This is the first entry, so here's the premise: we're going to write down what it actually takes to build a Pokémon bulk business, as it happens, not after the fact when the story's been smoothed out. If you're thinking about doing this yourself, the real numbers are more useful than the highlight reel.
The first two weeks, in numbers
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Domain & infrastructure
celestetcg.com bought, Cloudflare account set up separate from anything else we run.
Aug1
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Site & inventory app live
The public site went up on the 2nd. The password protected inventory app that runs the whole operation went up the day after.
Aug2 to 3
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First full audit
978 active eBay listings checked line by line against the real inventory. Full breakdown below.
Aug13
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Live listings today
Where the count stands as of this post, still climbing.
Aug 161,686
The count didn't stop at 1,686. Here's the same climb through today:
What almost 1,700 listings taught us
On August 13 we ran a full audit: every one of the 978 active listings at the time, checked against what the inventory actually says, not just price and quantity. The tool we sync with only pushes price and quantity to eBay automatically. Descriptions have to be pushed on their own, and 501 of them had quietly drifted out of sync with the real inventory while the tool kept updating everything else.
Nothing dangerous, mostly small drift: 48 listings still said regular on a card that's actually reverse holo, a couple had the wrong condition written into the description text even though the structured listing was correct, and about half didn't mention that a multi copy listing's photo is representative rather than the exact card. All 501 got fixed. The listing count also grew mid audit, so the final check covered 1,240 listings, all clean.
The fix wasn't just correcting the 501, it was closing the actual gap: the sync process now has to update the public description too, not just price and quantity, so this doesn't quietly happen again.
The $129.99 misprint
One of the more interesting pulls sitting in inventory is a Magikarp with a factory ink blob sitting right on top of the printed name, otherwise near mint. It's listed at $129.99 as a misprint, not a defect. The audit's one real content note on this listing: the title said misprint, but the description didn't explain what that actually meant. Fixed it so anyone paying that price for a flaw knows exactly what they're paying for and why it's worth it instead of being a reason to walk away.
That's entry one. Next one will cover whatever the week after this one actually looks like, numbers included either way.
What these numbers include
The figures behind Two weeks in: from zero to 1,686 cards live come from Celeste TCG's operating inventory, not a hypothetical store. They describe the listings and sales visible at the time of the count. They do not describe every Pokémon seller, and they should not be stretched into an industry average. Their value is narrower and more useful: they show what happened inside one real workflow.
Frequently asked questions
- Are the reported numbers projections?
No. They come from the store's first two weeks of live inventory and completed work.
- What changed after the first two weeks?
Scanning, listing and quality checks were adjusted around the bottlenecks measured in real orders.
