As promised, we launched the new COMC.com today. We still have a lot of polish and new features to launch, but you will get a good idea for the direction we are heading. You can easily compare the old and the new versions of any page by clicking the corresponding logo of the other site.
Over the next several weeks we will be doing posts that focus on different areas of the site. Today we decided to make a youtube video to discuss the most popular topic regarding the new site… Beckett Prices.
Quick note: you can turn on Beckett prices on COMC.com by clicking on the Book Prices link at the bottom of the page and following the instructions to subscribe to Beckett prices.
Kudos to youtubers. I have a lot of respect for people that put out videos. It takes a lot of effort even to make a simple video.
Hey, Tim. Thanks for taking the time to respond. It makes some sense why Beckett sees a risk in “giving away” their OPG, but it also makes the assumption that there’s a significant cross over between those that pay for theirservice and those that visit COMC- much less those bright enough and willing to take the time to come to COMC to figure our their Beckett values. Realistically, it’s a smaller number. (Heck, people list Beckett prices with their auctions on ebay, too.) Perhaps Becket is playing to you by saying that you’re going to grow sooo much, and you believe you will since you have to be optimistic. Also, $100 for buyers to see card prices for one year on your site – one that specializes in selling cards around $1-$3 – is completely unrealistic. We’re a cheap lot – negotiating vehemently and daily on $.25 and $.50 per sale.
This situation is unfortunate, and after viewing your video, I’m convinced there is zero upside to removing the Beckett prices. It has been critical to the model that makes this a compelling site to buy and sell in a way that’s very different than ebay. (I doubt this is lost on you but know sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees when it’s all you’ve been doing for years.) I’ll see how my sales go when you switch over completely, but I’m no longer planning on sending-in more cards. 🙁 Hey, maybe a cautious lull will give your staff the reprieve they need! I do wish you luck!
These site changes get better with each passing day. What serious collector has even used Beckett as a “price guide” since 1988? Any collector can go to Ebay or COMC to get the actual market value for any card ever produced. Beckett wouldn’t even price rare cards with a print run under 50 so not like they are adding pricing insights for rare cards.
I’m worried that my sales are gonna start flopping completely now.. Ill see how it goes and I may be wrong, but a card listed for 9 cents sounds a lot better then listed for 34 cents. I realize the shipping fee is added, but the cards that cheap are typically flip cards. It feels like flipping wont be successful with the new style due to the extra prices that are added that make buyers think twice before buying a card. In conclusion I guess I’m saying that I like that its moving forward, but I highly doubt it’ll be successful. I truly hope I’m wrong cause I love this site. 🙂
Sorry guys, but not impressed with the look and feel of the new site. Albeit I typically dont like change, I just do not care for the look period. The old site has a much more user friendly feel to it.
As for the Beckett prices, $100 to use them is ridiculous. As mentioned above, alot of cards shifting hands are lower end cards, autos/game used/inserts. The BV isn’t overly necessary, but Im sure some people see a card with a high BV and low price and snag it for that simple fact. The BV does help make some sales.
The fees here just keep adding up, listing fees, cashout fees and shipping fees. And now Beckett fees? How can you expect those who sell here to even be able to turn a profit? I for one have sent in my last batch, it just isn’t cost effective any longer, especially with Ebay offering free listings.
Tim – how long do you plan to keep the old site up?
Somewhere around 1-3 months depending on how things go with the changes to COMC.com.
I think I am good with the no BV, will take a bit to adjust,
My question is can we now send in cards that Beckett does not have values for? I have a lot of minor league stuff you dont ever take because its to new and beckett does not list them, also some non sport cards. Can I now send these in? Good cards just not listed by beckett.
Also, why im thinking of it, can you move all of the Poker cards that are listed in the non-sports to the poker section, I know its dumb but it drives me crazy, search poker and most are in the wrong section.
We routinely allow cards with no book values to be added to the site, including non-sports and minor league team sets. For example, over the past week we have created the 1984 Topps Gremlins and 1991 Pro Set Musicards sets, two oversights on Beckett’s part. In the respective cases of both these sets they are mainstream, produced by widely established companies. We ask that if the set isn’t on our site that you send a complete checklist so we can evaluate its contents and if acceptable create it in an efficient manner. We do not accept cards lacking licensing or copyright data (“Broders”), cards cut from a magazine (Ballstreet, Tuff Stuff, Sports Illustrated/SI For Kids being the lone exception) or cards that are considered a risque or controversial subject matter that may be deemed offensive to some (Benchwarmers, Penthouse, fantasy art, Serial Killers, even Biblequest could be considered offensive to those of other religions).
Chad are you guys taking in Pokemon? As I understood it during the lawsuit you guys were not accepting new submissions. I believe that lawsuit is settled? We have nearly 1000 foils we’d like to send to you….or set on fire. lol
TripleAvintage Sportscards – We are already accepting more Pokemon cards, we’d love to have yours on the site. Thanks!
Great! we will send some in and see how they do!
I understand the necessity of the Beckett move (and agree with the folks above that $100 a year is unrealistic for most), but I think your video glosses over a key point: it’s quite easy to determine the market value of a card when there are ten copies listed at $5 each. Where the Beckett data comes in handiest is in determining the market value of a card that’s not yet on the site at all (or a card of which there’s only one copy). I assume you’ve discussed at length in the past your rationale for not releasing historical sales data; but in light of the new lack of pricing information available to flippers, perhaps you might reconsider that decision?
Tim this will all work out fine.
We didn’t even use Beckett as a guide when we were on their marketplace. We know what we paid for a card, we know what we want out of the card and that is how we list. No checking of Ebay prices for us since we don’t sell there. On occasion we’ll check what other sellers here are charging.
Who cares if a insert that is selling for a couple of bucks “books” $5 or $10. If a collector wants the card, and the price is the lowest or the condition is the best, they will buy it.
About the only thing Beckett used to be good for was telling us the print run of certain cards. I assume you guys will still post that type of information? I look forward to taking my business 100% Beckett free. Casting those chains totally away as we did years ago with Ebay and Paypal is a very liberating feeling.. “Onward, Upward, Forward!!!!”
Also like to add that all of the COMC sales done on Amazon are done so without book prices being posted. I’m glad it is an option for people who want to use it but the site will be fine without paying through the nose to give it to everyone for free.
totally agree and after watching Tim’s video I feel even better about the changes because it’s obvious the guy knows the hobby and cares about his business and I think things are going to continue to get bigger and better at COMC! Few changes are perfect in the beginning but I believe they’ll see how the new site runs and make the appropriate changes to make this place better than we thought possible. Today I got a list of Beckett changes, and they’re quite ridiculous. Had a card drop from $30 to $10 in one month and a card numbered out of 7 fall from $25 to $12 bv..really? I think the market does a much better job telling what a card’s worth than their silly numbers…once BV’s gone, I think most of us might miss it initially but life could be better without it!
Ya. but you just go back to comc for the book value. Well worth the time in my book.
So, as a seller the Beckett pricing is free? Only buyers need to pay the fee to see Beckett pricing? Or will both buyer & seller need to pay the fee? Will we continue to receive the emails w/ pricing Beckett pricing changes? Thanks.
If you’re the person who submitted the card, you can see the BV of the card for free. I guess you could say it is included with the submission fee.
It is included in the submission fee. When you submit a card, you are paying COMC to prepare, process, give a scan, and tell you what it is. I think it only make sense that the original owner knows a ballpark estimate of what they should price it at.
Tim, I have an online subscription to Beckett Basketball and Football that I pay $9 each for, not to mention I buy the hardcopies too… Paying another $10 seems like overkill. Furthermore, I won’t be willing to go back and forth between the two sites/check the hardcopies before I buy a card and would probablly just not buy it unless it’s something I really want. So, is either COMC or Beckett going to give some sort of break/freebie for customer’s in my position? Thanks, Shaun
Hi Sndm13.
That’s definitely on our radar. We’re discussing different ways of making it happen, but it gets complicated because Beckett licenses by sport so we’d need to create some kind of parallel by-sport integration.
Thanks!
Jeremy
Good question I have the same one. Would hate to pay twice. I only reason I have Becketts OPG is for the orginazor. Thanks Sndm13.
Speaking as someone who buys (no selling at this point) through Checkoutmycards/COMC, I have a large problem with the book values not being up on COMC. I understand that Beckett can’t continue to give out the book prices for all the cards on COMC since there are so many, but this is horrible for the buyer. I will be a lot more hesitant to buy from COMC because I no longer can see the book value. Not bashing the sellers on this site because so many of them are great, but what is stopping a seller from putting a card they have up for sale for, say, 20 bucks when the book value is only 10? For cards that are common, this wouldn’t be an issue because sellers will have to keep their prices low to compete with eachother for the sale, but if someone has the only copy of a certain card that is on the site, this would be an issue. Other people in this thread have said that it doesn’t matter what the price is, it someone has the best condition and lowest price, the card will be bought. That idea could easily be wrong because someone wouldn’t want to pay for a card that could be worth a lot less than it is being sold for. Why would you pay $10 for something you could get for $5 before? I am assuming that the sell prices will go up because nothing is stopping the sellers from doing so. Others have said on this thread that nobody uses book prices anyways. That idea is crazy. Yes, if there is a certain card that is on the site that I really want, I will be more inclined to buy it just because I really want it, even without the book price. But without book prices, there is no way of knowing if I’m getting a good deal or not. Again, this isn’t a problem with cards that are common, but once there gets to be only a couple of copies of that card on the site, I would not feel comfortable buying it unless I am 100% sure it is a good deal. One more issue with the lack of book values: I have bought cards multiple times before just because the card was being offered for a fraction of the book vaule. However, with no way to know how the list price coresponds with the book price anymore, I will no longer be doing this.
I realize that from the business aspect, Beckett can no longer offer the prices anymore. This is great for the seller, but it really hurts the buyer. Don’t get me wrong, I have loved CheckOutMyCards (not quite sure about COMC yet) just sharing my thoughts on the lack of book prices from the viewpoint of a buyer
Matt….
If the $10 card only books $5 and yet it is the only copy of the card that you can find….and you want the card…..then why is the book value important?
I am really shocked by this… I hear so many people telling me how scambay is “THE” place to get real pricing and that Beckett is good for nothing but a checklist. So why has that changed? Weren’t alot of you going over there to see what stuff sold for anyway?
We’ve sold tens of thousands of cards at drastic discount of book and we’ve also sold thousands of cards at or above book,especially those with a print run of 100 or less.
I am not saying pay $100 for a common Griffey jersey card because it is the only copy here. But if you are a collector and you see something you like and you can’t find it elsewhere, what is the real difference between $5 and $10?
I think most collectors are aware of what “market value” is for most types of cards. For those that are not, there is an integrated option available here or you can buy pricing from Beckett directly. People buy on Scambay, Amazon, Sportsbuy, Sportlots, the Beckett Marketplace every day by the thousands without book prices displayed. Yes it was nice here…but if those sites can survive without it…and they don’t have pictures of every actual item….I am sure COMC will do fine.
It wouldn’t necessarily be the extra 5 bucks (unless a card got bumped up $10, $20+ of the BV), it would be the fact that I could have gotten the card for half as much before when the book value is displayed, compared to the $10 I would be forced to pay now that the BV is not displayed. Not sure what your point about eBay is, since I never said anything about it, but my problem is that this would hurt buyers. Without a book price to compare to, buyers will no longer know if they are getting a steal or paying way to much. You refered to eBay as Scambay, I’m assuming you did so because things there go for prices way higher than they should. Put in a book value with all trading cards, and I bet you that people will stop buying things for 5x their value. By taking away the book values in the listings, isn’t COMC becoming more like eBay? COMC will still do fine without Beckett prices, since they offer many features that other sites don’t (like scans of each individual card rather than stock photos), but COMC hurts the buyer a lot
Thanks for taking the time to post, very well put and you addressed we, the buyers/collectors concerns nicely…All valid points, thank you again!!
Matt,
Appreciate your perspective. An interesting point of view.
I refer to it as Scambay due to their demand of the use of Paypal (and the Paypal terms of service regarding their rights to freeze payments) It has nothing to do with the prices that items go for because we haven’t checked prices there in years.
C O M C
I don’t care how many times I hear com-C, I won’t say it 🙂
lol agreed 🙂
Also makes sense that the buyer should have a ballpark estimate of what to offer the seller. This WAS comc’s greatest selling point
Just shipped off a round of graded cards! The lower pricing and faster service times make it worthwhile.
Congrats on the success Tim, the new site, and working out some sort of “deal” with Beckett.
Bit sad that Beckett put the screws on COMC and now we have to suffer (or ante up). Keeping the growth and volume/traffic of the site in mind I suppose it was inevitable, however I just don’t see it benefiting the true collectors that are passionate about the hobby.
“Also makes sense that the buyer should have a ballpark estimate of what to offer the seller. This WAS comc’s greatest selling point” Brian from Canada
Excellent point Brian and thanks for representing the collector in all of this…
Already I’m seeing sellers RAISE their prices knowing that buyers don’t know the bottom line.
The last 50 seconds of the vid pretty much sum it up 🙁
As a seller on checkoutmycards.com I am still severely dissappointed with the changes that have been made. I sent my last batch of cards in at the lower price and have found a better alternative with no cashout fees and a monthly rate to list the cards. I just can’t see how a company can justify doing less work and charging more for the service. Let’s see remove the pricing, take longer to process the cards and raise the cost to process. It’s just sad to see a once great concept becoming money hungry and pricing the average guy who has enjoyed selling $2-$5 cards on the site for over 3 years now out of the COMC market. I knew when I started it was too good to be true and should’ve listened to my instincts. Sorry you decided to go the way of the old feebay and offer less service and slower turnaround times for more money and made it harder for the little guy to sell competitively on the site. Once my port is sold I will be gone unless COMC figures out a way to make it cost effective for the little guy and stops catering to the big boys. A site that was once praised by many is now being praised by few. Sad to see.
Hi, bigchili73.
We appreciate your feedback. It’s definitely our hope to be an egalitarian platform that panders to neither small nor large sellers. We don’t cut our large sellers any special deals, and doing away with the old $3 batch fee has actually made it less expensive to send in fewer than 50 cards at the new One Month rate which we definitely hope will benefit small sellers.
Removing the free universal listings of Beckett prices was necessary, as Tim pointed out, because we do not want to work against them. It made sense when we were small, but now that we’ve grown it isn’t fair to them for us to simply publish their prices.
The processing times of our new service levels are comparable to the old – One Month, One Week, and One Day. We appreciate everyone who took advantage of the temporary Oct. 29 service that we were able to offer for folks who wanted one last crack at the legacy pricing, but processing times will not be longer than before. We really hope that the additional $0.05 will not be prohibitive, while allowing us to operate sustainably for a long time.
Thanks,
Jeremy
Jeremy as you know we were about to walk the plank about that nickel/15 cent increase…
However….with the ability to set autoaccept/decline, the lower cost and FASTER time for larger cards and the removal of condition note fees, those extra up front service fees are more than a fair trade.
Jeremy,
your timeframe is incorrect unless I am mistaken, You were .20 per card for 4 week turnaround now you are .35 per card for 5 week turnaround. The shipping fee is ridiculous if you are still charging an industry high 20% cash out fee and then the expense just to ship the cards to COMC. For me to sell a $2 card I would need to list that card for at least a $1.00 to make any profit for myself. Theses cards will no longer sell as well as in the past because you will add the .25 shipping fee onto that card. Card that previously sold for .50 will now be listed at .75 and wont sell. This is going to drive a lot of people away from COMC and to cheaper alternatives. It used to cost $78 with the batch fee to send in 500 cards when I first started on COMC in 2009. It now costs $175 to send in those same 500 cards without the batch fee. You throw in the 20% cash out fee and as a seller you now have to sell 3 times as many cards just to break even in profit how is this good for a low to mid range seller like myself and the majority of the sellers on the site. Less sellers = less cards = less traffic. This model works great for people who like to throw money away if they really sat down and figured out all the fees and the percentage COMC takes they would see how truly outrageous the fees are. I have noticed a serious declined in sales over the past month and with the new fees am having a hard time making a sale even when I have a promotion going on. I just don’t see with all the other selling options out there how this is the best option for the majority of the sellers anymore. Thanks for the quick response as always your srepsonse time and customer service have been great however you are just pricing the casual seller or low to mid range product off of your site.
Why are you worried about being fair to Beckett? They’re your competition, aren’t they, or is there more here than meets the eye?
Hi, bigchili73.
I checked your account and I see that you currently have over 1000 cards for sale between the prices of $.26 and $0.75. Increasing the processing fees by $0.05 has allowed us to reduce the storage fees for those cards to $0/month, saving you $10 on storage fees monthly. We’re really pleased that this processing fee change will allow us to help small and large sellers in this way as well as to roll out all the other great features we have planned.
Tim mentioned a lot of other benefits here that we’re very excited about:http://blog.checkoutmycards.com/2012/09/16/last-2-weeks-of-20%c2%a2-processing/
There’s even more on they way in the near future that we haven’t even announced yet.
Thanks!
Jeremy
Further, my “rent” dropped 40% on 9/1 vs 8/1, and it stayed that low on 10/1. The higher ceiling for no storage fee more than makes up for the nickel I get charged for new submissions. The elimination of the batch fee has no effect on me, but it’s great for smaller sellers.
I wish we could bulk increase everyone’s 25-cent card to 75. I know some of you think it will decrease sales volume (and obviously it would), but it would be more than compensated by increased revenue.
Have to say that having book value listed was what made this site work. Obviously, book value is not perfect, nor does it reflect actual value. It did though allow people to compare some sort of value. I sold many cards that had low serial numbers just because I was listing them at a low percentage of book. Buyers probably felt like they were getting a deal, while I felt like I was getting a fair price. Also, having book value listed implied some thought went into print runs or some level of scarcity. For example, if you have two kobe bryant inserts that have only 1-2 listed on COMC, one books at $20 and one at $2. The one with the $20 book obviously is more scarce, maybe one insert a box, or case even, while the other had maybe 6 per box. Now, its just anyone’s guess. Sure you would think that eventually more of the $2 cards would show up on the site, but now with the higher listing fees and the additional $.25 that sellers are ultimately going to have to eat (do you really think people are going to want to see cards listed at $2.25) fewer low $ cards are going to be sent in.
I also can see someone doing a search to buy, lets say a kobe rc Maybe they make the purchase because they see they are buying a $20 book value card for $10. Seems like a good value. Instead they see a bunch of kobe rookies listed, can’t tell the difference and ultimately don’t make the purchase. These people are for sure not going to spend $100 to get book value.
Also, my experience as a buyer is that I would usually start looking at a seller’s listings by sorting as highest percentage off of book value.
I think this will definitely hurt sales, not just for me, but the site as a whole.
Really disappointing news.
Jeremy,
Precisely my point. You are now raising the prices of all those cards by $.25 per card to ship and charging .05 more per card on the front end. Dinging the seller or the supplier of your product and the buyer. Leading to slower and less sales. I also noticed you guys have steered away from the whole 20% cash out fee discussion. It only takes $1 to mail a check if you send with extra stamps and maybe $.25 per check to cut the check so why should someone pay $240 of $1200 in sales = total Cash out of $960 therefore really costing the seller $240.00 + Listing Fees + Shipping cards to Checkout. The shipping is not the big deal but it is still an expense that the seller has to take into account. It used to be fun to send cards into the site and buy cards from the site. I will no longer be buying the cards I need or want from COMC because of the .25 per card shipping fee increasing the price of the cards immensly. Again thanks for your time in debating the issue, but for me Checkoutmycards is know Checkoutmyfees and no longer a viable site for this buyer/seller. No hard feelings but I will protest the fees the only way I know how and that is to take my business elsewhere once my port is sold.
What 5 week turnaround are you talking about? As I understand it they have raised the month per card rate by a nickel and the week rate by 15 cents. They have also reduced the larger cards to 50 cents for a month and 75 cents for a week when it used to be 75 cents for 3 weeks ( lower costs and or faster service time) Also…. not getting hit with those surprise condition note fees…. and lastly on the shipping…. you were paying roughly a quarter per card to ship them before. Now it is just built in….
I am with you on the cashout fees being high.
Joel….when you said the batch fees weren’t an impact on you…is it due to you mostly buying ports or was the $3 just a minor “annoyance” in the grand scheme of things?
It’s a minor annoyance, I guess. When COMC fees reflected the direct labor cost, batch fees made more sense. What I mean by that is how confusing the fees used to be, because if something required a unique amount of labor, there was a unique fee attached to it.
They’re not charging an additional 25 cents per card. They’re displaying a handling fee that was already there. If you don’t want to see the fee, you can go to COMC, My Dashboard, My Profile And Options. Then scroll down to “Outgoing Offers”, click on “Advance Selling Mode” and POOF! All the 25 cent postage and packing charges disappear. Then the site is more or less the exact same as it was before.
Why COMC isn’t shouting this from the rooftops or why they didn’t default to this view for current members, I have no idea. But it is there.
I think they gave up on shouting it. They explained it well in the previous blog posts. I am all in agreement with people who think the shipping rate is too high here. But there is not a 25 cent increase… There was a small increase. But not a quarter….except perhaps on graded/oversize cards but I could be wrong on that?
Hi, bigchili73.
I definitely respect your decision, and one of the things I like about COMC is that it’s a free market; we lay out our system clearly and everyone can make a decision about what will work best for them. No hard feelings at all if you choose to leave for a while, and you’re certainly welcome you back if you decide to send in more items.
To clarify a couple of points, shipping is exactly the same cost as it was on September 30th – $3.25 for the first card and $0.25 for each additional card. We just changed the way we show it. If anyone still likes it the old way of seeing the shipping, they can switch to Advanced Reselling Mode in the Options menu or just use checkoutmycards.com instead of comc.com.
As much as we’d love to offer our service with no cashout fee, it unfortunately isn’t possible. Our rates have been a steady 20% for five years and we’ve found it to be a sustainable number, especially when compared against the value of the work sellers need to do themselves to sell on other marketplaces.
Thanks for replying, and letting us know how you feel.
Jeremy
I believe I have sent my last batch in as well.. Im a low end small seller (just send about 250 more cards in at the 20 cent) but I really feel this won’t be as succesful, and less and less people will be buying cards from here due to all the changes that are affecting it. unless things change or I see my cards selling well and succesfully, then once my new port sales it’ll be time to look for another way to make some extra money. Thanks for the time here, I hope things will work out, and i’ll keep coming if it does.
Hi, jkbball.
I actually really like how you stated your last comment – we know that if we provide the right service, people will use it. Right now there’s a lot of big changes going on and it’s going to take some time to see what’s working well and what will need adjusting. People will take their cards to where there’s money to be made, and we want to be that place so we’re going to keep working hard to make sure we are.
Thanks,
Jeremy
Question for you fellas,
Is there any plan in place to be able to tell when a fellow seller has beat your low price on the site? It’s always a race to the bottom, which is a big time win for buyers and flippers, and essentially COMC too… Perhaps a notification? I would love to be able to edit my price to be the lowest on the site without having to check all 3,000+ cards
I’d second this request.
I’d third it, with the caveat that maybe COMC should allow people to auto-reprice their port once a month or so, rather than, say, 500 times a day.
I recently went into my account and manually repriced about 30,000 cards. The process took close to a month.
That being said, the #1 change I would like to see is the ability to subdivide your port into several different mini-ports, each of which could be subject to different auto-accept rules, and each of which could be offered as a port sale.
That way, if someone wants to have a fire sale on one group of cards, they can do so without affecting the cards they want to treat with a bit more respect.
Nearly every dealer at nearly every show will have a case full of “nice” stuff, and a box full of “bargain” stuff. It should be the same with COMC.
That being said, I doubt that the Powers That Be at COMC are too excited right now about making any more major changes in the near future.
The problem with this idea is the amount of bandwidth it would take to evaluate every card every second to check every seller’s price in order to send a notification to every owner. This would bog down the speed of the site to the point that it wouldn’t be able to function.
1) Make it so it can only match the lowest price, not beat it
2) Charge 1 cent per card or $100 flat rate to run it so it is somewhat self-sufficient
3) Only run it in the background, i.e., when site traffic is X% of normal or less — in fact, use dynamic pricing so if lots of sellers want to use this tool at once, it costs more, similar to how keyword purchasing on AdWords works
Oh, and 4) Add a new element to the Dashboard, underneath the one that says how many unpriced cards I have, which tells me how many cards this tool has found and give me the same UI when I go to reprice them, except show the low price at the time the tool was run where the acquisition cost (where applicable) goes today.
All you’d really need to do is add (possibly as an option) the “lowest price” column to the search when you search by seller. A 2nd column “2nd lowest price” would also be tremendously useful. This would actually save a great deal of bandwidth. Right now, when a seller with 10,000 cards is having a 50% off sale, I have to click on every single listing that seller has in order to find this information. And every other flipper has to do the same thing. Whether you are flipping or repricing your own cards, this information is critical.
The “lowest price” information is already there, when you search for the card by player or set or sport. But when you sort by a seller, the information disappears. COMC set this system up when there were a few thousand cards on the site and a few dozen users. I don’t need COMC to continually monitor my listings and alert me when a price has changed. But I do need to be able to scan thousands of listings and be able to find out when there’s a big gap between the lowest price and the 2nd lowest price.
If COMC is unwilling to provide this information, it’s fine by me. That gives me an advantage over someone else who doesn’t want to bother slogging through thousands of listings to find a needle in a haystack. But if COMC was to provide this information, it would be a tremendous time saver and would lead to a more efficient marketplace.
Another idea is to only charge the cheapest card (or the cheapest 10% of a card, so 10 if there are 100 of the same card on the site) a storage fee. Obviously the storage fee structure would have to change to be revenue neutral, but that would create a true race to the center.
This would be horrible for me, but it would be great for the site, and I would support this for that reason.
Hi, Tyson (and everyone else in this discussion thread),
Thanks for asking. The “race to the bottom” concept that you and a few others mentioned is an environment we want to avoid for a few reasons. You’re right that it would be seen as a win for buyers and flippers, but in the long run it wouldn’t be sustainable for the sellers, and without the sellers there’s no COMC. The profit margins would become too narrow to be sustainable and people would take their cards elsewhere, thus collapsing the market.
Sellers are free to price their cards the lowest, but we don’t want to make it any easier than it already is.
As far as the other suggestions here, thanks for the input! While we’ve done the single biggest update we’re likely to do for a while, there’s still a lot of neat features in the pipeline and we plan to keep rolling out improvements to the site. Personally I love the idea of partial port sales and it’s something I want to see us start supporting. User input and interest is a large factor in our development schedule, so definitely keep letting us know the kinds of new features you want to see.
Thanks!
Jeremy
“Sellers are free to price their cards the lowest, but we don’t want to make it any easier than it already is.”
I wish you’d meet us half way and make it a little easier. As it is right now, the process is so inefficient that I usually don’t even bother with it.
I think the Manage My Inventory section should include some information on competing listings. It’s difficult for me to correctly price something like a 1990 Pro Set Emmitt Smith rookie card if I don’t know how many of them are for sale on the site right now, and what the lowest, second lowest, and median listing prices are. And as you might imagine, I don;t want to click on each and every card in my inventory to manually find out that type of information, and I wish you guys would just put it right there next to each item in my inventory. If you don;t want to include the lowest price (in fear of causing a price war), at least put the qty. there. Like other sellers here, I want to be able to quickly find out if I have the only 89 UD John Smoltz Rookie on the site, or if there are 275 others available for sale..
I’d also like to know the last and average sale prices for a card. I think sellers should be able to access that information. I think Half.com already has a system like that in place. Any time you list an item, the software tells you all of that.
The partial port is the #1 idea I’d like to see implemented. I don’t think it would require much on your end. All you’d have to really do is allow people to control more than one account, and to shuffle cards and credit between accounts.
Then, you wouldn’t see these ads where cards are 50% off, but only if they book for less than $6 and are priced at more than 75 cents unless the player has a y in his name.
You also would see a lot more coherence in port sales. You’d see ports for sale that are entirely made of memorabilia cards, or entirely made of cards from a certain set, player or team. Those ports would probably sell for much more than random grab bags of miscellaneous cards.
Another suggestion: if there’s a port being offered for sale, then the cards from that port should be removed from COMC for the duration of the sale. Also, I’d like the seller to be able to have the option of displaying the current winning bid.
Yes, the partial ports are needed. I have a lot of cards in my port that I wouldn’t mind getting rid of and at a relatively low cost, but also have a lot of cards that I’m content with keeping where they are, at the prices they’re at. Would be great if we could sub-divide our port into mini ports by sport, player..etc..I have cards that I’ve been sitting on for a year and a half that I’d love to clear most out, while focusing on my newer listings..
……and without the Buyers there’s no comc.
I would also really like to see the ability to do a partial port sale or sub-divide a port to allow different auto accept, min/max offers etc.
What you’ll see with this feature is what Amazon deals with….items listed for a penny because people are in a constant race to be the cheapest. Depending on what perspective you look at it from that could be good for the site or bad.
Possibly, but they could slow down the process by making it so that a seller can only match another seller’s price, and that the seller could only adjust their port once a month or so. That way, it would be more of a slow crawl to the bottom rather than a race. Some Amazon repricer programs will adjust the prices every few minutes.
COMC could also simply let sellers see in the Manage Inventory Page those cards which are not the cheapest on the site. Then they would have to manually go through and adjust each one. But if you want to defeat a race to the bottom, then one feature that a repricer program should have is the ability to adjust prices up and down.
I wouldn’t mind seeing what Sportsbuy has in prices showing in red if they are not the cheapest.
The monthly feature you are talking about…makes some sense…and I can’t believe I am saying this since I am normally anti-fee increase but perhaps there should be a small charge to do that mass adjustment..
In both scenarios whether it be having to do it manually or paying to do it on mass, people will have to stop and think before entering that race to the bottom.
Actually, on COMC, there tends to be a race to the middle. If a given price gets too low, someone is likely to buy the card and either reprice it at a higher price or take it off the site entirely.
This is different than Amazon. I’d be all over it if I could buy penny books on Amazon and reprice them at a buck, without ever having to take physical delivery of the item or ship it when it sells.
Exactly. Flipping is really what makes comc so great as a concept. It increases sales while costing comc essentially nothing.
An (optional) auto-notification might also be helpful when the average listed price of a card increases by, say, 40%. I can see that being useful when somebody gets called up, pitches a perfect game, especially if we could put all our prospect cards in a certain grouping.
I have one question. If i want all my cards that i am selling to end in .99 and be visible to the buyer at .99 do i have to price them at .74…Example: I want the card to be seen to the buyer at $9.99.Do i price it at $9.74……….Does the buyer see it at $9.99 or $9.74 + .25
That is how it works on COMC, but I am curious how it looks on Amazon. How does shipping work for those purchases?
Lee – if your buyer is not in “Advanced Seller Mode”, then they will see the card as 99 cents. But when they go to have their cards shipped, then the shipping will be some flat rate, like $2.99. Also, when they are buying on some other site like Amazon, they will see the price as 99 cents, which seems to be the primary reason they’re doing this. Amazon has rules that forbid merchants from listing an item for less money on their website than they list it on Amazon.
Because of this, I recently reduced the price of thousands of cards by at least 25 cents, and I suspect other sellers have done the same.
still having some issues on the shipping deal. In previous posts there was reference to grandfathering in older items that have been on hold pre 9/1.
I will have to find my posts and communication back and forth, but what was going to cost me $4.88 or something like that before 9/1, was going to be around $5.69 with the new method, but they are all showing up now for almost $8 delivered. Oversized fees went up from what they originally showed as well as the extra 0.25 for each card. Right now I’ll have to keep them there or turn around and try to sell them instead since I get stuck paying an extra $1 for a card already in a toploader or bgs case (which was 0.45 or 0.90 before). Just a little more clarification on what the shipping deal is for cards held before the switch over.
Hi, sometimemountaincards.
While we did end up running the flat-rate shipping promotion for an extra month and a half due to popular demand (it was originally scheduled to end in August), in mid-September shipping rates returned to what they originally were at $0.25/card. Shipping oversize / graded cards has had an extra cost of $.75 for a while and hasn’t changed.
Thanks,
Jeremy
I was thinking about the Beckett pricing thing. Wasn’t the whole point of the collab between COMC and Beckett that Beckett would get private access to sales data, thus letting them update their price guide more accurately? I guess though that accuracy does not mean much for them.
Joel, Beckett stopped caring about accurate pricing a long time ago which is a small part of why Dr. Jim Beckett walked away from the company. They are a media company now. Not a sportscard pricing company.
I like the new site, but I think you guys should go out of your way to point out how you offer a flat $2.99 shipping fee. That information should be in large type on the top of every page within the website–especially the homepage.
“$2.99 flat rate shipping. Buy as many cards as you want from as many different sellers as you want, and have everything shipped to you for just $2.99.”
This shouldn’t be overlooked. A bold shipping strategy needs the bold marketing to go with it. That means it goes in the page header. This is easier now because the logo has gotten smaller 🙂
So should i price my cards at 9.74 for them to be seen at 9.99?
Lee that is how you have to price it for unregistered sellers or sellers in the mode that builds in shipping.
COMC believes that seeing your cards at $10.24 won’t hurt sales because people will be under the illusion that the cards are shipping free.
It is for that reason we are not lowering our prices to eat that 25 cents ourselves because customers have been paying close to that to begin with to have their cards shipped.
Time will tell if the strategy COMC has designed will work. We have concerns but are keeping an open mind
I have over 7,000 cards on here so obviously I am not going to reprice each one but my new ones that i price and others that i run into I don’t mind lowering a quarter…a customer of mine who is a small seller and has around 800 cards on here told me he is going to drop all his cards 25 cents, In time i guess all mine will get lowered and I am fine with it.
I went on and spent some time on the new site and my opinion is that the changes are terrible for buyers. I do not believe in Book values at all but most do and i think you can say goodbye to casual buyers…….I put each site up on my screen next to each other and had 4 collectors who do not use comc and all 4 said they liked the old one better…….They like the savings % in red feature, obviously the BV, they thought the newer one was harder to navigate and so on..I agree with pretty much everything they said. Now as a seller it makes no difference to me other than I think sales are going to drop dramatically when the old site is gone.As a guy who flips and prob buys 4-5 cards a day on avg to flip, I doubt that I will be flipping anymore(and has nothing top do with the .25 add on to each card)but rather the annoyance of surfing the new site ….If sales drop substantially then you guys may need to add some costs to the sellers to pay the $10 a month for the buyers.I am all for maybe an increase and charge .30 per card processing fee instead of .25 to pay beckett if needed. Hopefully it wont come to that and sales stay strong. I was and still am a huge fan of COMC and as a seller i have no issues I am just trying to look at the buyers side and if i was a buyer I just donot see anything appealing about COMC like I used to few years ago(Maybe i am wrong, Lord knows I am wrong often)
Lee….
I have heard the same things. However as I pointed out before no other site puts book values up and people seem to buy like crazy on them. I understand people upset because they can’t get something for free (wow I will bite my tongue from making a timely political reference) but in the end I think if this site continues to offer a wide range of cards at a wide range of prices and continues to offer actual scans of all cards rather than stock photos (something no other site can offer), people will “get over” having to either pay for pricing here or access their online subscriptions to look up pricing just as they do on every other site out there.
It’s too funny I just had one of my regulars call me about a couple of things he saw on our port. He asked why he could see BV on one version and not on the other… I explained the whole scenario to him… His response “Maybe on the next presidential debate they can argue about whether Americans are entitled to free sportscard pricing”
It’s never been free. We’ve been paying for it as part of our fees. Now Beckett wants more money to have it be available on here. I am glad it has become optional rather than a blanket fee increase to everyone.
Can COMC revise the storage fee from .25 to .75 here https://www.comc.com/Manage/AccountUpgrades.aspx …so I know after Oct. 1st we are on the same fee structure. Thanks
Hi, Jerry. You’re right, we need to update the info on that page. Thanks!
I miss the bar at the top of the page where I can click the Ads, Baseball, Football, etc., section. I am not a fan of pull down menus, especially when I am on my phone. Also if someone is new to the site the Ads are not as visible and all the way at the bottom of the scroll down. Hoping you can get the missing bar back in. As for the cash out fees I figure for me every $300 I cash out is equivalent to the $60.00 table fees I pay to set up at local shows.
Yes but there are no additional upfront fees beyond the cost of the table. Your analogy is correct but it would also be like giving the promoter an additional $XXXX anount of dollars to set up your table for you. We have fees to submit and fees to cash out on top of the fees the seller is charged for shipping they should rename the site checkoutmyfees.com. (ComF instead of ComC).
Hi, bigchili73. We do not charge shipping fees to the seller. The shipping fees are paid by the buyer.
Thanks,
Jeremy
I really miss the Brands segment of the bar in the old one which was replaced by that AWFUL comc logo. I know it’s under sets in the new site but I’m trying to avoid that like the plague until I have no choice.
Yea gonna be a sad day…They should find a way let us have the option of which site we can use…I tried the new one and cant stomach it…I like to search around to flip cards and I lose interest on there in minutes.I am gonna try to load up before the new site starts and then stop flippin on here.
Hi, cannwinn.
That’s a good point about users browsing on their phone. We intend to design a COMC app, and we’re seeing how keen people are for a feature like that to help us determine which new offerings to roll out first.
Thanks!
Jeremy
I just do not see why a buyer would buy here now as opposed to Ebay…Ebay has a bigger selection, Completed listings to gauge comparative costs,Cheaper prices due to auctions and protection as Ebay caters to buyers in all/any disputes…..I just feel (and again I hope i am wrong as I am lazy and sell only on COMC ) that Comc does not have much left to offer buyers.
There is something to be said for a consistent user experience. eBay will never have that because it has user-generated content (and policies). People who buy on eBay do not care about that stuff.
No matter what the rules are, it will sort itself out. The only thing changing polices/rules/fees here does is affect volume. That’s just economics in action.
Lee I think COMC offers buyers a clear scan of every card(no stock photos or bait and switch tactics), competitive prices and as far as buyer disputes…I think COMC offers a clear return policy for all items. In a couple of cases where I have received something I didn’t like they were very quick to make it right. I might be wrong but before Ebay got scared of the competition and offered free listings to everyone who had a shoebox of cards until the end of the year the numbers here were greater than their selection.. Once that promo runs out it will be interesting to see what happens.. Regarding auctions….It has been proven time and time again that the majority of buyers prefer to hit a button and own the item rather than wait around. They have their place of course but the fixed priced market is the wave of the present and future.
Also….from what I am reading elsewher, Scampal is on an account freezing fiesta. Lots of good people are getting their accounts limited and therefore losing their ability to sell on Ebay.
You also get what you pay for. I think shipping fees here are outrageous and the shipping times are slower than what is normally accepted.. That said… when I requested shipment this morning of the Terry Sawchuks and a couple of other things I needed for the store I know it will get here safely…no cards thrown in top loaders without sleeves or with the top loaders unsealed so the cards slide out…no plain white envelopes etc.
None of us know what is going to happen. But I don’t think taking away book prices which can easily be found with an OPG subscription is going to matter. For the sake of all of us…let’s hope it won’t.
you know what you’re getting at COMC. That scan you see is the exact card in the exact condition that you get and it will arrive to you safely and securely. People on Ebay could be sending damaged cards or shipping high end cards in PWEs..none of that here and you could buy with confidence.
I think COMC service is better for me as card collector livin’ outside USA/Canada. There is much higher probability to get cards on the COMC site for me, because many eBay sellers simply didn’t want to ship cards internationally. Even better there is lower shipping cost for me at COMC. Right now eBay cann’t beat COMC for me.
Continue to see sales even with the changes, hope this keeps up.
One suggestion: get a new advertising agency, your beckett ads are pretty unimpressive and fail to impart to the audience a clear sense of how unique your site is.
Robert says
I am a collector and buyer only. I use the book value and percentage off when making my purchases on just about all my decisions. I cannot believe that some people are trying to make me believe that having all that information at my disposal is not in my best interest. That I should be willing to pay what the seller is offering if I think the price is fair. Thats right, I should just trust the seller and let the market dictate the price and not try to gather any input or outside advice such as the Beckett price, percentage off etc., because all that stuff after all is just interfering with a nice, clean, clear, picture of a scanned sports card and it is ruining my enjoyment.
Well HELLO folks the only reason I make a decision to buy is due to the information that is being provided to me.
Here is my main problem. I will not pay the fees to have the book price and percentage off displayed. Once the old sight is taken down is the day I make my last purchase.
Good Luck to all of you.
Robert where else do you buy that has book value provided to you at no charge?
At every hobby and collectors store or booth I go to. They all have a price guide or something we can reference.
I came upon this site by accident. I fell in love with it and spent several thousand $$$$.
I have no sense of entitlement. (Seems to be a hot topic for some reason but is not a concern of mine.) I have used the information that was provided to me to help me with my purchasing decisions.
On the other hand I get a real laugh out of the people who are trying to sell this new site as a good thing. That this new site does not clutter or overwhelm me with obsolete information (example.. Becket Prices while asking for a $10.00 a month subscription) or percentage off because I really do not need to know that it just makes everything to hard to figure out, the seller knows what he is doing trust him, and if I buy a $1,00 card for $2.00 I should not feel that I got ripped because I am actually doing a great service to the hobby by establishing a higher price for that item. Then we can give that information to the obsolete Becket people so they can update the obsolete price system they have.
Stop trying to sugar coat this. The new site is more expensive to the buyer and yes we do need the information that was provided to help with our decisions. The bottom line is this, am I willing to pay for this information. I for one am not and I suspect others will not as well. I am not trying to influence others, I know what is right for me. However some seem to be preaching from the mountain top about what a positive move this will be because now we do not have to concern ourselves with numbers, percentages, and costs, just sit back and admire the nice pretty pictures.
To me that is the ultimate irony.
Robert.
So to be clear…you do not shop for cards elsewhere on the internet?
I am not going to get into the trust issue because I view it as knowledge and common sense. But I’ve been at this a very long time and I realize there are many many inexperienced collectors.
I also won’t argue with anyone who says that costs here are either close to or over the line because we’ve been very public with our concerns over shipping costs, cashout fees etc.
However what you are saying is you (and the legions of others) are not willing to pay to have the tools to educate yourself. It is up to the hobby shops, show dealers and COMC to pay for it? Or perhaps Beckett should become a volunteer organization and do the work for nothing?
I really am not getting those who feel they are ENTITLED to free pricing.. How did Scambay ever survive? They sell all sorts of things and to the best of my knowledge have never offered pricing on cards, coins, stamps, comics, antique telephones or plots of land in the Arizona desert.
And why would you want pricing you have just admitted is Obsolete??
I loved the experience of selling cards to collectors here. But I’m a small seller and this is a side project for me. I may have sent in my last batch. Managing the inventory and the “race to the bottom” are proving to be a handful. Also, I hate to see this site become a jersey and auto depot; with the increased fees, a set collector or singles collector will find a hard time locating he singles they need. Why? It’s not economically feasible to send in common “penny cards.” Likewise, my buying will slowdown. The “no cap” on shipping really kills it; this place is best for small purchases and FLIPPERS. I think COMC has seen its best days regarding cards; the expansion into other collectibles may have promise.
I am still waiting for everyone ranting ” I won’t buy or sell here anymore if I have to pay for pricing” to tell me where else they have been or will sell that provides this information free of charge….I don’t get the sense of entitlement or lack of loyalty to a site that has provided this information to buyers free of charge for quite some time who now, with valid reason can no longer do so. This isn’t the White House…stuff can’t be given away free to everyone who wants it. And where is the anger towards Scambay and the other sites who have NEVER provided pricing for free?
Checkout has to have something unique to draw the buyers…Ebay may be a rough place to sell but it is a great place to buy sportscards…..I know this is a small sample but I sell on average 15-20 cards a day on here and the last 3 days these were my sales: Saturday 6 Sunday 6 Today 7….i looked back and the last day I sold less than 8 cards was September 6th and i followed that up the next day with 26 sales.I hope this is just an abberation,Probably is
I hope you are correct Lee! My sales are down over 30% in the first week. If we did not have the addition of amazon I would be closer to 50%, that says a lot about how the new site is being taken. I would love for the daily report to break down the sales by sites, but I am sure that will never happen. By raising the shipping rates to coincide with the new site they have made it debatable as to what is causing the slowdown.
One good thing is that Tim is a pretty bright guy, if down the road he sees sales or traffic drop due to the unattractive new site I am sure he will find a way to bring back the old one or if he thinks that the loss of book prices is the reason then he will pass the beckett costs on to us sellers.Maybe something along the lines of a $10 a month sellers fee or even a penny or two for every sale.
I am on pace to sell 20 cards this month. My previous months I’ve sold 57,88,69,40,48,70,129,72. Baseball is my smallest inventory and football is my biggest, so this is really slow. I did not have a single sale over the weekend. There seems to be a lot less enthusiasm for the site with the changes. From what I am reading here, some people really liked the Beckett pricing and others don’t care, but if the people who used the pricing have now moved on (or back to ebay) it is really going to impact the sellers. Although ebay is far from perfect because as we know there are some trust issues, but at least you have something to look at to see if you are getting a fair price by looking at completed sales. So I guess we will have to see if buyers move on. If they do it is definitely going to be a race to the bottom for the sellers and I don’t think they will come back. I am definitely going to hold off on sending in any more cards at this point. It is really bumming me out because I really liked this site a lot. Hate to say it, but these changes are for the worse, not just the pricing, but the whole adding $.25 to each sale too. Just don’t get it. This site used to be so clean and simple.
Ebay has so much more traffic and with free listings there is no reason to even consider COMC unless you just don’t have time to list and ship.
The funniest thing to me is at our B&M nobody….ok 9 out of 10 buyers who want to check prices sit down at our customer computer and or hope on their cell phnes and check this site or Scambay to see if they are getting a good deal.
When I scour trade boards so many traders trade by “sell value” which to them means exactly what I mentioned above.
I would think many people here would do the same thing….check the Bay…the BMP or wherever and see what other like cards are selling for. If the card listed here is the only one to be found anywhere…then frankly…book value is irrelevant and common sense combined with how badly you want the card should be the two factors.
I bet the folks at Beckett are reading this and giving themselves a hernia patting themselves on the back because this is as much support for their pricing as I have seen since about 1992.
How about this…..
If I were not an active buyer on the site I would not want to pay $10 a month for Beckett….
But let’s say I do want to look up the price of something….
What if you could “pay per price” say 25 cents to view pricing for a specific card?
That way someone who maybe like me is a Sandy Koufax collector and is down to some very oddball stuff would only need pricing if something that was on my wantlist showed up on the site would only have to pay for a specific price instead of $10 for something I won’t use often.
I’m pretty sure this was discussed before, but why not replace BV with average sold value at COMC? That way, buyers will see a “% off”. A link to more detailed sale statistics (max, min, st dev, # sold, date last sold, whatever) would also be useful for sellers and interested buyers. If 10 copies were sold in the past for an avg of $5 with a standard dev of $0.50 then $5 would probably a good estimate of “fair market value”. If only one copy was sold in the past, then buyers who are worried about “fair market value” could then look to other resources or maybe pay the per unit cost of viewing the Beckett price as suggested by AAA. When I buy things on eBay (not necessarily cards), I tend to look at completed auctions for that item to get an idea of what I should expect to pay. Is that not what most people do? I also want to agree with the person suggesting that the shipping policy be more prominently displayed on the new site, especially since the justification of including the $0.25 per card in the selling price (I think) was to create the perception that shipping is unlimited after the fixed cost. Lastly, I know a lot of people have been ragging on the new site, but I personally think it does look cleaner, and I don’t mind the color scheme. Looking forward to more updates. Keep up the great work!
Posting about stuff analytics can prove is kind of pointless. Qualitative feedback is much more helpful for them. But to quell sales-drop comments, there are other factors at stake. How many regular buyers are using comc.com when they can still use checkoutmycards.com? Just because the new site exists doesn’t mean people are using it exclusively.
Now maybe conversion rates in fact are lower on comc.com vs. checkoutmycards.com, but if that’s the case, THEY CAN TELL.
If you’re trying to be helpful, make qualitative suggestions, such as increasing the visibility of “free” shipping or other improvements to the site.
My intent was not to suggest that Tim et al. do not understand statistics. Rather, visibility of said statistics may be useful to both buyers and sellers. Others may not share my opinion, but I think it’s more constructive than complaining about fees and shipping changes over and over again, when it’s clearly too early to tell how those changes are actually affecting sales in the long run. If such comments are not helpful, then so be it. I’ll just sit back and look forward to seeing how the beta evolves. Cheers!
I wasn’t trying to single you out. I apologize if it felt that way.
The only other thing I could add is if prices get too low, then people will buy here to sell on eBay, just as people have bought on eBay to sell here. That’s why I say the changes here only affect volume, not prices. The economics of it will be stable as long as the site is viable. There are enough arbitrage hunters to keep the equilibrium.
I don’t like having to pay to be able to see BV for a card that I am interested in buying. Now if Beckett were to keep real-time stats, kind of like a stock market for cards, then that WOULD be a valuable service worth paying for! But the current Beckett prices reflect no substantial or tangible value that a collector should bank on–these are just arbitrary figures.
Also, I still do not see any icon or check box or other symbol that indicates when a card is a new or recent addition to the for-sale lineup. When I check back periodically to find cards to add to my collection, I want to know if a card that comes up in my search is one that I haven’t looked at yet, or at least that it’s one that’s been added within the past day/week/month/whatever. That would make it SOOOOO much easier for collectors to determine what is worth clicking on. The Beckett Marketplace does this (they have a little green “NEW” icon) and of course you can tell from Ebay when something has been listed. I don’t believe that this request will be too difficult to implement.
So now I must ask–is COMC meant for true COLLECTORS or is it for those people who have destroyed the hobby in the first place by ripping off kids and sports fans by turning collecting into a lousy cut-throat enterprise? :-/
Unless they have removed it? (and I too would be upset if they did) You can search “recently added” cards via their search options…
Regarding pricing/paying for it… it sounds like you don’t care whether pricing from Beckett matters whether it is free or not. After all if it ” reflect no substantial or tangible value that a collector should bank on–these are just arbitrary figures” (and I and many others agree with that) why would anyone care to use it to determine if they are getting ripped off or not?.
Well…. I can tell you the ads for COMC in the Beckett mags are making some folks over there pretty peeved…. That tells me they are doing their job….along with the fact that they are back to crying to Amazon about the “unfair advantage’ COMC is getting…..pass them the tissues.
Just shipped off 52 graded cards to the site. Loving the faster turnaround times and better fee value on graded cards 🙂
Earlier this year I was sending a huge portion of my Topps case breaks to COMC with a mix of one week and regular processing. The one week batches did very well as collectors on the site were excited to buy new releases.
I just finished opening 20 cases of 2012 Update and based on my slow sales the past three months and higher fees will be moving everything single card on Ebay. The flood of new sellers thanks to the National and $.50 fee to list a single card is a real killer on large volumes of cards. I used to update pricing once a month and would find my prices were within the reasonable range of the same card on the site. I went into update my pricing today and I see almost every card I have on the site has been undercut by 50% by multiple sellers. If it means more business for COMC I guess that it a good thing, but I can’t justify giving COMC any inventory at this point.
Think they’ll realize soon that 90% of sellers are either making less, or are selling much less? By what I’ve seen nearly everyone’s saying that they aren’t selling nearly as well. It’s true when they say that abandoned shopping carts are mainly because of shipping, but the ones that weren’t abandoned had a lot of cards in it it seems.
Robert
Out of the 122 posts before this, one person is responsible for approximately 26 of them.
Which brings to mind, “Methinks he doth protest too much.”
Or to relate this in Book Value which will no longer be shown unless subscribed to:
21%.
So where online are you buying cards from?
And why does your name appear before each of your posts below where it is supposed to be?
I really am trying to understand where you are coming from.
No sales drop off here. In fact in the last hour we sold a nice Alex Smith Rookie via Amazon. I checked and they are still not listing Beckett values anywhere on that site. I wonder how that buyer knew he was getting a good deal?
A sale on Amazon is not a visitor to Comc………Actually had a decent sales day sold 18 cards and only 5 were amazons………..You are not getting the point the bv is a unique feature, it is a feature to draw people and offer something different than ebay to buyers….Actual book values means nothing, it is the feature that attracts buyers. All things being equal a buyer is going to Ebay hands down
Lee,
I guess time will tell . I have to hope based on my experiences that buyers will continue to go where the prices and service are the best. For years I had people telling me I was nuts to sell on the BMP VS Scambay but had it not been for the inept management of that site it would have blown the Bay back into the bay.
I think a buyer who knows of this site will check both to see where the cards are priced the best. The service here is better hands down.
The fact that all cards are scanned with good photos instead of grainy scans or stock photos is a unique feature to this site. Ability to flip is unique to this site.
My point on the Amazon sale was not whether or not the visitor was to COMC, it was simply pointing out that Book Value was not provided to that buyer at the point of sale by Amazon. If all of my sales here come from the Amazon link that is fine by me. We closed our independent Amazon store and will be filtering that stuff through here.
I guess I am not buying all of the doom and gloom. As you know there are PLENTY of things I have complained about when it comes to some of the costs associated with playing here. However I understand that Beckett stuck it to COMC on this. If there was no FREE pricing available to the seller when card were uploaded or if there was no ability to purchase pricing then I would understand the frustration. I do think they need to implement “pay per price” for the casual user. I just don’t get people who think they are entitled to free pricing and show no loyalty or understanding to a site that offers so much. I won’t come off that.. If meaningless pricing is all that is keeping some here (read how people USE COMC as a price guide….) then please by all means go back to dealing with the shoebox sellers on the Bay and hope you get what you order and that they don’t ship it loose in a PWE.
Seems like mostly the greedy sellers are complaining…
I have got better prices on cards on ebay (with a little patience) than I find on here. Any card “worth” more than $2.00 can be found on ebay usually with free shipping.
My problem isn’t finding the “star” players, it is the common cards that I need to fill out sets. As a buyer, I really don’t see the advantages to this site anymore. If the seller has to fork over 25 cents and the buyer has to fork over 25 cents…that penny card is now over valued by fifty cents before the seller makes his mark-up.
Plenty of dealers on Beckett will sell me that penny card for what it cost me to have it shipped from you guys…and if I buy enough of them, the shipping is free.
Perhaps you should offer a one rate shipping price of $2.99 for buyers and charge the sellers a 1% commission on their sales. That would give incentive for the buyers to buy more and the sellers would be happy because they would sell more.
Without buyers, checkoutmycards would be just a warehouse full of cardboard.
My $ .02
I dont think this is a gloom and doom situation at all..Personally I think COMC will be just fine and will prosper one way or the other.Once again I am just stating that COMC has to continue finding ways to be unique for the BUYERS.If the buyers go to where the prices and service are best as you stated you better be realistic Just because you are bitter towards Ebay do not ignore the fact that the prices are better and the service for a buyer is just fine. As for flipping cards if that is the one unique thing going, it doesn,t do the guy who buys a Larry Fitzgerald patch once a week any good. With all the pricing cutting and port sales getting kinda hard to flip cards anyway.Also Beckett did not stick it to COMC and it is not COMC,s fault that they have to charge a fee to use Beckett’s services.This was inevitable once COMC grew this large.
Hi, Timoteo.
Commons have always been an interesting market on our site. For the most part if a serious collector or seller knows that a card is only worth $0.05, it’s unlikely that they’ll want to pay for processing of it or pay for shipping of it, because either one will always seem “too much for such a cheap card”. Our shipping and processing labor costs are essentially static because it is no less labor for us to process or ship that $0.05 card than it is a $5.00 card. For that reason if a buyer simply wants the card and doesn’t care about seeing the scan or consistency in shipping quality / return policy / customer service, it absolutely makes the most financial sense for them to buy it elsewhere.
If a casual collector wants the card though, we frequently see them buy the card for full asking price even if the asking price is many times higher than the market value. Cards with a $0.05 BV often sell for $.75-1.00 when the buyer has come looking for just a few cards rather than hundreds. To those casual visitors, the site does in fact offer flat rate shipping of $3.00, and with no sales commission to sellers.
Thanks for your input!
-Jeremy
COMC will be fine without Beckett pricing. EBay sellers shipping methods are gross. White envelopes, no top loaders and other such surprises. EBay is a place where every kid can play dealer. I will keep shopping here thank you.
Agreed. We get horror stories on a weekly basis from our customers about their poor Scambay experiences. While Ebay has done some good for the hobby the “wild west free for all” it allows for anyone with a debit card and a box of cards to become a “dealer” has resulted in both ignorance and the intent scam artists to reak havoc on a large number of collectors over the years. As you mentioned there are also the clueless shippers who don’t realize a card can slide out of a top loader or that a regular envelope with a top loader can get mangled in a machine. Many collectors left the hobby since the number of shops shrunk and the supposed “best” online venue ripped them off or resulted in them receiving damaged items. Makes me long for the days of Don West and Eddie Lewis.
COMC fees in some cases are out in space. The 20% cashout fee, the per item shipping fee (no matter which site you use) and even the submission fees push the limits and for some are past the limit. But this mess with pricing has been handled as well as they can. It is available for those who desire to support this site (and Beckett). Those who don’t….good luck.
Beckett DID put the screws to them due to pressure from BMP dealers whining at them and other factors.
Someone else posted the historical data suggestion. I like that. Perhaps the pricing of the last 3 sales could be made public.
I have had a great few weeks since the change over, the more I use the new site, the more I like it. As far as book value goes, I like the no book value, as many who say we must have the BV have also said, the BV is a joke and has no real meaning. I dont care if book is $100 on a 1998 Dan Marino card if it only sells for $5.00, If it sells for $5.00 thats the value, not $100 from a guide that does very little to update with reality. I love the new ComC and have 3,000 more cards on the way. Also as far as fees go, eBay is getting almost as much of my money if I sell a card for $5.00 and I have to do all the work, no thanks Ill stick with ComC. There is no way I have time to like 10,000 cards on eBay, never going to happen, but I can package them all up at once and let ComC do the work, it takes me 10min to mail in and a few hours to price, it would take me years to sell 10,000 cards on eBay and a ton of work. As far as people who say there stuff is not selling, try to price it at market value, not book value, it really does sell well.
I came back to read this thread. I posted that we should take the assets of the COMC and convert them into information to benefit the Buyers and the Sellers. You see, it’s information that is one of the issues people are having. In this case, that information is the Bible of Price Guides. Why do we need a price guide!!! The price guide is derived from what? The sale of cards that come from a variety of sources. Well I will say it again, is COMC collectively (all sellers) producing and data warehouse of sold card values? (Yes) Could these sold card values be used for the purpose of displaying to buyers/sellers the true sold value? (Yes) Does VintageCardPrices.com sell you a $18/mth. subscription to view their historical sales? (Yes)
Ok, so they only care about expensive vintage PSA/SGC/BGS cards, but the point is, that COMC has built something that they can use to benefit everyone.
Pros to COMC offering their data of sold card values:
1) People can drill down to see the date and sale of any card.
2) Sellers can use this data to set their prices.
3) Buyers can use this data to assess the value if it is a good deal for them.
4) COMC would be the place to go to get “REAL” sales data. (Ebay offers this for 90 days, i think)
5) COMC would have an increased value proposition for anyone looking to buy/sell a card, further increasing their traffic and exposure. I bet you, this would represent a double digit increase in traffic.
6) COMC could establish a FREE historical sales data guide that is unique to COMC.
Cons to COMC offering their data of sold card values:
1) Cards that sell for 95% discount (of Beckett) via port sale or other would scew pricing to unbelievable lower values, showing that the card is undervalued causing a panic.
2) To few of historical card sales determining the value of a card to be lower or higher when in turn it is posted and sells routinely on Ebay for much more or less.
3) May create a large majority of the people on COMC to revolt that the prices of a card is way to low causing the value of their card to appear much too high when priced for sale.
Guess COMC will have to decide if and how to use their precious historical sales data.
I would like to hear from anyone else what they feel about COMC sharing their sales data.
Thanks in advance for sharing any feedback.
Some great thoughts on historical sales data. I suggest that only sales data for cards that are shipped or marked to ship should be included. This approach would provide true market value by excluding port sales and other blowout sales to flippers,
I disagree with posting old data. Just because one seller paid a certain price for a card does not equate to that card selling for the same price again. There are too many factors that are discounted that could raise or lower what the next card will sell for. It could also lead to the scams currently on Ebay where cards are never actually sold, yet the general appearance is that they have sold. Having been through the Beckett era when everybody read it religiously on a monthly basis, I can assure you we do not need “real” sales data to price cards. If Beckett were to actually update the prices based on sales as opposed to the tier system they currently use the bottom would drop out on the card market.
How many people recall the down arrows from the past Beckett’s and the results of them?
I’ve hardly made a sale since the cross over, and now it appears that there is no way to login to the new site w/o going to the old. I have not done much comparing each on yet. I have only switched on my “flipper” account setting so I don’t see the shipping. I have noticed that the cards I have in my “to ship” bucket have gone down some and the bulk went from 50 min. to 10 min. No idea what is going. I guess at this point I’m going to see if there is some sort of black friday shipping/listing/posting deal.
Also please please please kill off some of the ads, same people have 3-5 ads running per day. I’ve given up on using your ad service at this point, it’s not benneficial unless one dumps $4-5 per day on it instead of saving $ and making one listing for a week.
Some sort of historical selling data would be good to see or have access to. When it comes to short prints or low numbered or hard to find cards, or just having the first one listed, setting an asking or a buying price is hard to do already.
Sales seem back to normal for me, So hopefully all is good. As for the ads I quit looking at them months ago.The same 10-15 guys each day and remarkably they all have the very lowest prices here.They ought to limit it to one ad per month or jack up the cost tremendously.
Hi sometimemountaintimecards, The “Bulk” Shipping works differently on the new site than it does on the old. We plan on phasing out our older Bulk option along with the old site, and are experimenting with a new kind of Bulk on the COMC.com Beta site. We’re sorry for any confusion on that front! Thank you very much for your suggestions.
yeah, that is confusing having different shipping totals on both sites. I’m still sticking to my gut that I was led to think one thing and another happened with the shipping. I still even see it with cards in my active inventory. Some show 0.45 for the “extra shipping” because they are in top loaders the rest show the “0.25” extra which are not in anything but sleeves, the items in my to ship cart which were once 0.45 or 0.95 are all a $1 flat because they are in top loaders or in a slab.
just go give my recent sales stats as I have seen a huge drop off in sales/offers:
10/12 so far Totals sales $10.75 – 10 cards 84% off
9/12 $259.04 Total Sales, 31 cards sold 55% off
8/12 $128.48 Total Sales, 51 cards sold 75% off
7/12 $205.80 Total Sales, 66 cards sold 61% off
6/12 $369.75 Total Sales, 43 cards sold 49% off
5/12 $333.10 Total Sales, 21 cards sold 60%off
My overall average taking out my 5 worst months (pretty much when I first came on and didn’t have much to offer and traffic was much lower) and 5 best months (port sales) shows around 40+ cards a month and around $140 in total sales a month.
Offers received for the month are at 7 total, one being cancelled, one being amazon, and 3 from the same buyer.
I am approaching my 3rd worst month totals sales and card sales wise since 4/2008 (I had 4 cards sell in the last 24 hours which bumped me from being at my 2nd worst month.
I know we are only 14 days in and anything can happen, but something just doesn’t seem right. I even lowered nearly all my asking prices a few days back just to try and get some extra lower cards to move.
I’m with those that feel that listing the book price is critical for buyers. That is my sole criteria for purchasing and I’ve been in the hobby for 30+ years. I buy volume at low cost. I will buy only if it is a good deal and paying over 50% of Beckett price is rarely, if ever, a good deal. It happens, even by me but only under specific circumstances. Under the new site, there is no way to know if it is a good deal without Beckett prices. Buyers of everything want to feel they got a good deal. We all want to see a sticker price with a slash through it and a much lower cost – on cars, games, computers, jewelry, clothes, and especially cards. I am certainly not paying $10 a month for Beckett prices on cards that range from $1-$10. Was just searching for Sabathia rookies (after another playoff gem) and I have no idea what they are worth but figure a couple bucks is a good deal and I should grab some now while he’s fresh in my mind. Can’t believe ’99 Topps Traded books for over $10 (definitely not worth that) but knowing the book price defines to me what I’m willing to pay (which is probably no more than 25-40% of that ridiculous price). Before seeing this new site, post and video, I went to ebay to search the ’99 Topps Sabathia and saw they can be had for about 20% of book (last auction sold 4 in a lot for $7.27 with no shipping). Not showing book price and the % savings will certainly reduce the amount of cards I purchase. Now I will likely only purchase to fill sets or unless I know the price of a card from previous transactions to know I’m getting a good deal. I will not go back and forth between ebay but likely will just stay there as closing prices dictate market prices which is better than knowing the book price. You should do before/after studies of cards listed under the old site and new site and here’s what I think you will find: buyers will think not including the book price is a great idea because you will see the same cards now listed at higher prices as they know few buyers will not have access to the book values. Buyers like me that continually search for the same types of cards will figure that out and purchase less. We will try to purchase at previous prices but fewer offers will be accepted. Very disappointed, hate to see Beckett dictate everything as it has for the past 30 years in this industry. Still not sure how a company can set market prices for merchandise, sell that merchandise, grade that merchandise and reset market prices for that merchandise. I’m sure another site will step in to fill the needs of buyers like myself and include book prices.
Here is my suggestion: when a search is made, and a specific card selected, i.e. that Sabathia ’99 Topps Traded, have an entry at the top of the page before you show your cards in stock show a brief report of the last 5 sales of that card on your site – that is the true market value that this site lacks that ebay offers, I think this would solve many of the issues with not listing book price – something to consider, I bet many would value this info and as the site grows, more transactions occur and the info is available for more cards.
I have been a big fan since I found your site a year ago, wish I’d found it earlier. Hope you continue to succeed. Can’t believe you have 25% of all cards ever produced, very impressive.
Tim I am confused…..
At the top of your post you say regarding the need for book price… “That is my sole criteria for purchasing” Later you talk about Scambay and say “closing prices dictate market prices which is better than knowing the book price”
So obviously book price is NOT your sole criteria. I join you in the fellow “30 year club” but in my case I only use Beckett as a loose reference.
I wonder what you folks who rely on Beckett will do if in the next 5 years they go out of business…. could be possible.
The new site is not good. Good job breaking something that wasn’t broken!
It’s amazing to see the amount of port sales increase over the last few weeks. I for one sold my port cashed out with the most outrageous cashout fee and had most cards shipped to me. I left a few $$$ in the acct in the event I do find a card for a screaming deal that I like. besides that once checkoutmycards.com goes away I am gone from this site. There are many better solutions out there for 1/2 the cost and imagine this I get to keep more of my money. Oh…BY THE WAY….IF YOU ARE GOING TO CHARGE MORE TO SHIP CARDS AT LEAST FILL THE REQUESTS AS PEOPLE ASK FOR THEM. I PAID EXTRA TO HAVE CARDS SHIPPED IN HARDSLEEVES and GUESS WHAT NOT HARD SLEEVES ON SOME OF THE CARDS REQUESTED. The service is getting worse and the price to do business with the site is increasing not a good combination for a site that used to be the best buying and selling site in the web.
Hi bigchili73, we’re sorry for any issues with your latest shipment. If you would be willing to send your shipment information (what items should have had hard sleeves, etc.) in an email to staff@comc.com, our Customer Relations team will be happy to investigate the matter.
Email sent look forward to a response.
Here’s an idea : since so many buyers search for cards that are at least 50% off book value, or at least 75% off book value, or at least 90% off book value, perhaps, on the new site, you could have an option where people could filter a search by those parameters, without actually disclosing the book value.
That way, the casual buyer who wants to get a good deal can still search with confidence.
For that matter, it would be incredibly useful to be able to filter a COMC search by a wide variety of parameters, including number of cards in stock, book value, asking price, year of manufacture, etc – in a range, determined by the user. It would also be useful, when searching by seller, to only see those cards offered by the seller which are the lowest on the site.
Another change that would be incredibly useful would be some sort of message system which kicks in when I log into my account. That way, when you make some improvement, or some major change, you can alert every user at once. To this day, I doubt that a majority of COMC sellers even know that they now have free auto accept, auto reject and minimum offer. I doubt that a majority know how to turn their Amazon settings on and off. I doubt that most users on COMC.com even know about “Simplified Shipping Mode” and “Advanced Reselling Mode”. You can’t count on people reading this blog, and then slogging through all of the comments, and then cross-checking with any updates at blowoutcards forum and then heading over to the Facebook page.
Hi, CheckOutMyDeals.
I think your suggestions are solid ones. Multi-variable searches are something we’ve wanted to be able to offer for a while now and it looks like we’ll actually have the resources to do it soon. We’re also putting together a dashboard update which I hope will address the communication issue you noted.
Thanks!
-Jeremy
While as a buyer I don’t like losing the Beckett prices, what I mostly buy is base and low end gu and autos anyway so I know where my market prices should be. I just want to say that as an Australian, COMC is a better alternative to Ebay, if I have to pick up five cards from 5 different sellers, I could be looking at 15 to 25 dollars in postage, but with comc its a lot more reaonable in that respect. Also as a buyer I factor shipping into the total cost, so if shipping is already included when I purchase a card barring the initial fee, I have no problem with that, however COMC may just wish to confirm 25 cents is removed from the shipping total? As the old system had the first card being the primary price, then whatever there after.
With the built in shipping, every shipment I make would be an extra 25 (or whaever the international rate is nowdays) cents, would it not?
Hi, wolvesjr34. We’re really glad you’re enjoying the site! We’ve got a great community of buyers from Australia, and we definitely want to make the collecting world smaller in terms of offering affordable international shipping.
Right now if you’re in “Simplified Shipping Mode” (which is the default for every account) you’ll see the cost of per-card shipping bundled in to the cost of the item. So if a seller wants $5.00, you’ll see the card for $5.25 and you won’t have to pay that $0.25 when you ship the card – just the flat $3.00 rate. Every shipment order you place will have that same flat $3.00 charge as long as you’re in Simplified Shipping Mode – the $0.25 will be factored in to the cost of each card automatically. (If you ever want to turn that feature off, just go into your Profile & Options menu from your Dashboard)
Thanks!
-Jeremy
One thing that has to be commended again is the stability of this site since the changeover. No down time, no error pages…. Coming from the BMP I can’t tell you how incredible it is to me to see such a professional rollout!
I do agree with COMD about the message system. We didn’t know about the Beckett data change until a customer told us because we don’t use the Blowout forums. Major communications should be in front of all users and visible on the main site. Many users don’t read the blogs or visit Blowout.
I wish you guy would sale Auto baseball and tennis ball from topps and ace.
Agree also with Checkoutmydeals… it’s very important to keep updates clearly visible on the site. Hopefully this will done quickly to the dashboard, as Jeremy said. Also, the fees and shipping pages are not updated properly or very clear to me.
In terms of showing historical sales on the site, I’m opposed to it, because it will be confusing. I buy many ports and the sold values of cards would be highly distorted — in many cases, the purchase price would be insanely low whereas there are other cards that would show up at a ridiculous price. Also, we would need to note whether a card has any condition issues. Finally, for flippers, this would not work well, as it would be highly visible what they bought the card for and what they are ‘jacking it up’ to.
Ultimately, people are resourceful. Ebay and other sites can provide a rough ‘market’ price. It’s clear that we can’t all get Beckett BV due to the relationship… I’ll definitely pay for the monthly fee because I know Beckett helps to anchor me a bit, while recognizing that it’s certainly far from perfect.
One thing to clarify on the shipping fees (or the ’embedded’ shipping fees)… I thought that any card that is flipped would no longer have the $0.25 associated with it. Will this be the case from this point onwards (if buying from the COMC site with either visible or embedded shipping)? So, if I’m flipping cards and repricing on COMC.com, I should no longer see that extra +$0.25 anymore? To be honest, I’m finding it difficult to follow and now that I’ve had time to absorb this, it just seems easier to leave everything in advancing shipping mode for everyone… users just have to pay for shipping per piece.
In any case, thanks for all the work… love the site and will continue to be a heavy user here.
Hi jimscards,
That’s right. In default mode, any card you purchase on the site now will have the shipping cost factored into the sale price. Jeremy explains it very well in a series of videos in a previous blog post here:
http://blog.comc.com/2012/07/26/45-how-to-flip-on-comc-com/
I would like to see historical sales prices but with a couple of caveats. First, I would like to see the number of sales and average sales price but only for cards that are either shipped or marked to be shipped. This eliminates the distortion of port sales or purchase to be flipped. This data would be invaluable in determining what cards to send in and how to price existing cards. I suspect that some of the cards on this site have only sold a very few since the site started and there are dozens or hundreds in stock. I would certainly not send any more of those in, if they are unlikely to ever sell. Also, on cards that sell well, it is not critical to lower an asking price just because a few cards are priced lower. This would help stabilize prices for such cards.
I have sold exactly ONE card in the past 10 days, I do have a lot of cards just about ready for pricing and another group of cards almost ready to be shipped. But one card sold in 10 days, makes it hard to hope for better sales going forward. I will also say that for myself, who sells cards at a “lower” price range, the 25 cents per card up front fee truly does hurt my business.
BTW, on the Beckett issue — COMC and Beckett are exactly right but not for the reasons everyone mentions. The “real” reason as far as I can see is for years the open “hobby secret” is that a workaround for Beckett OPG pricing has been to go to the COMC site and look up your cards that way. I know that during the “Topps Vintage Card Giveaways” of 2010-11 many people on Facebook in the active trading areas openly talked about using COMC to get Beckett pricing for their trades. That, frankly is unfair to Beckett and not what COMC was created for. (The only possible issue in that is how many people, if any, did use COMC for Beckett prices and then started buying cards)
Rich
This site needs to show completed sales for sure. As a buyer I want to know what other cards have previously sold for. Also when people are listing cards for more than ebay it is a little much. Also would be nice to have lower listing fees for cards that are sold for under $2. .25 cents plus 20% cashout fee is too much for insert cards and commons. I like buying on this site and with the Canadian warehouse opening I dropped off some cards at the show in Vancouver. Hopefully they do well selling for me.
I talked to the CEO and founder Tim at the shows each time he has been to Vancouver and he is a really great guy. The fees are reasonable for the level of service that the site provides sellers. I think change is always difficult to accept but hopefully the change is for the better.
I also believe the site still has room to grow. Hopefully it does. Not sure about the costs that COMC have to operate and how much revenue they make versus the amount of actual profit.
Also there are shipping fees for sellers. It is the cost to ship items to the COMC warehouse. I’m sure that is expensive. That is why I didn’t previously do it. Dropping them off at the show saved me that cost.
I don’t know if this has been mentioned before, but one thing I really miss compared to the old site is the ability to see my account balance on the homepage upon logging in. I know the balance is just a click away, but I look in the corner for the balance every time I log in (habit) and am always disappointed when I don’t see it.