How Do I Track Costco Inventory for Pokémon Cards?

To track Costco Pokémon card inventory, check the bundle's item number against warehouse price lists with Scavio's Costco API. POST /api/v1/costco/prices returns, for up to 9 warehouses per 1-credit call, whether each warehouse lists the item and its shelf price. Run it every 30 minutes near your ZIP, across a state, or at all 627 US warehouses, and alert when a warehouse starts listing it. Costco sells its Pokémon card bundles in the warehouse only, so the usual stock lookup returns no record for them.

Rather have your AI agent set all of this up? Copy this into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or any agent that can run code:

Track Costco Pokémon card drops for me: https://scavio.dev/skills/costco-pokemon-tracker/SKILL.md

The agent reads the skill, asks for your ZIP or states and how you want alerts, then installs the same tracker this guide builds.

Why the normal stock check fails for Pokémon cards

We tested both of Costco's endpoints on November 7, 2026, at the 10 warehouses nearest Everett, MA:

The card bundle (item 2007496, the Pokémon TCG 30th Celebration Elite Trainer Box & Booster Bundle) had no stock record at any of the 10, and it was on all 10 price lists at $57.49. The Pokémon Holiday Calendar, a box of figures Costco also sells online, behaves the other way: full stock status per warehouse, out at Everett and in stock at the other 9. So you watch the price list for card drops and stock status for everything else.

Pick your scenario

Step 1: get the warehouse ids

For warehouses near you, send your ZIP:

curl -s https://api.scavio.dev/api/v1/costco/warehouses \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SCAVIO_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"zip": "02149", "limit": 50}'

Each result has the warehouse_id, address, hours, services and distance_miles, up to 50 per call. For Everett, MA the nearest was Everett (333, 1.1 miles), then Waltham (308), Danvers (301), Dedham (319), Avon (303), Sharon (1704) and Nashua, NH (307), all within 30 miles.

For a whole state or the whole country, you do not need to rebuild the list. We swept every US location on November 7, 2026 (660 in total: 627 regular warehouses, 27 Business Centers and 6 home showrooms) and published it as us-warehouses.json, with each warehouse's id, type, city, state and coordinates. Filter it by state, or by distance from a point for a road trip.

Step 2: get the item number

Costco's card bundles do not show up in a costco.com search. Our search for "pokemon cards" returned the Holiday Calendar, Pokémon dog toys and unrelated bestsellers, no trading cards. On costco.com, item 2007496 resolves to a placeholder page titled "D28 RESERVED" with a price of 0. The item number has to come from somewhere else:

• The shelf tag or your receipt, if you have already seen it.
• Collector drop threads. Collectors post the number the day the first pallet lands, which is how 2007496 spread. Scavio's Reddit search finds those posts as JSON:

curl -s https://api.scavio.dev/api/v1/reddit/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SCAVIO_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query": "costco pokemon item number"}'

Pull the 7-digit numbers out of the titles and text and confirm each one before tracking it. POST /api/v1/costco/product with "country": "ca" returned the real title for 2007496 ("Pokémon TCG: 30th Celebration Elite Trainer Box & Booster Bundle"), and /costco/prices tells you whether US warehouses list it.

Step 3: check the price list at up to 9 warehouses per call

import os, requests

r = requests.post(
    "https://api.scavio.dev/api/v1/costco/prices",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['SCAVIO_API_KEY']}"},
    json={"item_ids": ["2007496"],
          "warehouse_ids": ["333", "308", "301", "319", "303", "1704", "307"]},
    timeout=90,
)
item = r.json()["data"]["items"][0]
print("online price:", item["online"]["price"])  # 0 = not sold on costco.com
for w in item["warehouses"]:
    print(w["warehouse_id"], w["available"], w["price"], w["price_code"])

All 7 came back available: true at $57.49, with a price_code meaning of special_buy. The call took 3.6 seconds and cost 1 credit. One call takes up to 20 item numbers, so you can watch every current Pokémon bundle for the same credit.

available: true means the warehouse has the item on its price list. It does not mean boxes are on the floor this minute, and the next section shows why that matters.

Step 4: check every US warehouse at once

Split the 627 regular warehouses into groups of 9 and send one prices call per group: 70 calls, 70 credits. It took about 8 minutes, one request at a time. On November 7, 2026 we ran it for three Pokémon items:

• 30th Celebration bundle (2007496): listed at 618 of the 627 warehouses. $57.49 at 613 and $57.99 at 5 in Hawaii and Alaska. Not listed at 4 warehouses in Hawaii, 2 in Alaska, and Salt Lake City, Reno and Fresno.
• Pokémon Holiday Calendar (1929673): listed at the same 618, $39.99 everywhere.
• A 2022 Pokémon bundle (1631799): still listed at 20 warehouses, at $37.99, years after its drop sold through.

That last one is the catch. A price-list entry can outlive the stock, so the signal worth an alert is a change: a warehouse that did not list an item yesterday and does today. None of the 27 Business Centers listed any of the three items, so skip them.

Step 5: run it on a schedule and get alerts

The tracker from the skill does Steps 1 to 4 and remembers the last run. Download tracker.py (Python standard library only), put your API key in ~/.config/scavio/api_key, and write a tracker.json next to it for your scenario:

{"items": ["2007496"], "zip": "02149", "radius_miles": 30}

{"items": ["2007496"], "states": ["CA", "NV"], "discord_webhook": "https://discord.com/api/webhooks/..."}

{"items": ["2007496"], "near": {"latitude": 34.05, "longitude": -118.24, "radius_miles": 100}}

Leave out every location key to watch all 627 US warehouses. The first run prints where each item is listed:

Item 2007496: listed at 8 of 8 warehouses, shelf price $57.49
Item 1631799: listed at 1 of 8 warehouses, shelf price $37.99
checked 2 item(s) at 8 warehouse(s), 1 credit(s)

That was Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Later runs print only changes: NEW when a warehouse starts listing an item, PRICE, GONE, and CLEARANCE when a shelf price ends in .97. With a Discord webhook the same lines land on your phone. Schedule it with cron:

*/30 * * * * cd ~/costco-pokemon-tracker && /usr/bin/python3 tracker.py >> tracker.log 2>&1

Costco Canada

The same item number works on costco.ca. Pass "country": "ca" and use coordinates for the warehouse search, since Canadian postal codes are not ZIP codes:

{"country": "ca", "latitude": 43.65, "longitude": -79.38, "limit": 9}

Around Toronto, 2007496 was listed at all 8 regular warehouses at C$89.99, and the Scarborough Business Centre did not carry it. Unlike the US, costco.ca sells it online, at C$99.99 with a limit of one per order. Canadian warehouses keep no stock record for it either, so the price list is the signal there too.

Pokémon items Costco also sells online

Plush, figures and calendars have a costco.com listing, so their stock status is visible per warehouse:

{"item_number": "1929673", "warehouse_ids": ["333", "308", "301", "319", "303"]}

Sent to POST /api/v1/costco/availability, this returns in_stock, low_stock, out_of_stock or not_available per warehouse, plus pickup and same-day delivery. It costs 1 credit per 5 warehouses. POST /api/v1/costco/search with "query": "pokemon" finds the item numbers (2 credits). For a warehouse-only card bundle, availability returns no_record: Costco does not track that item's stock, the lookup did not fail.

Is the Costco bundle a good deal?

Compare the shelf price with what the same product sells for elsewhere. We ran Scavio's eBay and Walmart search for the 30th Celebration Elite Trainer Box on the same day:

The Costco bundle, with an extra booster bundle, cost less than half the median eBay asking price for the Elite Trainer Box alone ($119 across 57 active listings). The lowest of three Walmart.com third-party sellers asked $129.49. These are asking prices, not completed sales, so treat them as the ceiling of what the box resells for this week.

What no tracker can tell you

• How many boxes are left. Costco publishes no unit counts for any item.
• When the pallet goes out. Costco does not announce drops, and collectors report staff declining to share shipment dates. The price list changes when the warehouse sets the item up, which you can see; the moment it hits the floor, you cannot.
• Whether a listing is fresh. Old bundles stay on price lists, as the 2022 bundle at 20 warehouses shows. Alert on changes, not on presence.
• Your purchase limit. Costco often caps Pokémon bundles per member. costco.ca showed one per order for 2007496.

What you are signing up to maintain

A Costco Pokémon tracker that works has to keep the warehouse ids for the area you watch, collect item numbers that never appear in search, tell a warehouse-only item from an out-of-stock one, ignore stale listings, and run every half hour through every drop. Scavio returns the price list and stock status for any item number at any US or Canadian warehouse, in the same JSON shape every call. You keep the item list and the alert.

The cost scales with how much of the map you watch. One prices call covers up to 20 bundles at up to 9 warehouses for 1 credit:

At the Growth rate of $1 per 1,000 credits, a metro tracker is under $3 a month and fits in the Hobby plan's 3,000 monthly credits. Checking every US warehouse every 6 hours is 8,400 credits, about $8.40 a month.

Try the Costco API free with 50 credits, no card, then run the same calls in the playground, or hand the skill to your agent.

Tracking more than Pokémon? See how to check Costco warehouse prices and stock by item number and how to find Costco clearance items at any warehouse.

Reference: Costco API overview · prices · availability · warehouses · product · Reddit search · eBay search