How to Prep for a Whatnot Action Figure Show: The Pre-Stream Checklist
The countdown clock does not wait for you to find your price sheet. Do the work before you hit Go Live.
The difference between a show that flows and one where you are visibly scrambling is almost never something that happened on stream. It is what you did, or did not do, in the hour before you hit Go Live. Chat moves fast, bids stack up, and there is no pause button once someone is watching you dig through a bin for the next lot.
Price your lots before the stream, not during
Do not price a figure for the first time while it is live on camera. Pull real sold comps ahead of time and write your floor next to each lot — not a vibe, a number. Check the real sold median before you set a floor on anything you are not sure of, the same way you would before bidding on someone else's stream. A written floor is the one thing standing between you and accepting a bid you will regret the second the adrenaline wears off.
If a figure has thin comp data — a handful of sales, not dozens — treat your floor as soft and say so if someone asks. Guessing confidently on a thin market is how you either give away a real grail or scare off a fair bidder with a number you cannot defend.
Stage and photograph before you go live
Lay out lots in the order you will actually show them, not the order you found them in a bin. Good, even light matters more than an expensive camera — a figure photographed in flat, shadow-free light reads better on a phone screen than one shot under a single overhead bulb. Keep the next few lots staged just off camera so there is no dead air while you go find the next box.
Run the tech check every time, not just the first show
- Run a real speed test on your stream connection, not a guess based on how the internet felt yesterday.
- Charge everything, and have a backup power source within reach — a show that dies mid-auction over a dead battery is the one bad experience bidders remember.
- Set up a second device to actually watch chat. Reading chat off the same screen you are streaming from means you miss questions and bids.
- Close anything else pulling bandwidth — backups, downloads, another household device mid-stream — before you go live, not after buffering starts.
Know your shipping and hold answers before someone asks
Someone will ask about combined shipping, box damage policy, or how long you hold a win before relisting it — usually in the first ten minutes. Write your shipping bands by weight tier ahead of time so you are quoting a number, not doing math live while three other bids are stacking up. Decide your hold window and your damage/return policy before the show, not in the moment, because whatever you say live is the policy now, whether you meant it to be or not.
The one thing worth automating: your price sheet
Everything else on this list is prep you redo every show. Your price sheet is the one part worth building once and refining — a running list of what you actually have, with a real comp-backed floor next to each piece, updated as new sales come in rather than re-derived from memory an hour before you go live.
None of this is complicated. It is just work that has to happen before the countdown starts, because there is no version of a live show where you get to pause it to go figure out what something is worth.