Terms & Conditions

Working document — reviewed for EU consumer and data-protection law patterns, but have counsel confirm before relying on it in a dispute.

1. Who we are and what this is

TCGBoxes ("TCGBoxes", "we") operates a trading-card shop at tcgboxes.io: you buy sealed digital packs whose contents are real physical trading cards that we hold in, or source into, our insured vault. Opening a pack gives you one specific card from that pack's published pool — keep it in the vault, sell it back to us for store credit, trade it with another collector, or have it posted to you. These terms are a contract between you and the operating company named in the footer. By creating an account you accept them.

2. Eligibility and your account

You must be 18 or older and legally able to enter contracts. One account per person; accounts are personal and non-transferable. Keep your credentials safe — actions taken from your logged-in session count as yours. We may refuse, suspend or close accounts that breach these terms, abuse promotions (including multi-account signup-bonus farming) or present fraud or chargeback risk, with any unspent deposit still returned to you.

3. Store credit — what it is, and what it is not

Everything in the shop is paid for with store credit: a euro-denominated balance, held in your account, spendable on packs, cards and shipping here and nowhere else. It is not a bank deposit, not electronic money, and not an investment. It earns no interest and is not covered by any deposit-guarantee scheme. It cannot be sent to another collector.

Your balance has two parts, and they behave differently. The screen shows both:

Credit you paid for — money you topped up by card or iDEAL. Whatever you have not yet spent can be returned to you at any time, back to the card or account it came from (see §8). This part is your money and stays your money.

Credit you earned — credit from selling a card back to us, from a marketplace sale, from a signup bonus, a coupon or support goodwill. This is spend-only: it buys anything in the shop, and it is never paid out in cash, to a card, or to a bank account, in any circumstance. Selling a card back to us is a sale for shop credit, not a way to turn a card into money.

When you buy something we use earned credit first and only then touch the credit you paid for, so the amount you can have back stays as high as possible for as long as possible.

4. Packs, odds and the sealed pool

Every pack publishes its full card list, its odds table and its expected value before it goes on sale — not a summary, the actual cards. Before a single pack is sold we seal that pool: we fix the card order, generate one draw seed per card, and publish the fingerprint of every seed together with a fingerprint of the card list. Your card is then chosen by the seed belonging to your draw, which is revealed to you with the result. Because the seeds were fixed and published before anyone bought anything, we cannot choose what you get, and because a seed stays secret until the draw that uses it, neither can you. The opening animation never changes a result. Every pack opening comes with a draw certificate you can recompute yourself, in your own browser, using nothing but SHA-256.

5. Purchase finality

A pack purchase is the delivery of digital content whose outcome is fixed at purchase. By confirming a pack opening you expressly consent to immediate performance and acknowledge that you lose the 14-day distance-selling withdrawal right at that moment (art. 16(m), Directive 2011/83/EU). A purchase that fails to deliver a card is reversed in full (see the Refund Policy).

6. The vault, your cards, and certificates

Cards you own are held or sourced just-in-time by us, insured, and never sold to anyone else while they are yours. Graded-slab certificates can change: because slabs are sourced on demand, if the exact certificate shown becomes unavailable to source, we substitute an equivalent copy — same card, same grading company, same grade. If no equivalent can be sourced at all, we compensate you (see the Refund Policy). Your ownership record, not a specific certificate number, is your claim.

Where we source from. Raw cards are bought on Cardmarket. Graded slabs are bought from the PSA vault store on eBay. Those are our two supply routes, and we do not promise to buy outside them.

If neither has your card available when you ask for it — no seller has it listed at all — we tell you and you choose: an equivalent copy where one exists (same card, same grade, same grading company for slabs), or store credit for the card’s full market value at the time we tell you, not the value it had when you pulled it. If the card has risen since, you get the higher figure. That credit is spendable on anything in the shop; it is store credit, not cash (§3).

“Not available” means nobody is selling it. It does not mean the price moved against us — a card that is listed and simply costs us more than we expected is a card you still get.

6a. Card condition — what we mean by NM

Raw (ungraded) cards are sold as Near Mint (NM). For us that means a card that would grade at roughly PSA 7–8 if submitted: it may carry a small whitening spot on an edge or corner, or one minor surface flaw, and still be NM. It is a played-with-care standard, not a perfect one.

What an NM card may have: light edge or corner whitening, a small print or surface imperfection, minor gloss loss, factory cutting or centring variance.

What it will never have: creases or bends, water or heat damage, writing or stamps, tears or missing material, heavy edge wear, or a repaired or altered card.

Graded slabs are sold at the grade stated on the label, and the label is the standard — not this one.

If a card arrives outside this standard, it is covered by §13i and your legal guarantee (§13g): tell us within 14 days of delivery with photographs and we return-post it at our cost, then put it back in your vault at full value, replace it with an equivalent copy, or refund it — your choice.

7. Selling back, marketplace and trading

Instant sell-back is open for 3 days after you pull a card. Once that window closes the card is still entirely yours — keep it in the vault, list it on the marketplace, trade it, or have it shipped home — but we no longer buy it back ourselves. The window and the percentage are shown on the card before you accept anything, and the figure on the card is the one that binds.

Selling a card back to us pays the published percentage of that card's current market estimate and is binding once you accept it. It is paid in store credit, never in cash (§3), and the card returns to our vault. Marketplace sales and trades between collectors also settle in store credit, with no platform fee; offers reserve the credit behind a bid until the bid resolves. We are not a party to collector-to-collector trades beyond settling them (§13e).

8. Topping up, and getting unspent money back

Top-ups are processed by our payment provider and are subject to your monthly deposit cap (§10). There are no withdrawals and no payouts. What exists instead is a refund: at any time you can ask for any part of your unspent topped-up credit back, and it is returned to the original card or account you paid with — never to a different destination, and never from the credit you earned in the shop (§3). Card refunds typically arrive within 5–10 business days; the exact timing is your bank's. If you have open offers, the credit backing them stays reserved until those offers resolve.

9. Shipping

Shipping is charged at the live carrier rate quoted at request time, multiplied to cover the sourcing leg (cards are bought in just-in-time). Risk passes to you on delivery. International orders can attract import duties or taxes that are yours to pay. When the card is scanned out for dispatch it leaves our vault and your ownership record is closed — its history stays permanently readable on its card page.

10. Spending limits and pacing

This is a shop for collectors, and we run it that way: default monthly deposit caps, raises that always take 24 hours with no support override, per-week pack caps you can set, and the option at any time in Settings to pause your account or close it for good. The full pool and pull rates are published on every pack.

11. Acceptable use

No automated purchasing, no exploiting bugs (report them — we pay finders' goodwill), no multiple accounts to dodge caps or farm promotions, no reselling access to your account. We may reverse transactions that abuse a malfunction.

12. Intellectual property

TCGBoxes is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by any trading-card maker — including The Pokémon Company, Nintendo, Wizards of the Coast, Disney, Ravensburger, Bandai and Konami. Card names, logos and artwork are trademarks of their respective owners; we sell the physical cards only. The TCGBoxes name, site and software are ours.

13. Availability and changes

We aim for continuous availability but may pause purchases for maintenance (your vault stays open, and so does asking for unspent credit back). We can change these terms with 14 days' notice by email or in-app notice; continued use after that is acceptance. Changes never retroactively alter completed purchases.

13a. Who you are contracting with

TCGBoxes is operated by [LEGAL ENTITY NAME], registered in the Netherlands, Chamber of Commerce (KVK) number [KVK NUMBER], VAT number [VAT NUMBER], registered address [REGISTERED ADDRESS]. Email [email protected]. That entity is the seller of every pack, card and shipment described in these terms.

13b. Shipping a card you already own

Opening a pack is the immediate performance of digital content whose outcome is fixed at purchase, so the 14-day withdrawal right is lost the moment you confirm it (§5, art. 16(m) of Directive 2011/83/EU). That cannot be undone — a revealed card cannot be un-revealed.

Having a card posted to you is not a further purchase of that card. The card became yours when you pulled it: allocated to you, held in our vault in your name, yours to sell back, trade or leave where it is for as long as you like. What a shipping fee buys is the delivery of property you already own. That is a service, and by asking us to send it you ask us to perform it immediately — so the 14-day withdrawal right does not attach to it, in the same way it does not attach to the opening (art. 16(a) of the Directive).

What you keep, in full. None of the above touches your rights if something is wrong with the card. If it arrives damaged, if it is not the card you pulled, if the grade or certificate does not match what we published, or if it is otherwise not as described, tell us within 14 days of delivery with photographs. We pay the return postage and, at your choice, put the card back in your vault at its full value, replace it with an equivalent copy, or refund it. Those are conformity rights and we do not limit them.

Once you have asked us to ship, we cannot un-ship it — but until a parcel has actually gone out you can cancel and we return the shipping fee to the balance it came from.

13c. VAT and the margin scheme

Trading cards we sell are second-hand collectibles, so we apply the margin scheme for second-hand goods, works of art, collectors' items and antiques (arts. 313–315 of Directive 2006/112/EC). VAT is accounted for on our margin, not on the full sale price, and for that reason invoices under the margin scheme do not show a separate, deductible VAT amount. If you are a VAT-registered business expecting to reclaim input VAT, you cannot do so on a margin-scheme purchase — tell us before you buy and we will confirm what applies. Shipping is charged separately at the applicable rate.

13d. Does store credit expire?

Credit you topped up yourself does not expire — it stays available while your account is open, and you can ask for the unspent part back at any time (§8). Promotional credit is different: signup bonuses, coupons and campaign credit are marked as such, may carry an expiry date shown when they are issued, and lapse if unused by that date. Collector points are a loyalty balance, not credit, and expire one month after they are earned; the expiry is shown on the Rewards screen. If we close your account for a breach of these terms, unspent topped-up credit is still returned to you — promotional and earned credit is not.

13e. Buying and selling between collectors

When the marketplace is open it lets you deal directly with other collectors. In those trades the contract is between you and the other collector; we are not the seller and do not become a party to it. What we do is operate the settlement: the card is in our vault, we hold the buyer's credit until the trade completes, we move the ownership record, and we release the credit. Because the card never leaves the vault, its authenticity and grade are exactly as we describe them on the card page — that part is ours and we stand behind it. What we do not warrant is the price: a collector-to-collector price is whatever the two of you agree, and it may be well above or below the market estimate we display. We charge no fee on these trades, and the proceeds are store credit like any other (§3). If a trade fails to settle for a technical reason, both sides are returned to where they started. Disputes about a trade go to support and we will act on the record we hold — which, since we hold the card and the credit, is complete.

13f. When your order arrives

We dispatch as soon as the card is in hand — for a card already in our vault that is normally 1–3 business days, and for one we source on demand it is the sourcing time shown when you request the shipment. In no case will it be later than 30 days from your request unless we have agreed a longer time with you in writing. If we miss the agreed date, tell us and set a reasonable extra period; if we miss that too, you may cancel the shipment and we refund what you paid for it within 14 days. Your card is not lost when a shipment is cancelled — it stays vaulted and stays yours.

13g. Your legal guarantee

Everything we sell must match its description and be what you can reasonably expect of it. A card sold as PSA 9 is a PSA 9, in the holder shown, with the certificate we published. This is your statutory conformity right under EU consumer law and it applies regardless of anything we offer voluntarily — nothing in these terms limits it. If a card arrives damaged, not as described, or the slab is cracked in transit, tell us within a reasonable time of noticing and we will repair the situation: replacement with an equivalent card, or a refund. Wear consistent with the stated grade is not a defect — a PSA 5 is expected to look like a PSA 5.

13h. Complaints

Complaints go to [email protected]. Describe the problem fully and include your order or shipment reference. We acknowledge within 1 business day and give a substantive answer within 14 days. If a complaint needs longer to investigate we will tell you that inside those 14 days, say why, and give you a date. If we cannot resolve it together, EU consumers may take the dispute to the European ODR platform at ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr. Using our complaints procedure never affects your right to go to court.

13i. Telling us something is wrong with a card

You never need a form to raise a problem — an email saying what is wrong is enough. This is here so you know exactly what helps us fix it fastest.

Tell us within 14 days of delivery. We pay the return postage on anything that is our fault, and the choice of remedy is yours (§13b). Nothing here limits your statutory rights if a card is not as described.

14. Liability

To the extent permitted by law, our total liability is limited to the amounts you paid us in the twelve months before the claim. Nothing in these terms limits liability for intent, gross negligence, or rights that consumer law does not allow to be limited.

15. Governing law and disputes

Dutch law applies; mandatory consumer protections of your country of residence remain unaffected. Complaints go to support first — we answer within one business day. EU consumers can also use the European ODR platform at ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr. Courts of the Netherlands have jurisdiction subject to mandatory consumer venue rules.