My experiences comparing Cardmarket and CardTrader (Zero) as a German seller and buyer

Hey everyone,

with CardTrader still being relatively unknown in the European and especially the German market compared to Cardmarket, and me having experienced both systems quite a lot (as a private buyer and seller on Cardmarket since 16 years and on CardTrader Zero since a couple of months), I thought I'd share my experiences with both platforms to help others compare them. If you have other specific questions my bullets don't answer, feel free to leave a comment.

CardTrader Pros:

• The CardTrader user interface and usability are so. much. better. Honestly, in my opinion, it's not even close and it's one of the main pros of CardTrader that massively draw me to them. Some examples:
  • Performance. Interacting with the site, putting new cards for sale, searching cards is all so much faster than on CardMarket.
  • Searching cards allows much more options to filter the search results than on CardMarket. I can search for Ragavan retro and find the MH2 variant, Ponder time and find the TSR version, or ha fount border to find all borderless variants of Hallowed Fountain. And instantly.
• Selling via CardTrader Zero saves so much shipping hassle as I only need to pack one order per week instead of countless one-card orders each on their own. This is the other main pro why I'm selling there a lot. It doesn't come for free: You need to pay the shipping yourself, and you do need to pay some seller fees -- but the latter is also true for Cardmarket. So you do need to pay a bit attention -- if, for example, you have a week in which you only sell a couple of cards via CT Zero that don't even accumulate a lot of value, you might run into paying a disproportionate amount of shipping for them. If you sell a lot though, I value the saved time a lot more than the small amount of money I need to pay for it.
• CardTrader offers a built-in autopricer. It's not capable of combining various criteria and probably won't be able to satisfy your more sophisticated auto-pricing needs, but if you're fine with your cards being priced automatically via relatively simple rules, it does its job and it's nice to not need any third-party software for that. Cardmarket doesn't have anything in that regard.
• CardTrader has a useful shop optimizer. When you have a wish list or cards in your shopping cart, it actually does a useful job finding the cheapest prices that still fulfill your criteria. At least in my opinion, the results are way more helpful than those of Cardmarket's shopping wizard.
• I also put buying via CardTrader Zero in the pro list, just because Cardmarket doesn't even offer such an option at all. That's not to say that CT Zero buying is an exclusively positive experience though: It takes a lot of time for the cards to arrive, and for the shipping to be worth it, you do need to accumulate quite some orders. That being said, the absolute biggest bunch of the long time doesn't come from CardTrader sending you your package once you ordered your cards to be shipped -- that went really quick for me. It comes from the sellers you buy from needing a lot of time to send their cards to the CardTrader office. The positive aspect of that is that you can reduce this time a lot by picking sellers who do that shipping quickly -- which comes with the downside of the price often rising quite a bit. If you want to do cheap buys, you often need to plan in some time before you'll have the cards. I wouldn't buy cards via CardTrader Zero that I need or want to have within a certain timeframe, but would slowly accumulate cards that are available at a bargain and which I'm totally with fine waiting long for.

Cardmarket pros:

• Honestly, in my opinion it's mostly one thing: the market saturation. Due do the fact that Cardmarket has such a big user base, it's often easier to sell certain cards there than on CardTrader. That's especially true for German cards; they sell much less on CardTrader than English cards. The same is true for buying cards: Some more rare versions, like FBB German dual lands, almost don't exist at CardTrader and if you want to buy such cards, Cardmarket is the better place to go.
• Selling used accessories like deck boxes or so works at Cardmarket, but doesn't at CardTrader (at least not via CT Zero as they have a policy there to only allow sealed accessories).

I hope these experiences are at least a little bit interesting for you and maybe they even help you make some decisions for your own buying or selling behavior. I'm interested to hear about your experiences!