TCG Empire opens warehouse to keep up with Temu sales

Trading card seller TCG Empire started with founders merging their own personal collections and selling at card shows; now, it’s a leading seller on the Temu online marketplace. TCG stands for trading card game. TCG Empire sells cards from different franchises, including Pokémon, Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh! and One Piece.

However, founder Joshua Howell told Digital Commerce 360 that “it’s mostly Pokémon and the other things are ancillary.” Howell started his business in January 2024 after having worked for a different card company. He had been flipping trading cards on the side for 13 years. By March 2024, TCG Empire had both a physical store and an ecommerce website.

“At first, it was pretty slow, and then once we got a grasp of things, opened our own storefront and then got distribution for TCG products and then Temu,” Howell told Digital Commerce 360. “Temu definitely helped us accelerate what we’re doing.” Howell said TCG Empire mainly uses its ecommerce website for bulk sourcing.

It has a form through which consumers can send their bulk cards. TCG Empire buys those cards. “We really didn’t focus much on our website because a lot of the sales are generated from other platforms because so many people use them,” Howell told Digital Commerce 360.

“It’s easier to get your name out there if you’re on, say, a website called TCG Player, which is all driven by trading cards. And then also eBay and then Amazon and also Walmart.” Global Online Marketplaces Database Leading 100 global online marketplaces.

Access up to 5 years of third-party (3P) and total GMV, company information, AOVs, conversion rates, number of sellers, and SKUs. Web sales range from $27 million to over $803 billion. View Details Temu accounts for most TCG Empire sales TCG Empire began selling through Temu in September 2025. Within a month, Temu became TCG Empire’s largest sales platform.

In six months, TCG Empire had sold more than 74,000 bundles of trading cards through the online marketplace. TCG Empire had become one of Temu’s best-selling local warehouse stores in the Games & Accessories category. Temu now accounts for more than 60% of TCG Empire sales, Howell said.

TCG Empire’s seller page on Temu features a tag for being the best-selling local warehouse store. | Image credit: Screenshot from seller page That demand led Howell and his team to open a 4,000-square-foot warehouse that now fulfills about 1,000 shipments a day.

Before selling on Temu, TCG Empire was fulfilling about 300 to 400 orders a day, on average, he said. TCG Empire opened the warehouse in January 2026 because Q4 2025 “was too crazy to do anything but fulfill orders for Temu.”

“It was supposed to be more of like a, ‘oh, we can sell on here if we have extra product’ kind of thing, but it actually was a lot more than that,” he said. Temu ranks No. 14 in Digital Commerce 360’s Global Online Marketplaces Database. The database ranks the 100 largest such marketplaces by third-party gross merchandise value (GMV).

Managing fulfillment costs Howell noted that he finds fulfillment easier through Temu than when selling via Walmart and Amazon. “Temu is very cut and dry as far as fulfilling orders, and it’s pretty easy to create listings on there, too,” Howell said.

The fulfillment margins through Amazon and Walmart are “just not as good as fulfilling it yourself,” he said. “The fees are so high.” He also said Temu helps figure out the pricing for each carrier and that it currently has the best prices as far as fulfillment. The closest U. S.

Postal Service location to TCG Empire’s warehouse is about two miles away, he said. TCG Empire does a daily drop off and pickup, he added. “If I shipped out the same product on Walmart, some of the orders are double the price as far as shipping,” he said.

How TCG Empire has grown its online sales One of the ways TCG Empire has grown its online sales — on its own site and via online marketplaces — is through custom Pokémon bundles. TCG Empire buys trading cards in bulk. Some of those cards are loose cards (already opened from packs), and others are sealed packs and boxes.

Each bundle that TCG Empire puts together includes what Howell called “a hit.” Essentially, a hit refers to more-desirable cards. That varies from buying a sealed pack of Pokémon cards, for example, which may or may not have a hit in it. “Most of the people are looking for the hits out of the pack,” Howell said. “Say you buy a booster box.

The most hits you can get of the newest set is — I want to say — 16. But there’s 36 packs in each box.” At most, he said, TCG Empire currently offers three hits in a single booster pack. “I grew up in the ‘90s and opened up Pokémon packs,” Howell said. “Back in the day, there were only 12 hits in a box with 36 packs, which is even worse than now.

And not pulling something cool, it’s kind of disheartening. But at least [with these bundles], you’re guaranteed something.” Do you rank in our databases? Submit your data and we’ll see where you f