Before we get into the details, note that, throughout this article, I refer to some topics already mentioned in previous articles. You can find those here, here, and here.
It's Been a Year Since We Last Spoke
I last gave you an update in March 2023, so I felt it was about time to provide you with the latest news and developments at Cardmarket. Here's a brief overview of the topics I want to discuss in this article:
- Our customer support and help desk
- Update on requested API features
- New games and the product catalog
- Safety and security
As always I'd like to take a moment to thank you for reading this and being part of our community. I appreciate you taking the time and effort to learn more about our company and product. Above all, it means a lot to us that you keep providing feedback and suggestions. While we'll never be able to incorporate every single idea, know that if you talk about Cardmarket on social media, Reddit, or YouTube, there's a big chance I will read it at one point.
This is a long article. So grab some coffee or tea and get ready to dive in.
Our Customer Support and Ticket Delays
I'd like to take some time to address the most pressing topic. If you've created a ticket with our support department over the last couple of months, you probably noticed it takes significantly longer to receive an answer than in the past.
We know how incredibly important our customer support department is, and we know that the current waiting times for ticket resolutions are unacceptable. I'd like to give you a bit more insight into our support department, the situation we faced, and then also talk about steps we've taken to bring us back to the service you expect from us.
What Is Customer Support at Cardmarket?
Our customer support department has a clear goal: providing solutions to our users (you) to keep the marketplace safe and secure and working as intended. On Cardmarket, you're not only dealing with us, as a platform, but also always with another party, the buyer or the seller.
In traditional customer support, if you have an issue, you're contacting the platform or service provider you have an issue with. You then talk to a representative of that platform or service, and hopefully they can offer you a solution, often based on a protocol of similar experiences that occurred in the past. Here's how that differs for us:
Customer support acts as a mediator
On Cardmarket (and of course other marketplace-like websites) our customer support is not only representing Cardmarket but is also acting as a mediating party between the buyer and seller. This already adds a layer of complexity. Rather than following a clear protocol on how to solve a case efficiently and fast to move on to the next, our team needs to examine every individual case and look at both parties involved. Based on the information provided by these parties, our customer support agents are then responsible for taking a decision that hopefully satisfies both.
Customer support operates in five languages
Now let's add an additional layer of complexity, languages. Cardmarket is a European platform. This is something we're very proud of, and something that sits at the foundation of our company. It means our website is available in five major European languages: English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian. It also means that users may speak different languages and might communicate in another language than the one they're most comfortable with. A lot of our support agents are proficient in three or more languages to communicate with both parties.
Every case is unique
Cardmarket is a marketplace where you can buy and sell cards, so it's only natural that most of the issues our customer support must deal with are related to exactly that. Roughly 95% of our tickets relate to shipments, disagreements on the condition or other attributes of the cards, shipments being lost, cancelled, or not shipped at all, to name a few examples. As mentioned, often in different languages and across various postal services.
Nearly every case is unique. While automations are possible and are in place to handle "simpler" tickets, many cases require human intervention from our side. This is especially true when it comes to disagreements over what can be considered subjective topics (card condition, to give an example). Cardmarket is far from the only website that faces these challenges. But I explain all this as I hope it gives you a better understanding of what it means to deal with our customer support department, compared to the customer support department of something like your internet provider or an airline company.
Capacity of Our Customer Support Team
If you're wondering how many support cases we deal with, I'm happy to share some numbers: On an average day we receive around 750 new support tickets. At full capacity and efficiency, our team can solve around 800 to 850 tickets per day. Sounds easy, right? Well, there are a few things you must keep in mind. First, our support team currently does not work on weekends, meaning there are two additional days of tickets being created.
Not every ticket can be closed with one answer. Often our agents need to investigate or ask involved parties for more details, leaving the ticket open and not solved. Finally, our agents are also human beings that can take sick days and vacation days. We always plan our vacations as optimally as possible, not to have any gap in languages or skills, but unforeseen things can and will happen.
What Caused the Increase in Waiting Times?
Now that you've gotten a better understanding of what customer support at Cardmarket means (again, thanks for reading all this), we can look at why response times have increased. There are three main causes:
Cause 1: We changed our help desk software
Because of the complex nature of our tickets (multiple parties involved, different languages) Cardmarket used to have a completely in-house- and custom-made solution for handling tickets and support cases. This meant that every time something needed to be changed, improved, fixed, or updated in that system, the same IT developers that work on the marketplace also needed to work on the help desk. Trust me when I say a help desk is already quite a complex piece of software by itself.
Why did we use to have this completely built in house? Well, Cardmarket was founded back in 2007, and at that point there weren't that many out-of-the-box software solutions for online marketplaces. We created the help desk with the inception of Cardmarket and built upon this foundation for the next fifteen years.
Fast forward to 2023. Last year, in November, after undertaking one of the largest projects in Cardmarket history, we migrated our help desk to a third-party software provided by Freshdesk. No longer do we have to rely on internal IT resources to improve our help desk, but rather on software dedicated to creating scalable solutions. This frees more resources in our own team to work on the actual marketplace. Additionally, Freshdesk offers all kinds of tools to improve the efficiency of our support team, far beyond anything we could've created in house.
So why did the response times increase rather than decrease? Well, our team had to completely change their workflow and get used to working with this new software. Naturally we had trainings and introductions, but no matter how well you prepare for a switch of this magnitude, there's always going to be a transition time in which the team adjusts to the changes. Nevertheless, this software already allows us to tackle workflow and efficiency issues better than anything we've had in the past.
Cause 2: We received a lot of new users
2023 saw the addition of two very popular games to Cardmarket: Lorcana and the One Piece TCG. We noticed that these games brought a lot of new users to Cardmarket, users who haven't necessarily played trading card games before. And this also gave us a realization: Cardmarket is a very powerful tool for the savvy TCG veteran, but quite complex to use as somebody completely new to the hobby.
We always try to balance making the website easier to use, without sacrificing how powerful it needs to be for our core audience that is used to a certain workflow. With the new games, we saw users create tickets on topics that we wouldn't necessarily expect from experienced Cardmarket users. We take this as a big lesson but also ask our veteran users to be patient and considerate when it comes to dealing with newer members of the community.
Cause 3: There is a lot going on outside of Cardmarket
Strikes, blockades, layoffs, and more. A lot is happening in Europe (and the world for that matter) that also impacted shipping times and logistics. Naturally people have a certain expectation on when something should arrive or ship. We noticed that in 2023 there were several periods when outside factors contributed directly to more issues with shipments on Cardmarket, which then directly resulted in more support tickets.
What Are We Doing to Solve This?
Now you know the challenges we face. Of course knowing about these challenges doesn't really help you as a user of Cardmarket. But I am happy to say we're doing everything we can to bring back our customer support response times to the level you were once used to.
Solution 1: Hire more personnel
More tickets mean we need more capacity to solve tickets. This year alone, we've hired six new full-time customer support agents across all five languages. While new customer support agents require time to be onboarded, trained, and get used to our workflows, we expect everybody to be fully operational at the end of Q1, beginning of Q2. We're also monitoring if more hires are required to scale up where needed.
Solution 2: Process optimization
We're reevaluating processes and making workflows more efficient. This sounds like fancy corporate buzzwords, so let me tell you what it means. With Freshdesk, we're much more capable of assigning tickets to the right agents. We have several experts in our team when it comes to topics like payments, shipping methods, fake cards, and more. We're working on identifying the topic (and language) of every ticket instantly, so it gets forwarded to the designated specialists immediately.
We've also completely overhauled our help pages to make them easier to understand and clearer to navigate. We've even dedicated resources to provide videos where possible (because who still likes to read in 2024, right?). I strongly urge you to consult our knowledge base before creating a ticket. The information displayed there is based on the topics we most frequently receive tickets on. Maybe it can help you find an answer or solution without having to wait for our team to get back to you. That's a win/win!
I want to close this section by giving appreciation to our customer support team. Please keep in mind they are never personally responsible for a delay in the replies, and they always do everything they can to solve any issue in the best possible way for all parties involved.
Update on Features and the API
We were happy to release a much-requested feature earlier this month: Dark Mode on Cardmarket. Not only a great feature to have on any modern website, it also gave our front-end team an opportunity to provide some much-needed updates to the older icons and images on our website, which in turn should contribute to improved performance and loading times.
The API and Alternatives
Next, I'd like to take some time and talk about something exciting. As many of you are aware, we heavily restricted access to our API a few years back. We still get plenty of requests about access to the API but have not changed our strategy in terms of accepting more users.
Most requests to access our API regard two important data sets on Cardmarket. The price guide and the product catalog. After doing some back-end tweaking, our team is happy to announce that these data sets will become publicly available to all users, without the need to have access to our API. This means you can always access and download them on demand and use them however you see fit. Do you want to fetch Cardmarket prices for your own website or app? Do you want to have some sort of tracking of your collection based on or matching with Cardmarket's product catalog? All of this will be possible soon, no approval or API access needed. We expect this feature to be available in Q2 and will post a news update once it's live on Cardmarket.
Keep in mind that these are read-only data sets. It will still not be possible to manipulate your actual stock and prices on Cardmarket without API access. For those that believe they need this, we strongly recommend looking at our inventory tools partners.
New Games and the Product Catalog
We're also changing the way we evaluate new games to be added to Cardmarket. We often receive requests for the addition of new games from either our users, from sellers, distributors, or game producers. We are aware that the availability of a game on Cardmarket plays some factor in the game's availability overall.
Adding a new game is never a matter of "just" uploading some images and going live. It requires careful implementation by our product catalog team and IT, as every game has its own parameters, attributes, rarities, and expansion cycles. It requires continuous support and effort to maintain after the launch on Cardmarket. We also strive to have the best possible knowledge of each game available in house, so we can always be on top of new releases and, more importantly, help users with tickets specific to that game.
We recently ran a survey to get a better understanding of the interest and demand for new games among our users. This survey gave us some very useful insights. We plan on conducting these kinds of surveys on a bi-yearly basis from now on and hope to share these results with you in the future.
We recently added Star Wars Unlimited to our product catalog and have no plans to add other games at this specific moment. But this can always change based on feedback and input from our community. If you want to see a game on Cardmarket, your best bet is to keep an eye out for these surveys and participate.
Safety and Security
This is far from the most exciting topic, but possibly the most important one. Having a secure marketplace is always our top priority. This year we want to focus on putting more effort in seller validation. We want to make completely sure that if you buy from a seller on Cardmarket, that seller is trustworthy and verified.
Later this year, we plan on introducing a Know Your Customer (KYC) process for sellers on Cardmarket. At this day and age, pretty much everybody has gone through a KYC process at some point, whether it was to create a bank account, sign a digital contract, or conduct some other important business online. We're excited to introduce this measure to our platform with the goal to improve overall security and transparency. Once we're close to the release, we'll announce a rollout plan and guides on how to go through this process.
Some Smaller Topics
I'd like to dedicate the last part of this article to some small updates and announcements that you might've missed or were not aware of.
We Sponsor Your Card Game Events!
Did you know that Cardmarket would love to help you run your paper TCG event? We launched our completely overhauled sponsorship program in 2023, which should make it very clear what we can do to support your paper tournament! You can find more information here.We Upload a Lot of Content to YouTube
If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channels, not just for Magic: The Gathering but for Yu-Gi-Oh! too. Our Yu-Gi-Oh! channel was on a hiatus but should be back to a regular upload schedule soon!
We'll Be at MagicCon Amsterdam
A few of us from Cardmarket will attend MagicCon Amsterdam in June. Feel free to come up to us and ask questions, provide feedback, or just say hi. Maybe we'll even play a round of Magic. See you there!
Thank you for reading and being part of Cardmarket,
Robert