Toolkit
Vendors run their booths on spreadsheets and gut.
Trading-card vendors juggle inventory across thousands of SKUs, mark deals on paper, and chase market prices through a half-dozen browser tabs. The card-show floor is fast — and the tools are slow.
VendBuddy is the suite I wish existed when I was on the other side of the table. One app, every surface a vendor needs, built for the way the actual hour-by-hour business runs.
A working day, captured end-to-end.
I mapped the full vendor day — intake from a customer, condition grading, label printing, walk-the-floor pricing, sale-by-scan, end-of-show settlement — and rebuilt every step around live data and on-device AI.
The native app's vision-AI scanner identifies a card in under two seconds — game, name, set, and number — straight from a phone camera. The deal builder turns that scan into a buy-and-sell-side trade in seconds, with market-price lookups across TCGPlayer, Scryfall, and TCGdex and a multi-strategy matching algorithm I wrote to handle the long tail of variant cards across Pokémon, MTG, Yu-Gi-Oh!, One Piece, and Lorcana.
Stack & infrastructure
- Native iOS and Android apps in React Native (Expo) for the show-floor scanner, label printer, and POS — the primary surface vendors actually run their booth on.
- Next.js 16 App Router web dashboard for back-office work — inventory management, analytics, and end-of-show reporting.
- Express API with JWT auth, RLS-scoped Supabase clients, Stripe billing.
- TCGPlayer, Scryfall, and TCGdex integrations behind a tiered cache, with scheduled jobs for nightly price refresh and image backfill.
ContentPlan
The content-collection problem, finally solved.
