Live e-commerce and trading card box-breaking platform Loupe announced a patent-pending feature Tuesday afternoon, allowing users to buy and sell cards directly within a live stream.
The platform, which has registered over 1 million transactions since its founding in 2020, offers collectors the ability to watch box breaks live, purchase spots in a box or pack, and receive “pulls” from breakers around the hobby.
With this new feature, dubbed “Collector-to-Collector” (C2C) buying and selling, users will be able to negotiate with one another for cards immediately after they are pulled. After a price is agreed upon, the buyer will have the card shipped directly to them via the streaming shop, while sellers will have the payment credited to their Loupe account.
The goal of the new feature, which Loupe founder and CEO Eric Doty told cllct marks the first release in a series of planned updates, is meant to expand the capabilities of the platform with the goal of serving a greater portion of user’s hobby needs.
“I think collectors in this market, regardless of their preferred platform, always love having a way to resell cards back into the market,” Doty said. “The difference with Loupe is everything we've ever focused on is immediacy. So how do we reduce the time of making the purchase, and being able to make a return on your purchase? So, a big part of this feature is how do we take these transactions that users are already doing on other platforms, and reduce it from weeks down to seconds?”
The liquidity Doty hopes to provide with the roll-out of the new feature has been one customers have been asking for since the early days of the platform.
“If you get a hit that isn't necessarily for your permanent collection or your personal collection, then you’re able to just move it very quickly so you can go on and keep spending on more product,” Doty said. “That's always going to be the ideal scenario. We've done plenty of user surveys, and we've learned that a vast majority of our customers go on to sell their hits on eBay, or to friends or to their local card shop.”
With the advent of this new feature, those transactions will become more frictionless on the consumer side, and, for Loupe, beneficial in keeping money in its ecosystem, creating a flywheel.
The feature is currently available for all Loupe users on IOS, Android and web.
Doty described a use-case of a collector buying two boxes of Prizm, receiving some cards of value that the collector doesn’t particularly care about, and quickly selling the cards to a fellow collector in the stream.
“Now [the collector] is buying a third box of Prizm with the credits earned from those rips,” Doty said. “That’s the true power of the future.”
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct.