Card Booth

Selling at a card show, a store table, or out of a binder? The Booth turns your table into something buyers can browse from their phone — before they even reach you.

How it works

1. Build your booth — Booth → New booth. Pull cards and sealed products straight from your shelves; each listing starts at its tracked market price and the asking price is yours to change. Add a venue, a date, and a note ("trades welcome", "prices firm").
2. Share it — as a link (socials, group chats) or a QR (print it, tape it to the table). Small booths fit in a single QR that any phone camera can scan — it's just a link. Bigger booths switch to an animated multi-frame code, scanned from inside Rarebox (Booth → Scan a booth). Need something tweet-sized? Shorten for socials turns the full link into a TinyURL — see the privacy note below. For printing or posting, Download as picture builds a Tactile-branded QR poster (booth name, venue, table total, scannable code) ready for socials or a table stand.
3. Buyers browse — opening the link shows your booth read-only: every listing with your price, and the full-table total. One tap on Save this shop archives it on their device, so they can check your table again later — even offline.

Update your booth any time; share again and the new link/QR carries the updated listings. Old links keep showing what they carried when shared — every share also stamps when it was made, so buyers see "snapshot 2h ago" and get a nudge to re-scan at the table when a link has gone stale. For a share that never goes stale, see Table mode and its live QR.

Sealed products are real listings

Booster boxes, ETBs, decks, tins — sealed has no industry-standard identifier, so the same box goes by a dozen names. Rarebox ships a daily index of 8,500+ sealed products across all six games (plus Japanese Pokémon), keyed by TCGplayer's canonical product ids. List a box from the search and it carries that id, which means wantlists and booth scans match it exactly — "Booster Bundle (LGS)" vs "booster bundle" never matters.

ISO wantlist — scan a table, know instantly

The good stuff often isn't on display: binders are too risky to leave out, and $1–50 cards aren't practical to spread on a table. The wantlist fixes the "is anything I need here?" problem without anyone pawing through binders:

• Build your list under Booth → My wantlist: search any card or sealed product, set a quantity and an optional max price. Hunting a master set? The set gallery's 🎯 ISO the rest button turns every card you're missing into wants in one tap.
• Scan any booth (or open any booth link) and matches light up immediately — a 🎯 banner with the count, ON YOUR LIST stickers on the matching listings, and a "show matches only" toggle. This works on the seller's entire inventory, including what's in the case under the table.
• Saved shops show 🎯 badges with how many of your wants each table has, so after a lap of the hall you know exactly where to go back to.

Matching is exact on card/product identity when both sides picked from the database, with a word-matching fallback for hand-typed listings.

Table mode — run the booth live

Five deals back-to-back and the list is already out of date — that's the moment Table mode (Booth → 🔥 Table) is built for. It's a full-screen, one-thumb view of your own booth:

• 💵 Sold / 🔁 Trade buttons on every row: quantity drops (the listing disappears at zero), with an Undo toast that reverses whole deals.
• Trades record both sides. The Trade sheet asks what came in: search any card or sealed product, set the agreed value, and tick "list it" to put it straight on the table — plus cash on top in either direction. "A 151 booster box + $20 for an OP-05 box" is one logged deal.
• Buy mode in the + Add search: flip the toggle, enter what you paid, and the cost comes off your table cash. Net cash can go negative — buying hard mid-show is normal dealering, and the ledger says so plainly.
• The ledger drives live recap chips (net cash, trades, buys) and a day log. 📊 Export Excel turns any booth into a workbook: Summary (all-time and today — sales, buys, trades in/out, net cash), Ledger (every movement, timestamped, trades grouped), and current Listings. No photos to reconstruct from, no spreadsheet at midnight.

The live QR

Printed QRs are snapshots — accurate the moment you print them, fiction by mid-afternoon. Table mode's 📺 Live QR is the fix: a full-screen code that re-encodes itself every time your inventory changes, with the screen kept awake. Prop a phone or tablet on a stand facing the aisle, and every buyer who scans gets the booth as it exists right now — mark a card sold and the code on the stand is already correct.

Run it from your phone (remote display)

Better still: put the QR on one device and the controls on another. Inside the Live QR screen, 📡 Show on another device makes a pairing code — scan it with a tablet's camera (or open the link there) and that screen becomes the booth display. Every sale, trade, and price change you make on your phone re-encodes the tablet's QR within seconds.

How it travels, honestly: updates go through ntfy.sh, a free public relay, end-to-end encrypted — the key is born inside the pairing code and never leaves your two devices, so the relay only ever carries scrambled bytes on a random channel. Same trade-off family as short links, disclosed the same way. If the venue network is hostile, put the tablet on your phone's hotspot and everything still works.

Booth branding

Give your table an identity buyers remember: pick an accent color and a monogram (an emoji or your initials) in the booth editor — they ride inside the share itself, cost a few bytes, and work offline. Buyers see your colors as a header strip and chip on the booth page, and the QR poster paints its name sticker in your color too. Have a hosted logo? Paste an https:// image link and it shows in place of the monogram.

Built for visitors

Buyers don't need Rarebox, and a shared booth never pressures them into it:

• No popups. Booth pages never show the card-database picker or download-progress indicators — someone scanning five booths at a show sees five booths, nothing else.
• One small invite. First-time visitors get a single dismissible banner above the booth ("made with Rarebox — track your own collection free"). Dismiss it once and it never returns.
• Uniform listings. Card scans, booster boxes, and tins all frame into the same white mat regardless of image shape, so a booth reads as one tidy table.
• Sortable. Any booth you open sorts by price (or the seller's order), so the bargain hunt takes two taps.

No servers, by design

Rarebox doesn't host anything, so there is nothing to upload a booth to — and that's the feature. The entire booth travels inside the share artifact itself: the URL fragment (/booth#b=…) carries the compressed booth data, and browsers never send fragments to any server. The QR encodes the same bytes. Seller to buyer, device to device, nobody in between. The wantlist and day journal live on your device too — and ride along in backups and device transfers like everything else.

Practical sizes: listings compress to roughly 25–60 bytes each. Up to ~60–100 listings fit in a single camera-scannable QR; beyond that the animated code takes over and links keep working into the hundreds of listings (some chat apps truncate very long URLs — if a link misbehaves, the QR always works).

Short links

Shorten for socials (in the share dialog) trades a little purity for a lot of convenience: it asks TinyURL to wrap your full link, straight from your device — the request never passes through Rarebox. Two things to know:

• The short link (and therefore your booth's contents) is stored in TinyURL's database. Booths are meant to be public, but it's the one share path where a third party holds a copy.
• Opening a short link requires internet (it's a redirect). The QR and the full link stay self-contained and work offline once saved.

Saved shops

Booths other collectors share with you live under Booth → Saved shops — a browsable archive like your set lists. Open them any time. The cross-shop search digs through every saved booth at once, with game and max-price filters — "every Pokémon card under $20 at every table" needs no search text at all. Saved shops are included in your backups and device transfers, and wiped by Reset Everything like everything else.