I haven’t gone for a walk in weeks. I think I should take a break from this project and go walk for 20 minutes.

I’ve been working on a tool to help my eBay store scale up. This is a snapshot of it as of February 14, 2026. Pokémon card eBay tool 

Might take some time to work on the card corner finder model this morning. I would like it to perform a bit better and have more to train with now.

I’ve been watching YouTube shorts wrong. I’m going to train it to show me crafting/skilled work/science videos (by the og makers, not the reuploaders) so I can find channels to have on in the background while I’m working.

gm ☕️ going to list some cards with the card tool and find areas to focus on improving sooner than the rest. I’ll let the friction do the triage lol

I recorded a demo of the Pokémon card tool using five cards, from pulling them off the shelf to putting them back listed and ready to go. It took about an hour and a half to document everything and talk through the workflow. If I were moving fast, I could’ve done it quicker, but I’m realizing the bigger win here probably isn’t shaving seconds off each step, it’s running the process in batches, like 50 cards at a time. But it documents where the system is right now and I ramble about where I want some parts of it to go.

Well in spite of the listing workflow not being fully automated yet, I was able to get seven cards through the system and onto eBay today. I think my immediate next action is figuring out temporary image storage for the automating of the image uploading for the csv route. If I can host them publicly eBay can grab them and add them to the listings via the csv route. Otherwise I have to add the images to each listing manually which can take a while when you’ve got 100 items in a batch.

Trying to make the bulk csv upload set the cards to ungraded and also their condition automatically is quite the roadblock in finishing a working prototype right now.

Remember when seeing one of these work was noteworthy?

Going to listen to today’s: “WTF just happened in tech” podcast while I wait for CODEX to finish my most recent request

How I’ve felt throughout the production of the card manager

Jim Rohn randomly popped into my head, figured I’d share a quote of his I’d like to turn into a lesson for my kiddos 😂

Back to fixing bugs/workflow blocks, today in the Condition Review part of the system. The sleeved image shouldn’t have defect boxes marked on it so that’s what’s being fixed right now. As soon as I can make it through this step with these seven cards we’re almost at the end of this system, generating the csv with the data we’ve generated through the workflow and list 🙃 not fully automated yet, just need it working for now as I’ve spent a month and a half on it and haven’t listed anything since January…

*insert daily ‘card tool’ dev update* 🙃

2026-02-10 For the last few weeks, maybe a month and a half, it’s felt like my eBay sales fell off a cliff. At first I tried to explain it the normal ways. Maybe it’s seasonal, maybe the Christmas money dried up and people tighten up for a while. I’ve seen predictable slumps and peaks before, back when I was generating paperwork at the youth ranch thrift store that showed it. Then I started looking for platform reasons. eBay changes things, traffic shifts, and I wondered if I just wasn’t getting the same exposure. But that didn’t fully fit the numbers in my head, because I’ve ramped up hard, from around 100 items near the start of last year to over a thousand by the end. If my “fishing” thesis is right, more hooks in the water should mean more impressions, which should mean more views, which should mean more sales, at least in aggregate. I kept telling myself sales are out of my control. Or so I thought. I even let it drift into macro stuff. You scroll social media for two seconds and end up seeing the world on fire. Things feel like they’re heating up globally, and I wondered if people were just spending less because of the general background fear. Who knows. But today I opened the seller page to fulfill the first order I’ve had in a few days, hovered over the marketing tab, and clicked into promotions. Then it hit me: I’d been running that “buy more, save more” discount, the one that not only nudges bigger orders but also creates that visible little callout on the listings page, and it expired on December 31st. So I’ve basically gone almost 40 days without the exact thing that was helping drive sales and bulk sales. I turned it back on immediately. I feel a little stupid, but whatever, this one doesn’t expire for years, and now I get to see if that missing lever was the whole story or just part of it. Either way, it puts me back where I need to be: moving product and increasing my surface area to the market instead of spiraling on explanations. The Pokémon card workflow still needs to get unstuck too. I’m leaning toward abandoning the full API dream for now and having the app generate a clean CSV plus a folder of final cropped, organized images, something that I can actually push through consistently to get inventory up.

When it comes to connecting my Pokémon card app to eBay‘s API, eBay expects an HTTPS connection, but I’m running the app locally on my computer. Do I have to upload it to a server to make this thing work if they require that?

Time to go shampoo vac my old room. yaaayyyyyy….

Used gpt’s agent to review the card app and asked it to guide me through applying for the eBay api creds. It just did it for me 😂 I guess it’s time to test and see if listing directly from the app is possible…

Maybe they released the e files so we wouldn’t notice it’s the Winter Olympics?