ways to acquire my little penguins. This will be an honest review of the CardTrader website and user experience, and also hopefully a discussion starter since I haven’t seen anyone here talk about it yet.
First Impressions
Overall, the website has a clean layout- things are easy to find. Notably, I made my purchases on mobile, and the mobile version of the website is also easy to navigate. When searching for cards, you can also see all of the versions that card was printed in over to the side within the suggestions (see below). This function works similarly to Bulbapedia, ordering all of the cards with the same play stats together. However, this also includes card printings in different languages, separated by Eastern (Japanese, Korean, S-Chinese, etc) or Western (English, German, Italian, etc) set. These two are considered different versions, with the languages the card was printed in showing up under the specified version of the card.
Within my own purchase, I picked up a few playable staples in Japanese for a few different decks, and this type of sorting made it easy to find the cards I needed, even when searching for the English counterpart.
How the process works
Similar to other consolidation websites, you pick the items you want to purchase, they get shipped to a warehouse, the packages are consolidated into one, and it’s shipped out to you. CardTrader’s consolidation program is called CardTrader Zero.
You can keep adding items to your order (seemingly) indefinitely until you choose to ship everything out. I took advantage of this a few times, adding things as they became available or as I thought about them.
With Zero, you don’t pay for shipping from the seller to the warehouse- only from the warehouse to you based on your location, the total price of everything together, and the number of cards in your order. I’ve found this to be extremely reasonable- my order was $7.77 shipping from the Italian warehouse to me in the US for 126 (mostly) bulk cards.
The warehouse staff also check over your order contents as they arrive, and if the card doesn’t match what you purchased, whether that be version, language, or condition, they’ll acquire another copy for you for free and ship both cards to you. If a card doesn’t arrive from the seller, they’ll do the same thing- find you another one at no additional cost. Sometimes for rarer cards, they won’t be able to find a replacement (this happed with me with a few cards not arriving at the warehouse), and they’ll fully refund you instead.
From my experience, some cards can slip through the cracks in larger orders, but I was genuinely impressed with their customer service in making everything right when I reported the issue upon arrival. I’ll go into more detail on this below.
Making a Purchase
When going to a particular card, listings will be ordered by lowest price first. The language and condition are shown to the left, as well as the seller (cropped out for posting here just in case). On the right, you have the option for adding to your cart like a regular transaction (in blue) or cards that are eligible for the CardTrader Zero program in yellow.
All of these options can be filtered to find exactly what you’re looking for, and I found that the filtering system works fairly well. You can exclude and include items from your search- especially handy for me excluding English card listings.
As a quick note on the condition marker- I’ve found this to be pretty accurate for LP and NM cards, while the MP cards lean more toward HP in my opinion. Like I mentioned above, the warehouse staff were extremely picky with the NM cards, but not as much so with anything below LP. Two of my cards got replaced in this way- one with minor surface scratches I didn’t even notice until the card was under bright, direct light, and one with holo pockmarks. As per the policy stated above, I was shipped both the initial cards and the replacements at no additional cost.
On the actual purchase screen, you’ll have the standard total of items and cost, but they also note approximately when the item will be ready to ship from the warehouse. There is also a little warning if anything will take a particularly long time to ship.
After Purchasing
I didn’t take any screenshots of the order-in-progress screen (whoops), but the site gives you a running total of how many cards in the order have arrived at the warehouse, how many have shipped out and their tracking numbers, and the specifics for each card.
Some sellers were faster than others, but having the tracking numbers for each package was helpful for keeping track of how long it would be until everything arrived. CardTrader also sent an email at the end of each business day that one or more items arrived, so you wouldn’t have to keep checking the site for updates.
I placed several orders at different times, with the first being on August 21st and the latest on September 3rd. Everything was ready to ship on October 2nd, and I received my package in my mailbox on October 12th.
One card in the last order was the reason for nearly a month waiting time between ordering and shipping, but they warn you if anything will take longer than 3 weeks to ship to the warehouse on the purchase screen, so I was okay with this.
Resolving Order Issues
As mentioned, I did have a few issues with my order once it arrived. Out of 126 cards I ordered, I was missing three cards, two of the cards were in the wrong language, and two of the cards were the incorrect version (Astral Radiance printed two Scythers, and I was shipped the wrong ones).
Honestly, I wasn’t too upset, seeing as the cards were all bulk, but I went and submitted a ticket anyway.
The ticket screen was easy to fill in- there was a dropdown menu for the item in question, as well as the reason for ticket submission on each item. Not shown here, but on the previous screen, was a place to insert photos of incorrect cards. Also not shown in this screenshot was the seller the items were purchased from, and funnily enough, they were all the same seller. I particularly appreciate this, because one time isn’t a big deal, but if every mistake in my order was from the same seller (like in my case here), I know to avoid them in the future.
The next screen was as follows:
I decided to just keep the cards for a partial refund, since they were all bulk and it wasn’t worth it for me to ship four cards back to Italy for $1 refund. On more expensive orders/cards, this is a good policy, though.
About 12 hours later, I received an email confirming my ticked had been processed, and the incorrect and missing cards’ value was refunded to my account. Overall this was a painless process that took about 5 minutes out of my day, and left me feeling good about making any larger purchases with the site in the future (which I will be doing for the non-English alt arts soon-ish).
Overall Impressions
All in all, I was consistently and pleasantly surprised at the ease of purchasing from CardTrader. I made a large order of bulk cards to test the system with low stakes, and I can honestly say this was fantastic. I did have issues with my order, but they were solved within a day in a process that didn’t take forever, and I found myself not really minding that much. I got my money back and I didn’t have to deal with a bunch of individual sellers. Overall, I’m happy with my purchases and the overall experience, and will be purchasing from them again when cards I need come in stock.
I’d love to hear y’all’s thoughts on the site, any experiences if you’ve used it before, etc. CardTrader has apparently been around for a few years, but I just heard of it in August. I would have loved this last year when putting together the spreadsheet to tick off some bulk non-English things early.
Bonus photos of the thicc stack of cards that have been since added to the Piplup binder!
