I sold my last tradeline on October 29, 2025. A $139 order, one card, nothing remarkable about it. I didn’t know at the time that it was the last one — you never do.
The store has been sitting there ever since, quietly taking orders that don’t go through. So I’m closing it. Not the blog, not the posts — just the store. Here’s the whole reasoning, numbers included, because in all the time I’ve spent reading about this business I have never once seen anybody publish theirs.
Four years of direct sales came to $1,731
That’s the number. One thousand seven hundred thirty-one dollars, gross, for the entire life of the store.
Thirty-one orders came in between April 2022 and June 2026. Eleven of them completed. The first was a $398 order for two tradelines, and it stayed the largest sale the store ever made. Everything after that settled into the $99 to $149 range, which is roughly what a mid-limit, mid-age card fetches when you are not a household name in this business.
Some context for why that stings. I’ve written before about five years of selling tradelines and roughly $30K, and nearly all of that came through brokers — who take something like 70% of what the buyer actually pays. The entire reason I built my own storefront was to keep that 70% instead of handing it over. (You can already see where this is going.) Direct selling was supposed to be the upgrade. It produced about six percent of what I’ve made in this business.
A third of the orders died at checkout
This is the part I didn’t know until I pulled the raw order data this week, and it’s the part that actually changed how I feel about shutting it down.
Of those 31 orders, 11 completed. Eleven were cancelled. Nine failed outright at the payment step. So about a third of the people who made it all the way to my checkout with a card in hand walked away with nothing — and so did I.
It kept happening after I stopped paying attention, too. Since that last completed sale in October, three more people tried to buy: $499 in January, $99 in April, $299 in June. All three failed or were cancelled. The $499 one bothers me the most. Somebody showed up ready to spend real money on multiple lines, and my own checkout ate the order.
So the honest version of this story isn’t “demand dried up.” It’s closer to “demand kept trickling in and my plumbing kept dropping it on the floor.”
Why I’m not just fixing the payment gateway
The obvious move is to spend an afternoon in the payment settings, fix whatever is misconfigured, and see what happens. I thought about it for roughly a day.
Run the math as generously as I can. Suppose I had captured every failed and cancelled order at full value, with no drop-off at all. That’s still under $5,000 across four years — a bit over a thousand dollars a year for maintaining a store, two payment gateways, an email automation plugin, twenty product listings, and a checkout I have now proven to myself that I don’t monitor. The problem isn’t only that the number is small. It’s that the number is small and I still managed not to notice a $499 order failing for six months.
There’s a second reason that has nothing to do with money. This site has never been one thing. It started as an early retirement blog, wandered into tradelines when I found a way to make my credit do something useful, and lately it’s mostly been optimization tools I build and give away. That’s fine — it’s a personal blog, it’s allowed to wander. But a storefront sitting in the middle of it quietly turns every page into a sales funnel, including the pages where I’m just describing what happened. I’d rather the writing be read as what it is.
The 815 customers who never bought anything
One more number, because it taught me something about my own reporting. WooCommerce told me I had 815 registered customers. That felt good for about ten seconds, which is exactly how long it took to check how many of them had ever placed an order.
Zero. Every single one of the 31 orders was a guest checkout. The 815 accounts are bot registrations that piled up over four years while I glanced at the number now and then and quietly felt like I had an audience. (If you run a store and you’ve got a customer count you’ve never cross-checked against your order count, go look. Right now, I’ll wait.)
What isn’t going away
The posts stay. All of them.
The mechanics don’t stop being true just because I stopped selling. American Express still reports authorized users with the date the user was added rather than the card’s real open date, which is why an Amex tradeline is worth far less than the brand name suggests. Citi is still notorious for not posting authorized users at all. Bank of America is still the issuer that closed a $40,000 card of mine over this kind of activity, which remains the most expensive lesson I’ve picked up here.
The broker reviews stay too, and I’d argue they get more useful. Reviewing Boost Credit 101 and Tradeline Supply Company while quietly competing with them was always a slightly compromised position, however fairly I tried to write them. That conflict is gone now. The same goes for everything I’ve written about what selling tradelines is actually like and what a given credit limit actually buys you.
What I won’t do is go soft on the things I think are genuinely harmful. CPNs are synthetic identity fraud and a federal crime, and not selling anymore doesn’t make that any less true. If you’re trying to move a score, the levers are the boring ones — limit, age, utilization, payment history — and the CFPB’s material on credit reports and scores explains them better than most of the paid advice in this industry.
The product pages come down over the next couple of weeks and the old links will point back here. The store made $1,731 in four years. The writing about the store is worth more than that, so the writing stays.
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