CardShark Closed. Final Goodbye - May 16, 2024

Dear CardShark Family,

It is with a heavy heart that we announce that we have decided to close CardShark.

We are proud to have served the Magic: the Gathering community as a marketplace for second hand cards for 23 years. Some of you have been with us nearly this entire time.

The reasons we have decided to close are:

1. Over the years shipping has increased dramatically making small purchases difficult
2. Competition in the marketplace by big companies with huge staffs compared to our small operation
3. Revenues have dropped to the point where we have been running at break even with costs for the last few years and working on the site for free.
4. Our site programming and server architecture was completely redone in 2015, but now it is starting to show it's age again and it will eventually need a major update which is expensive and time consuming.
5. new Magic sets have multiple art versions that takes hours of work each set to deal with
6. PayPal policies around refunds leave us at high risk of loss from fraud, theft and even flaky sellers that do not respond. Fees are no longer refunded and we almost always get stuck if someone steals a credit card to make a purchase. PayPal fees have increased over the years so that our portion is less and less.
7. The number of users has dropped off over the years and we are serving only a small dedicated group of customers.

Considering the above and the fact that the company is losing time and money and has higher risks and no plans to modernize, it is time to just close the project with a smile and honor a job well done and hopefully a positive impact for everyone involved. We see this project as a huge success and running a business for 24 years has been fun and challenging. Now it is time to free up space and energy for something new.

Thank you for your dedication to this site and community.

We appreciate you and are grateful for your participation over the years!

All of us at CardShark.com