The Story Behind CardLuma

A little over a year ago, my stepfather passed away unexpectedly.

He'd been collecting sports cards for more than 40 years — incredibly organized, deeply invested… and with absolutely no intention of ever selling any of them.

To help my mother out, I brought the collection home and started listing on eBay.

That's when things broke.

I tried the existing tools. After about a thousand cards — and months of workarounds that would make a reasonable person quit — it became obvious: nothing on the market was built for how this actually needs to work.

So I did what any rational person would do — I ignored the sunk cost, gave up my free time, and built my own software from scratch.

My wife was thrilled.

The first version wasn't pretty. It was blunt, unforgiving, and built entirely for one very specific user: me.

But I ran thousands of cards through it — and it worked.

More importantly, it proved something: every frustration I had with existing tools wasn't unique. Other sellers were dealing with the same problems — just without a way to fix them.

So I stopped listing for three months and rebuilt everything from the ground up.

This time, it wasn't just for me.

Cleaner workflows. Better safeguards. Faster paths from scan to listing. The kind of tool you can actually hand to someone else without a disclaimer.

In January 2026, CardLuma opened to the public.

And we're just getting started.

The roadmap is stacked — inventory management, feedback automation, buyer messaging — all focused on one thing: making it dramatically easier to sell sports cards on eBay.

CardLuma is built by a dealer, for dealers. That's not a tagline — it's the entire design philosophy. Every feature on the roadmap exists because someone in this hobby needed it. Usually me. Sometimes you.

Your feedback builds what comes next

Which brings me to the most important part: we live for your feedback. Seriously. Tell us what's broken, what's missing, what would make your workflow faster. We read everything. We build accordingly.

The best ideas for what comes next aren't going to come from a product meeting — they're going to come from the people actually moving cards every day.

The cards aren't going to list themselves.

But we're getting close. And we're building this thing together.

—Tom