Every seller knows this box. It sits next to the desk, it fills up with every opened display, and every time you look at it you think the same thing: that is money sitting there. Someone just needs to list it.
The reason it is still sitting there is not laziness. It is the kind of work: search every card, pick the right printing out of several, judge the condition, look up the price. That work does not shrink by postponing it, and it does not get more pleasant when you do it in one weekend-long sitting.
This guide walks the whole path once, from the box to the offer that is live. It is built around a scanner workflow, because that is the path where capturing cards stops being the bottleneck. Every station links to a detailed guide if you want to go deeper.
First: one honest sorting decision
Not every card deserves its own listing. Cards whose individual value sits below what listing them costs you belong in a bundle sale or a trade stack, not in single offers. Make that call before scanning, not after: split the box once into “gets listed individually” and “leaves as a package”.
Everything that survives that cut deserves to be captured properly. That is what the rest of this guide is for.
Station 1: Capture the stack
The classic way is finding every card in the search field and typing it in. The faster way is photographing the stack or running it through a scanner and leaving the identification to a recognition engine.
With TCG Actana it works like this: your scanner software drops new images into a fixed folder, Actana picks them up continuously while you keep scanning. Existing photos from a folder work the same way. You can capture Pokémon, Magic, and One Piece in batches, and the original images stay on your device.
Which device fits your stack depends on volume and card value. A feeder handles volume, delicate single pieces belong on a flatbed or in front of a camera. The comparison document scanner, flatbed, or phone photos settles the device question, and scans or photos shows the ways images get into the app.
Station 2: Review suggestions instead of trusting blindly
This is where a usable workflow separates from a dangerous one. Every recognition engine makes mistakes. The question is not whether, but what happens then.
Actana suggests a card and printing for every image. Clear matches go through. Anything uncertain stays open and is put in front of you instead of being booked wrong silently. In the review view your scan sits right next to the catalog image, and you confirm against the physical card before anything moves toward the export.
Anyone who has ever handled a complaint knows why this is not a comfort feature: a wrong printing in a listing costs you more than the saved review minute, namely an unhappy buyer and, in doubt, your rating. Especially in Magic, some printings look nearly identical, and some cards do not even carry a collector number. How MTG scanners identify printings explains those cases, scanning Magic cards in bulk shows the flow in detail. For the other games: scanning Pokémon cards and scanning One Piece cards.
Station 3: Condition, finish, quantity
Condition is the second place where sellers lose trust. Cardmarket buyers know the grades precisely, and an optimistic Excellent can quickly cause trouble after the sale.
In the batch you set condition, finish, variant, and quantity for every copy before anything is exported. When in doubt, grade one step stricter; it saves you the argument later. What the grades from Mint to Poor actually mean is covered in the card condition guide.
Station 4: Put prices in context
Actana shows price references for recognized cards, giving you a starting point while you review. The final sale price is set later during listing, rule-based for the whole stack instead of card by card.
What matters is understanding where the references come from and why printing and finish are decisive: the same card name can have completely different prices depending on the printing. That is exactly why the review in station 2 pays off twice. The background is in understanding market values.
Station 5: Export, split by game
At the end of the batch stands the export: a finished CSV file for TCG PowerTools. Actana automatically splits mixed batches into one file per game; you do not have to pre-sort anything.
What the columns contain and how to check the file is explained in the CSV export explained.
Station 6: List through TCG PowerTools
You import the CSV into TCG PowerTools, set your pricing rules there, and push the offers to Cardmarket in one go. An overview of the format and the import lives at TCG PowerTools CSV.
Honesty requires this part too: Actana does not list offers on any marketplace automatically. The last step deliberately stays with you and your pricing rules. A tool that lists unreviewed on your behalf would be exactly the kind of automation station 2 warns about.
Afterwards: the next box
The first run is the slowest one. From the second on you have a routine: scan, review, export, list. Sellers with steady throughput even skip sorting into a system: with chaos sorting, cards receive sequential storage locations that are carried into the export.
Do not start with the whole box. Take a manageable stack, walk through the six stations once, and check whether the workflow fits the way you work.