New Referral Program! Black Friday Specials & Canada Update

Posted on by

Julia & Tim w/ Warren Moon

Hello, Julia Getsch here!  You may remember me as Business Manager and Co-Founder from the early years of CheckOutMyCards.  I am happy to announce that I am back at COMC, as Director of Business Development.  I am here to drive business, launch new offerings, and free up Tim’s time to focus on feature implementation.  I look forward to seeing you in the near future at a card show or here online!  I want to announce our upcoming specials that are unprecedented and unmatched.  We are gearing up for the biggest sale of the year!

Item #10,000,000 & “Perfect 10” Black Friday Special

Today is 10 days from Black Friday, and we are quickly approaching item #10,000,000.  This calls for a “Perfect 10” Black Friday Weekend Special!  What better way than to launch a 10,000,000 Penny Giveaway as a token of our appreciation for our buyers and sellers.  It is our buyers and sellers being a “10” that makes COMC a success. This special will run Black Friday, November 23rd through Cyber Monday, November 26th.

In order to give away 10,000,000 pennies, we are giving 5,000,000 pennies ($50K) in buyer specials and 5,000,000 pennies ($50K) in seller incentives.

Black Friday Weekend – Buyer Incentives

  1. Get Paid to Buy – COMC will pay 10 cents store credit for every item purchased & shipped from COMC.com* on Black Friday only!
  2. Free Shipping – Just order 10+ items from COMC.com* and get Free Shipping, Black Friday through Cyber Monday.
  3. Huge Savings – On top of the COMC incentives, hundreds of sellers will be slashing their prices to bring you extraordinary deals!

* Note: CheckOutMyCards.com and the Advanced Reseller Mode on COMC.com will direct buyers to the specials and promotions that are only available from the default COMC.com Simplified Buying Mode.

Black Friday Weekend – Seller Incentives

  1. Restock for Free – For every item sold with a “Sale Promotion” (see below) from Black Friday through Cyber Monday, we will give you $0.25 of FREE processing!  We will send you a processing voucher that can be used on our One Month, One Week, or One Day services.
  2. New Sale Promotions – We are creating a new Classified Ad type that is called a “Sale.”  Starting Friday, we will let you create a “Black Friday Sale” for FREE.  A Sale is not just a Classified Ad; it will actually adjust your visible asking prices so that people browsing the site will see SALE stickers with your lowered prices.  Sales will be very easy to create, you just specify a base discount percentage, and then we let you customize the discount percentage for any of your items.

We want this Black Friday to be the best one yet!  Our goal is to increase sales by 10 times!  We have launched an extensive online and print ad campaign, including Beckett, Facebook, Google, Bing, and more!  We also want to empower you to help us get the word out with our new “10” Referral Program.

$0.10 -> $10.00 Referral Program

Use the new “Share” command, and we will give you $0.10 store credit for each new visitor you send our way.   If s/he creates an account, we will record you as the referrer.  Once s/he spends $100 on either purchasing items or processing items, we will give you $10.00 store credit!

Achieving a “Perfect 10”

There is a lot to strive for this Black Friday Weekend, summed up in our “Perfect 10” Special.

  • We are approaching item #10,000,000
  • We have 10 days until Black Friday
  • We want everyone to rate this Black Friday Weekend a “Perfect 10”
  • We are launching a 10 Million Penny Giveaway
  • We are giving free shipping for buying 10+ items
  • We are giving buyers 10¢ for each item purchased & shipped on Black Friday
  • We have a goal to increase sales by 10 times
  • We are giving you $0.10 for referring a new visitor
  • We are giving you $10 for referring a $100 user

Mark your calendars for this Black Friday to make history with us.

Canada Update

As we previously announced, we are opening a warehouse in Canada!  This is one of the projects I have been working on since my arrival.  We assembled a great team and found an ideal space from which to launch.  Unfortunately, there have been a few more hoops than initially anticipated in order to secure the space for November.  Due to this and our current focus on Black Friday, we won’t be opening the new Canadian warehouse until December.  Nonetheless, we are still on track to process items received for the Canadian Pilot Special by December 31st.  We received a number of submissions at the Vancouver Fanfest and the Toronto Expo.  We are still receiving submissions for the Canadian Pilot Special – postmarked by December 1st.  You can send these submissions to our temporary PO Box:

COMC
4311 Canada Way
Burnaby, BC
V5G 1J3

Shipments must be sent only from Canada and only by Canada Post.

57 thoughts on “New Referral Program! Black Friday Specials & Canada Update”

    • As long as they are purchased from the default COMC.com Simplified Shipping Mode they will count. If you have any items that were purchased from CheckOutMyCards.com or COMC.com Advanced Reseller Mode, you will just need to pay the Per Item shipping fee. The base $3 fee will get waived once you hit 10 items.

  3. Welcome back Julia! I Need a little more detail/clarification regarding the free shipping promotion. What if a buyer already has cards in their account waiting to be shipped? Understandably these cards alone will not ship for free, but what if the buyer purchases 10+ more cards during the promotion and then requests shipment for everything. Does the Free Shipping promo only apply to the cards acquired during the promo or does it extend to the entire lot?

    • Hi, VintageHeroes,
      Thank you! My apologies, for it appears your question was missed. Items already purchased will be eligible for a $3 shipping discount if you ship 10 or more of them from COMC.com this weekend. The ‘free shipping’ promotion does not include the $0.25/card handling fee which will still be calculated on both the old and new sites.
      Thanks!

  4. For the new “sale” concept I would like to know the impact on my net proceeds from a Amazon Sale. If I have a card selling for $100 and want to run a 25% sale I would like to confirm if Amazon will show a $75 selling price (plus the additional 20% Amazon selling fee).

    • The sale will not change anything for Amazon. Unfortunately it isn’t possible for us to synchronize data between the sites fast enough to keep the sale in sync. We will be testing that over the next year, and we may consider running Black Friday sales on Amazon next year. But for now, the sales are on COMC.com only.

  5. How will “sale” promotion prices interact with offers and auto-accept settings? For instance, if a seller sets a 50% “sale” promotion and also has a 50% auto-accept set, will offers of half the sale price (25% of the original starting price) be automatically accepted?

    • Auto-Accept and Minimum Offer % will be based upon the original asking price, not the promotional price. You won’t need to worry about super low offers being accepted automatically.

  6. Will the “Black Friday Sale” price % off we set also be reflected on our Amazon prices as well or is it exclusive to COMC?

  7. how long will we have to cash in the free processing voucher? i only have about a dozen cards to send in at the moment, so it will take time for it be worthwhile to send anything in.

  9. Welcome back, Julia.

    Will the new “sale” type of ad be available after Black Friday? Will the Black Friday “sale” ads only be good on Black Friday, or will they be good for the entire four-day weekend, like the other promotions are?

  11. I have about 100 cards I’ve bought that I’d like to have shipped but it costs too much. How can I tell if I bought them through “COMC.com Simplified Shipping Mode “, from “CheckOutMyCards.com” or “COMC.com Advanced Reseller Mode”?? and if I buy 10 cards on Black Friday will I be able to have those 10 plus all the others shipped for free??? Also if I decide to have them shipped and I
    click the button and it’s more than I expected can I then cancel my shipping order?

    Thanks

    • Our site will display the cards which weren’t bought in Simplified Shipping Mode on our check out screen, and you will be able to see the total before the shipment request is fully completed.

  12. I’m a buyer and will still use checkoutmycards instead of comc as long as I’m able (Beckett values shown, bulk shipping saves me considerably because I ship a few hundred cards at once, sorry but the old site is way better for me), will there be any bulk shipping specials for Black Friday? When should I start worrying about cards bought on the old site being “cut off” and no longer being allowed to ship with the bulk method?

    • We don’t have a Black Friday special for Bulk shipping, but we plan to have Bulk shipping be available until checkoutmycards.com is retired. We estimate this will be towards the end of 2012/beginning of 2013.

  13. I’d like to say congratulations to Julia and to wish her continued success for many years to come.

    I’m excited by the new sale feature but kind of fuzzy on the details:

    * Is this “new type of Classified ad” a permanent feature of COMC? Will I be able to place a “Sale” ad after Cyber Monday (November 26)?

    * If I place an ad on Friday (November 16) at, say, 10% off, can I also place an ad on Saturday (November 17) at 20% off? Is there a limit to the number of different “sale” ads I can run between November 16 and November 26?

    * If I am running a “Sale” ad, can I change the terms of the ad while the ad is running, or do I have to wait for the old ad to run its course and launch a new “Sale” ad?

    * Does the new ad format still have to be approved by COMC? Do the sale prices go into effect when I place the ad, or after the ad is approved?

    * Will the “Sale” prices be visible on COMC.com and on checkoutmycards.com, or just on COMC.com?

    THANKS!

    • Hi, Check Out My Deals.
      The new “Sale” function is intended to be a permanent feature, but it will eventually have a cost associated with it; we’re offering it for free for anyone who wants to do a Black Friday Sale, though. Anyone who wants to (though no one is required to) will be able to run a free Sale on any of the days of Black Friday weekend – the 23rd-26th.
      I’m not sure how exactly the feature is being coded, so I don’t yet know if we’ll be able to implement it in a way that allows alterations once it’s live. There should be a follow-up blog post running through some of those details soon. Sale ads will NOT need to wait to be approved like current Classified Ads, which we expect to be a very welcome feature. You’ll be able to post-date Sales just like current ads, so they can either go live as soon as you submit them or at a prespecified future date/time. The Sale prices I believe will only be visible on COMC.com and not on CheckOutMyCards.com or on Amazon, though I’ll need to doublecheck.
      Thanks!
      Jeremy

  14. I apparently had missed the fact that Checkoutmycards.com was going away. Any plans to have Beckett Values listed on the new COMC.com? That is the SINGLE reason why I use your site over others.

    • Hi, Matthew.
      We’re looking into a few ways to implement a market price on COMC.com, but we won’t be able to offer free Beckett book prices to everyone the way we could with CheckOutMyCards. The site has become so large and has so many different cards (one out of every four cards ever made) that we couldn’t afford to pay Beckett for all that data and give it away. Tim our CEO did a great job of breaking down the cost in his video here: http://blog.comc.com/2012/10/01/come-see-the-new-comc/
      Instead we are currently investigating several other options, including many good suggestions from our users. Consignors can still see the BV of any item they send in, and you can sign up for a free trial Beckett’s BV service on the new site at any time.
      Thanks,
      Jeremy

  15. I’m really having trouble understanding the shipping “special”. Am I hearing correctly that the shipping special is only for cards purchased from COMC.com and NOT checkoutmycards.com? I have been a member for 4 years and didn’t realize there was a difference between the two. Please clarify because if the above is correct then that means there is no shipping special for cards purchased from checkoutmycards.com….in which is all the carfds I have purchased.

    • Hi, elmo4256.
      The nuts and bolts of the shipping special will work like this: if you request at least ten cards to be shipped and you make your request through COMC.com, we’ll knock $3 off the price. That means if you were already shopping on COMC.com in ‘Simplified Shipping’ mode, $3 was all there was left to pay (since the handling charge is bundled into the price of the cards). If someone bought cards on COMC.com in ‘Advanced Reselling’ mode or bought them on CheckOutMyCards.com, then they would still need to pay the $.25/card handling fee for those cards, but they can still get the $3 off – just make your shipment request of at least ten cards through COMC.com.
      The other part of the sale is for cards bought on Black Friday; for every card that is bought and requested to be shipped on Black Friday by a buyer in ‘Simplified Shipping’ mode, we will add $.10 store credit to that buyer’s account.
      Thanks!
      Jeremy

  16. I as well dont understand…….i have a friend who needs some cheap commons from the 70s and 80s.I told him i would purchase them on Black Friday….Should i purchase them at checkoutmycards or comc.com and what mode should i purchase them at..I am going to have them shipped on Black friday as well.

    • Hi, Lee. Great question.
      To take advantage of our Black Friday promotion, you should purchase your items on COMC.com, and use ‘Simplified Shipping’ mode. The best use of the special will be to both buy the cards and request them to be shipped on Black Friday.
      Thanks!
      Jeremy

  17. I am really lost here. The free shipping sounds like a good deal as does the $0.10 per item store credit. But I think I would actually pay if I tried to get these deals. I currently have 300+ cards in my acct waiting to be shipped. I am just a buyer for now. I have been letting them build to save on shipping.
    Now, I have to buy these 10 items on here to get the free shipping and I will get the $0.10 per item as long as I buy it all and ship it all on black Friday. Now the free shipping doesn’t apply to my current holdings in my acct 300+ cards. Now the charge for shipping on the new sit is $3 and the other fee $0.25 is already added into the price you pay for the card.
    Now onto my math. I buy 10 items. Save $3 but pay 0.25 extra per card. So I save $3 but spend $2.50 more. Total savings so far $0.50. But now I will also gain the $0.10 per card from buying on the new site. $1.00. Total savings so far $1.50.
    Now I could just pop over to the old site, buy the same cards, I already have to pay for shipping on all my other cards anyway so I will only be spending more for any other cards I buy. I will not get the extra $1 for buying the cards, but they also wont have the extra $0.25 added to each card. So say I buy 10, I would lose the $1.00 but would gain $2.50 savings. Total savings at this point $1.50. Now I will have to pay the extra $0.15 per card shipping. So im back to even.
    All these deals will earn me a total of $1.50 (if i use the new site) so far.
    Now the fun math. If I do this to get these deals, I just got exact count on my cards in my acct 331. But if I ship right now on the old site with bulk shipping it will cost me $54.50 to do that same shipment on the new site will cost me $84.10 for a big loss of $29.60!! Now it wouldn’t cost me anymore in shipping and I would gain $1.50 from the deals, I would still lose $28.10 using the new site and getting these deal. It would cost me $28.10 more to take full advantage of these black Friday deal. Almost forgot, if I was buying those 10 cards on the other site I would tack on $1.50 more. So I would only lose $26.60. But still no matter how you word it or cut it or what ever I will lose money if I use your black Friday deal.
    I called you guys several times around the beginning of the month to get this shipping thing worked out because of my shipping total being one price one day and then around the time you put the new site into play my shipping total jump pretty nice. And the last person I talked to told me to wait until the black Friday deals rolled out and I would for sure want to take those deal to save big on shipping! And it will end up costing me over $25 more to use them lol. I understand you are trying to roll some good deals out (and I think thats cool and I like it) but I am sorry, this in no way is any kind of deal to me. How is it a deal when its going to cost me more? Maybe I missed something or didn’t add right. Very possible. But sorry I will NOT be using the new site or the black Friday deals. But I very much would like my cards, but there is no way I will spend $25+ more to get them on top of the $50+ I already have to spend to get them.
    Sorry no dice, you rolled craps on this one.
    And I am very aware that this post might get deleted, its bad for business. But facts are facts. -Jason

    • Hi, Jason. For your 331 cards which you have already purchased, Bulk Shipping on the old CheckOutMyCards.com site is definitely the best way for you to go, and you don’t need to wait until Black Friday to get a better bargain. If you have any additional cards which you would like to buy, buying them through COMC.com on Black Friday and requesting them to be shipped the same day will save you some money.
      Thanks,
      Jeremy

  18. What exactly is the difference between “Advanced Reseller Mode” and “Simplified Shipping Mode”? How can I tell the difference between the two?

  19. My question revolves around the referral payments that I can receive if I direct new people to visit and join the site. How will you know it is me who directed someone to the site? Do they have to say that I referred them when they sign up? I want to promote the site and drive traffic to it and would definitely want to take advantage of the $0.10 and $10 payments I can receive.

    Also I dropped of cards at the Vancouver show and was hoping they would have been up before Christmas but I guess above it says by December 31st. For the Canadian warehouse how will you process the orders? Will it be 1st in, 1st processed?

    Thanks, Nathan

    • Hi, Nathan.
      If you sign in and use the “Share” link at the top of any page on COMC.com (so this could be sharing your individual port, or a card you like, anything really) we’ll assign a unique tracker to the link that gives you credit for the incoming traffic from new sources. The “Share” button is right next to the Shopping Cart summary and the ‘Make Offer’ buttons in the upper right corner. It can generate generic links for blogs etc, or automatically format for facebook and twitter.

      For the CA warehouse it’ll probably be F.I.F.P. like you said. There may be some priority given to batches that are easy to process (all cards from the same set for example), but in general we’ll do everything we can to get inventory up for sale by the 24th.
      Thanks!
      Jeremy

  20. How are “new” visitors determined for the 10 cent referral bonus? IP address?

    Do they have to sign up for an account to get that 10 cents or just visit COMC through the referral link?

    Does the backend system know if that person already has visited the site before so they are not credited as a new visitor?

    • Hi, Brad.
      Tim has written a complicated algorhythm (complicated to me, anyway) to determine if any given visitor is new or not. To get the $.10 reward they don’t need to make an account – just visit us through your link.
      Thanks!
      Jeremy

  21. I’m preparing a box of roughly 400 cards and I live in Canada. I’d like to take advantage of the 0.20 price and send to the new BC warehouse, and will probably mail in the next couple of days. I took a look at the submission form on the website, and it says to put in the # of cards, and then it calculates at 0.25 per card. Is this just an estimate, and will be corrected when the shipment is received? I’ve never sold before, so I just want to make sure I’m doing everything correctly. Thanks!!

    • Yes, Matthew, that’s just an estimate based on the rate available. As long as you clearly mark the box as being meant for the Black Friday Special, you should be fine. If there is an issue, contact us at staff@comc.com and we’ll straighten it out.

  22. So am I correct if I say there is NO SHIPPING SPECIAL for people who buy/have bought cards from checkoutmycards.com? Only for people using COMC.com? This is really hard to imagine. Each year you guys have nice specials on shipping come Black Friday. But now I am getting penalized for not using COMC.com. It is discriminating against all the checkoutmycards.com people. Kind of sad for all your loyals.

    • Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Cards on checkoutmycards.com cost less than cards on comc.com. In the end it seems that it will cost you the same.

  23. Anyone going to respond to my post? Also I want to apply for a part-time job at the new Canadian warehouse. What positions are you looking to hire for it?

    • Hi, Nathan. Sorry for the delay in replying, we generally don’t work on the weekends.
      If you’d like to apply for the Canadian location, please send a resume and cover letter to hr@comc.com and they’ll try to match you up with anything that’s still open. Definitely go into detail about whatever card experience you have.
      Thanks!
      Jeremy

      • Hi, Tyrodsports.
        There’s a link on your ‘My Dashboard’ page when you log in where you can set up whatever you like over the Black Friday weekend. It’s free, and you can run on any of the days you want (including none if you decide it’s not what you want to do).
        Thanks,
        Jeremy

  24. Will the black friday sale adds be posted in the Advertisements section or will they go unadvertised? Also, I like the feature quite a bit. Its handy

  25. Not sure if this has been asked but an important question I’m sure many are wondering about the Black Friday sale and .25 seller credit per item sold through the promotion. Does the buyer have to ship the item in order for us to receive the credit? Because I am thinking some flippers may take advantage of the sale, so I was wondering if I would get the .25 credit on those sales or not? Could use some clarification here.

    Also, I posted this last night on facebook and didn’t get a reply yet. I’m looking at setting up my sales and I see you could set the default sale percentage from 0-80 but on individual cards it’s only 0-50..is that right? I’d like to have some more options with my percentage off as the hotter players I’m obviously not going to offer extremely deep discounts but I do have some cards in my account that I wouldn’t mind throwing up there for 80-90% off in hopes of moving them and getting my cost of listing back in one shot..

    • Hi, dirty. Both excellent questions.
      On the first point, the buyer does NOT have to ship the item for the seller to get a restocking credit. This is good news for everyone because it means you don’t have to worry about whether someone is buying your card to ship or to flip. It’s worth noting that in order to prevent scammers from flipping cards back and forth between two dummy accounts to rack up free credits, any card that gets flipped after being bought from a Sale promo will be treated like shipping has not been paid on it regardless of what mode the next subsequent buyer is in. This will have zero effect on anyone who buys a card intending to have it shipped, it’ll only be relevent for flipping and it’s to prevent system abuses.

      On the second question, you’re correct – the overall Sale minimum is 80% off, but the individual card max discount is only 50% off. The way the feature is intended is for raising the prices of a few key cards within a sale. We didn’t want a situation where someone had a mostly 30% off sale but had a few cards they just wanted to ditch, thus throwing off the computer’s math when it calculates the overall %-off. If someone has a large number of cards they would like to blow out, they can set the sale for 80% off and then pick and choose what items they’d like to hold back on at a higher price. The sale percentages can be changed at any time as well, so over the weekend folks can adjust numbers as necessary.
      Thanks,
      Jeremy

  26. Exciting, You guys are doing a very nice job with the site. I will be the first to say when all these changes went into affect I was more than rude to COMC staff. Now that I am able to sit back and take a look at all the great new features I am very excited about COMC’s future.There is one question I ask. I have a godaddy link to COMC it is currently linked to checkoutmycards.com wondering if in time it will automaticaly link to the new COMC site? I would like my customers to be able to work on the new site. Keep up the good work and thanks for putting up with me.

    • Hi Cardko, glad to hear you happy with the new site! We plan to keep checkoutmycards.com up and running until at least the end of this year, and the url will redirect to our new site when we have retired our old one. If your link isn’t working after that, you may need to change the url on your end. Please feel free to contact us directly if you need any help with a technical issue at staff@comc.com.

  27. so when checkoutmycards.com finishes up am I automatically signed up on COMC? I am only a buyer and have a few $ in my account, don’t want to have it disappear and end up in Tims pocket, think he may already make shitloads more than me.

  28. Pingback: 10 X the traffic = some site hiccups | COMC Blog

  29. The “Share” copy/paste link is buggy…check it out for yourselves.

    I had to edit a lot of it before pasting it in a forum message board.

    • I know what it is…

      Inside the URL [ ]…the URL is in quotation.
      Remove the Quotation marks and the “Share” copy/paste would work correctly.

      Could you guys fix that so it’ll work properly?

      Thanks!

Comments are closed.