How much MTGPrecons.co.uk made in September
Share
Back for month two of lifting the hood on MTGPrecons.co.uk. Same format as last time: every pound that came in, every pound that went out, and what was left at the end.
Note: September beat August, which I called my best month ever. Amazon coming back to life did a lot of the work. This month I've also spread my annual bills (Shopify plan, domains, Companies House) across the year, so a renewal doesn't make one month look worse than it really was.
The headline
| Line | £ |
|---|---|
| Customers paid | 10,463.74 |
| Platform / payment fees | −966.42 |
| Reached my accounts | 9,497.32 |
| Output VAT (1/6 of gross) | −1,743.96 |
| Cost of stock sold | −5,770.24 |
| Overheads | −456.19 |
| Net profit | 1,526.93 |
98 orders · 110 units · £106.77 average order value.
Net margin 14.6% of gross sales, or 17.5% of ex-VAT revenue.
Against August: sales up from £8,093.45 to £10,463.74 (+29%), net profit up from £962.60 to £1,526.93.
For every £100 you spend with me
| Where it goes | £ |
|---|---|
| Buying the stock (and posting it to you) | 55 |
| VAT to HMRC | 17 |
| eBay, Amazon and card fees | 9 |
| Running costs | 4 |
| Left over | 15 |
Where the money came from, and what each channel charged
| Channel | Orders | Gross £ | Fees £ | Fee % | Net cash £ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Own web store | 36 | 3,546.55 | 89.84 | 2.5% | 3,456.71 |
| eBay | 24 | 3,122.80 | 417.88 | 13.4% | 2,704.92 |
| Amazon | 31 | 2,797.65 | 428.03 | 15.3% | 2,369.62 |
| Shop app | 3 | 613.00 | 13.01 | 2.1% | 599.99 |
| Cardmarket | 4 | 383.74 | 17.66 | 4.6% | 366.08 |
| Total | 98 | 10,463.74 | 966.42 | 9.2% | 9,497.32 |
Rates applied: eBay 12.8% final value fee + 30p + 0.35% regulatory operating fee · Amazon 15.3% referral including digital services tax · Cardmarket 5% · Shopify Payments 2% + 25p · PayPal 2.9% + 30p. PayPal costs me more than card payments, which is why the web store comes out at 2.5% rather than 2%.
Amazon went from 10 orders in August to 31 in September. It's now second only to my own site for number of orders, but it's still the most expensive channel. On average an Amazon sale left me £12.69 of profit, against £18.94 on the web store and £28.17 on eBay (eBay sales skew towards the pricier decks).
Amazon also gave me my worst day of the month. A listing tool linked single booster packs to booster box pages, so people were buying "boxes" at pack prices. I had to cancel nine orders, which tanked my cancellation rate. Lesson learned: check what a listing actually links to before it goes live.
Every sale against what I paid for it
This month I went line by line: every sale, minus its fees, VAT and what I paid for that exact item.
- The 24 best sales made £1,139.94 between them, 57% of all the gross profit.
- 22 of the 105 lines sold made less than £5 each.
- Three sales lost money outright, and two of those were discounted on my own site. A £25 discount turned a Foundations Play Booster Box into a £7.79 loss, and a £26 discount did the same to a Final Fantasy Counter Blitz deck.
- Best earners: EOE Play Booster Box (£245.64 across 6), VelociRAMPtor (£221.10 across 5) and Blood Rites (£207.25 across 7).
- Barely worth it: Aetherdrift Living Energy made 72p a sale, Mardu Surge 32p and Strixhaven Prismari Artistry £1.81.
Most of the money comes from a handful of sales: older, harder-to-find decks and the EOE box. A lot of the cheaper, newer decks keep the shop busy but barely pay for themselves.
Cost of goods
£5,770.24 for 110 units sold plus one box given away, or 55.1% of gross sales.
As before, this is landed unit cost including £3.80/item of outbound postage. The box given away was a Foundations Jumpstart box.
Ex-VAT revenue was £8,719.78, so gross profit before overheads was £1,983.12, a 22.7% gross margin.
VAT
£1,743.96 of the £9,497.32 that reached my accounts belongs to HMRC. One sixth of every sale, every time.
September was also a big VAT month in cash terms. I paid £4,759.50 for the May–July quarter, and finally got a £1,856.77 refund from an earlier quarter. HMRC had sent it as a cheque made out to the company, which my bank can't take. Neither of these is profit or loss, but they make the bank balance swing a lot.
Overheads - £456.19 this month
| Item | £ | |
|---|---|---|
| Accountant | 195.54 | Still my biggest overhead by a mile. |
| AI tooling | 145.57 | I upgraded Claude from the £75 plan to the £150 plan this month. |
| Shopify apps | 29.80 | Reviews, marketplace sync and upsell apps. |
| Amazon Selling Fee | 30.00 | £30 a month to sell on Amazon. |
| Shopify plan | 19.00 | £228 a year, spread monthly. |
| Microsoft | 6.99 | Monthly cloud costs (for the Shopify app). |
| Companies House | 2.83 | £34 a year for the confirmation statement, spread monthly. |
| Domains | 1.98 | Three domains, paid yearly, spread monthly. |
| Facebook ads | 21.00 | |
| Other card spend | 3.48 | |
| Total | 456.19 |
August's £543.07 had the whole £228 Shopify plan renewal in it. Spread across the year, overheads are fairly steady, and next month they'll be about £436 with the full Claude plan, plus whatever I spend on ads.
Claude is still the best value line on the sheet. I used it this month to go through every sale for this post, to build a sync between my shop and Cardmarket, and to chase down months of import VAT paperwork.
More stats about the business
Headline
- 98 orders, 110 units, £10,463.74 gross
- £106.77 average order · 1.12 items per order
- Web: 37% of orders, 34% of revenue, 2.5% fee
- Amazon: 32% of orders, 27% of revenue, 15.3% fee
- eBay 13.4% fee, blended fee across all channels 9.2% (up from 7.3% as more sales went through Amazon)
- Gross margin 22.7%, net margin 14.6%
- Stock cost eats 55.1% of every pound taken
Products
- Best seller by units: Blood Rites (7), then Ahoy Mateys and the EOE Play Booster Box (6 each)
- Biggest single order: £502 (two Lord of the Rings deck sets, web, 5 Sep)
Stock
- £35,812.78 at cost, up from £15,532.86 at the end of August. Most of that is stock I bought in August and September arriving.
- 808 units across 116 lines. 122 of those units (mostly single packs split from boxes) don't have a cost entered yet, so the real figure is a bit higher.
- Roughly £66,700 at current web prices
Customers
- 96 customers, 7 of them returning: a 7.3% return rate, down from 11.5%
Looking forward
- The rebrand is happening. MTGPrecons is becoming TableTopTemple. The company stays the same; it's just a new name over the door, and I'm aiming to switch before the Christmas rush.
- Last month I said singles seemed like a headache. I've started anyway. I'm cracking some precons and booster boxes and listing the good cards from £2 up on here and eBay. No singles have sold yet, so ask me again next month.
- I've built my own sync to push singles to Cardmarket, rather than paying for a tool to do it.
- Lorcana starter decks are on the shelf now, a first small step outside Magic.
- Less discounting. This month showed that my own discount codes are the quickest way to sell something at a loss.
Notes
A friend is still doing my fulfilment for half the profit. That's about £763 of this month's £1,526.93.
Not included: TikTok paid me out £270.16 in September, but those orders don't come through my shop system and I haven't matched them up yet. Packaging and other small supplies aren't in here either, which probably comes to a max of £50 a month.
The fees are worked out from published rates, not my actual invoices. Promoted listing charges aren't included.
I still haven't taken any money out of the business. Most of it is sitting on shelves as stock.
PS
I'm still putting together the UK WhatsApp community for TCG shop owners - reach out to me if you run a shop and want in!
PPS: I'm thinking about making YouTube videos about my journey, give me a follow here
Happy to answer questions on any line. If you sell online, go through your sales one at a time against what you paid. I didn't know two of my own discount codes were losing me money until I did.