Our Story
Our Founder
The CrystalCommerce story starts with our founder Dan McCarty, his backpack, and a determination to turn his passion into a business. As an avid Magic: the Gathering player, Dan was a regular in the Seattle tournament scene and traded for the cards he needed. He discovered that he had a knack for trading, buying, and selling Magic singles. Soon, Dan, with his backpack, became a fixture on the local tournament scene. Over time Dan grew his inventory to the point where opening a store was the next logical step.
As Dan was running his store, the TCG world exploded. Magic, stronger than ever, continued to release new cards, and new games like Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh proved their staying power to the point where it was no longer feasible to display one’s entire TCG singles inventory within a store. Dan realized that by making an online catalog, you could show customers everything that you had in stock efficiently, reducing the search time for both him and his customers.
What happened next became the foundation CrystalCommerce is built. Dan realized that once you have your catalog and inventory digitized, you can display that inventory anywhere: your physical store, your e-commerce store, and even established marketplaces like eBay and Amazon. Looking around, the Internet revealed that there were no available software solutions that enabled this function. Dan set off to create his own system, and in 2006, CrystalCommerce was born.
A Software as Service Company
Today, CrystalCommerce supports over 700 Hobby Game retail stores manage one inventory. This inventory can be displayed to customers who visit them in their brick and mortar, e-commerce, and affiliate marketplace stores.
At CrystalCommerce, we have developed a proprietary system that enables retailers to launch a new website and integrate their inventory and e-commerce system within a day. CrystalCommerce strives to make the life of game store owners and their employees easier. We want to automate the tedious and monotonous tasks that eat up their time and make it easier to spend more time on what makes a store great–serving the individual needs of customers.
We are continuously updating our catalog and software services, and as we look toward the future, we will develop new ways to connect customers to retailers, retailers to distributors, and distributors to manufacturers to maximize and optimize the business exchange between each of these partnerships.
One inventory, many marketplaces, more customers!