Toys to Retirement Weekly Wrap-Up #27
Hello friends,
Another week, another ecommerce drama.
More Mass Gatings
We are seeing more and more brands get hit with massive gating quantities, ranging from as low as 10, but more frequently 100-400 units. While it’s hard to identify exactly what the criteria is to be able to dodge the gatings, it really seems like those who sell a certain, unannounced threshold for each brand are relatively safe. It no longer seems to be category dependent. For example, even though I only sell toys, I’m still getting gated in several toy brands like Jurassic World, Masters of the Universe, etc. because I don’t actively have the arbitrary number of sales or SKUs that Amazon wants.
While I do still believe this is beneficial to us in the long term, what’s annoying is that Amazon is constantly denying gating applications from legitimate sellers. I have not needed to ungate anything myself yet, but I have friends who have submitted documents dozens of times only to be rejected instantly. The sheer incompetence of Amazon’s support team has never been more clear, and I’m surprised they haven’t got the message internally.
Like I said though, I think this opens up a lot of opportunity this coming Q4. There is no doubt a massive migration of sellers going to Walmart from Amazon, swearing to never return.
In a niche where products are only selling hundreds to maybe a few thousand times a month during the peak season, every competitor that leaves is directly a boost to us.
I would hang tight before committing to any sort of large ungate right now, and see if Amazon loosens things up in the near future once they finally realize how ridiculous they’re being with the invoice acceptance.
Incoming Walmart CPC Requirements
This has already been rolled out in other categories, but over the coming months you may notice several of your toy listings get taken down on Walmart. Allegedly, the directive is coming from their legal team to require every seller to submit CPC docs for every toy that they want to sell that requires CPC docs.
This is different from Amazon because Amazon only requires one person to submit docs and the listing is ‘safe’. Walmart will allegedly require us all to upload docs.
LEGO should be fine, you can easily obtain the CPC documents on the LEGO site in the ‘LEGO Product Certification’ section.
Toys you buy wholesale will be fine, you can obtain the CPC docs from your distributor.
But OA? RA? Exclusives? Remains to be seen what will happen.
My gut says they will roll this out and back track once they see a large part of their toy category disappear over night, but time will tell.
Just brace yourself for impact here if the worst case scenario happens.
Prepping for Q4 already?!
Guilty. Take a look at my article from this week if you’re running out of time, space, or capital.
Don’t worry, I’m running into all three. It’s a good problem to have. But here’s how you can relieve a bit of the pressure:
McFarlane slowing production?
The new McFarlane movie line for the upcoming Superman movie has opened up for pre-orders. Pretty out of character for a McFarlane movie release, but it appears these figures are pre-selling out fast. It’s not hard to know what McFarlane will do with this data. Historically they’re a “one run and done” company, but movie figures are often an exception. Do they get another print going? Or are these about to be some very profitable figures?
Get ready for more Godzilla!
One of my favorite IPs is preparing to expand even more! Toho has announced a roadmap of sorts for the Godzilla franchise going through 2028.
It’s always a fun year when Godzilla content is at the forefront, and perhaps every year will soon become a Godzilla year. Lots of opportunity in this franchise.
Star Wars Celebration
Lots of big news from a galaxy far, far away this week. Definitely check out the Star Wars feed on X/Twitter to get the latest updates on what’s being announced. Not only is Ryan Gosling announced to be joining the Star Wars universe, but we’re getting an animated Darth Maul series, a Mandalorian & Grogu teaser, and of course some Black Series announcements.
Personally, I’m not the biggest Star Wars fan and have slowly been drifting away from Star Wars investments, but maybe those of you who are more into the IP may see some potential investments.
Pokemon Destined Rivals Art Reveals
How “cool” a card looks is an extremely metric when it comes to investing in Pokemon sets. The upcoming Destined Rivals set has had its art revealed, and while it’s not bad by any means, many are underwhelmed by what was expected to be one of the most hyped up sets of all time.
There’s no doubt this set is good, but it remains to be seen if anything in this set will command prices similar to cards from Evolving Skies or Prismatic Evolutions.
Regardless, this will likely be an incredible set to invest in long term. It’s just important to remember that more eyes than ever are on Pokemon. That means this set will likely have one of the highest amounts of competition and highest print rates ever.
Demand will of course exceed supply, but at what rate? Guess we’ll have to wait for pull rate data to come out before we know.
You can see the full visual set list here: https://www.justinbasil.com/visual/sv10
Going to wrap things up here folks, hope everyone has a lovely Easter and enjoys the weekend with their families.
This version of CPC enforcement on Walmart would be devastating. Lego appears to be the only safe bet at the moment.