Mana Pool Improves Price Optimization for Online Card Purchases with Hexaly
Mana Pool is an online marketplace dedicated to Magic: The Gathering cards. The platform connects sellers who list card quantities, types, and sealing options with buyers who build customized carts from thousands of available products. At the core of Mana Pool’s business model lies a critical challenge: real-time price optimization.
Real-Time Price Optimization in a Complex Online Marketplace
When a buyer adds cards to a cart, Mana Pool must compute the optimal sourcing strategy across multiple sellers in order to minimize total cost. This is not a simple price comparison. The final price depends on:
- The individual price of each card
- The number of cards purchased from each seller
- Whether the cards are sealed or not
- The available shipping options for each seller
Each cart, therefore, triggers a large-scale combinatorial price optimization problem with multiple objectives and constraints.
To deliver fast and accurate results, Mana Pool chose Hexaly.
A Large-Scale Multi-Objective Optimization Model
Mana Pool’s optimization engine simultaneously minimizes:
- The total purchase price, including cards and shipping
- The number of packages sent
This bi-objective price optimization model ensures that buyers benefit from the lowest possible cost while keeping logistics manageable.
The scale of the problem is significant:
- The universe of Magic: The Gathering includes millions of different SKUs
- Trial instances included carts with up to thousands of cards
- These carts were sourced from more than 1,000 sellers, with carts including up to 73 sellers
For each cart, the system must determine:
- Which seller supplies each card
- Which shipping option applies
- How to combine orders to reduce shipping costs
- How to balance total price and parcel count
This makes Mana Pool’s platform a real-world example of advanced e-commerce price optimization at scale.
From MILP to High-Performance Price Optimization with Hexaly
Before implementing Hexaly, Mana Pool relied on a pure MILP model solved with open-source solvers.
This approach created serious limitations for their online price optimization workflow:
- Failures to find solutions for large carts
- Several minutes to obtain a feasible solution
- Slow convergence toward high-quality solutions
- Unacceptable response times for an interactive marketplace
Since customers are actively waiting for their cart total, delays of several minutes were not viable.
By redesigning the model using Hexaly’s set-based modeling approach, Mana Pool achieved:
- Initial solution times under 15 seconds for most instances
- Strong solution quality even for large carts
- Stable and scalable performance
This performance breakthrough transformed the user experience. Mana Pool integrated the optimization engine directly into the checkout interface. Buyers can now:
- See the current best price in real time
- Accept the current optimized price immediately
- Or wait longer for a proven optimal solution
This flexible approach combines advanced mathematical price optimization with a seamless e-commerce experience.
Rapid Deployment from Trial to Production
Another remarkable aspect of the project was execution speed.
Mana Pool moved from trial start to production deployment in less than four weeks. This rapid implementation highlights both the modeling flexibility of Hexaly and the responsiveness of the Mana Pool team.
In addition to performance gains, licensing conditions played an important role in the final decision. While other commercial solvers were evaluated, Hexaly offered a very attractive licensing model combined with strong optimization capabilities. This balance of performance and cost efficiency made Hexaly the right long-term partner for Mana Pool’s price optimization strategy.
Delivering Advanced Price Optimization to Online Buyers
For digital marketplaces, price optimization is not a back-office function. It directly impacts customer satisfaction, conversion rates, and operational efficiency.
With Hexaly, Mana Pool now delivers:
- Real-time multi-seller price optimization
- Optimized shipping cost allocation
- Reduced number of packages
- Scalable performance for large carts
By embedding advanced optimization technology into its platform, Mana Pool ensures that every buyer benefits from intelligent, data-driven price optimization in seconds.
With Hexaly, we completely transformed our price optimization, and created a capability that users love and cite as one of the beast features of Mana Pool.
