Featured case study

Sports Card Marketplace

Custom sports card marketplace concept for collectors and breakers. The MVP focused on card cataloging, searchable listings, user card submissions, ownership verification, admin moderation, and a points-based reward system for approved contributions. A future marketplace layer was planned for verified owners to receive offers, with admin-controlled payment holding, shipment verification, and payout flow to reduce fraud.

Type Marketplace

Project type Marketplace

Stack stripe · saas · marketplace · multi tenant · +1

Status Live

I Brief

What stood in the way

ClueTracker is a sports card marketplace and discovery platform built for collectors, breakers, and buyers who need better visibility into card availability, ownership, and real market activity. The platform allows users to browse and search cards, submit ownership or observation proof, make offers to verified owners, and complete transactions through an escrow-style workflow. It also includes a moderation system, points-based gamification, leaderboards, and admin tools to manage cards, submissions, disputes, and redemptions. The goal was to create a more reliable way for collectors to discover who owns specific cards, track availability across the community, and safely initiate offers without relying only on scattered social media posts, live break comments, or outdated sales data.
II Approach

How we shipped it

We designed and developed a structured MVP focused on card discovery, verified availability, and safe offer-based transactions. The platform includes a searchable card catalog where users can browse cards by player, team, year, rarity, and variant. Each card can have multiple variants, allowing rare and less rare versions to be grouped under the same base card while still being managed separately. Users can submit two types of evidence: Ownership submissions when they personally own a card. Observation submissions when they saw a card pulled, listed, or held by another user. To maintain trust, submissions go through an admin moderation process where they can be approved, rejected, or marked as verified. The system also includes invalid submission tracking to reduce abuse and improve data quality over time. For transactions, we implemented an offer workflow where buyers can make offers to owners, owners can accept or reject them, and accepted offers can move through an escrow-style process. Admins can step in to resolve disputes, refund buyers, return cards to owners, and update authenticity or trust-related indicators when needed. To encourage community participation, we added a points system where users earn rewards for valid submissions. Weekly and monthly leaderboards help gamify the platform, while a redemption flow allows users to request rewards that admins can approve manually. The admin panel gives the platform owner control over card management, user submissions, redemptions, disputes, and overall marketplace activity.
III Outcome

The impact delivered

The MVP gave the client a clear, structured foundation for validating the ClueTracker concept with real collectors and breakers. Instead of relying on scattered card information, users can now contribute ownership and observation data in one place. Buyers can discover potential card owners, make offers directly, and rely on a more controlled transaction flow. Admins have the tools needed to moderate submissions, resolve disputes, and maintain trust within the platform. Key outcomes include: A searchable sports card catalog with support for variants and rarity. User-generated ownership and observation submissions. Admin moderation to improve trust and data accuracy. Offer-based buying workflow connected to an escrow-style process. Dispute handling tools for safer transactions. Points, leaderboards, and redemptions to encourage community activity. A scalable MVP foundation that can later expand into native mobile apps, deeper marketplace features, push notifications, and advanced collector tools. The final product positioned ClueTracker as more than a card catalog. It became a community-driven availability and transaction platform designed around trust, discovery, and collector engagement.

Field notes

Collectors often struggle to find out whether a specific sports card is currently available, who owns it, or where it was last seen. Existing tools may show past sale prices or historical market data, but they do not always provide a clear view of current availability.

For breakers and collectors, this creates several issues:

Cards may be known to exist, but ownership is unclear.
Buyers have no simple way to make direct offers to current owners.
Observations from live breaks or marketplaces are scattered and difficult to verify.
Trust becomes a concern when users submit card ownership or claim availability.
Admins need a way to moderate submissions, handle disputes, and keep the marketplace reliable.

The client needed a lean MVP that could validate the core idea quickly while still supporting important workflows such as card submissions, verification, offers, escrow, dispute handling, and user rewards.