We have two huge announcements.

1. We are slashing our processing fee in half!
2. You can now send us graded cards!

Graded Card Support
We are glad to announce that we are now officially accepting graded, encased, and jumbo cards.

• Graded card support
• Processing fees for graded, encased, and jumbo cards
• Shipping fees for graded, encased, and jumbo cards

Updated Fees
In order to support graded cards, we had to revisit our fee structure. In doing so we took a close look at how the business is generating revenue and what we we can do to help the site grow.

Over the last couple months we have offered some great promotions and discounts to new and existing sellers. This has generated a spike in the number of cards added to the site, but due to all of the promotions our total revenue due to processing fees was actually down. In spite of that, our overall revenue was significantly up because of the tremendous growth we have seen in sales. Even though the economy around the world is way down, we are still seeing sales on our site skyrocket. Check out our blog about growth in a down economy.

It looks like the #1 indicator for growth is the number of new cards we can add to the site. So we are introducing a new, lower processing fee that should make it easier for people to flood us with more cards. Our team can currently process about 5,000 cards a day, and I would love it if we needed to hire more people or invest in better infrastructure to keep up with the demand.

November Growth Goal
Our goal is to add 100,000 new cards to the site during the month of November. This should give people a nice selection for the holidays. Last year our sales tripled in December. Let’s see what happens this year.

For those of you that are taking the time to read this post, here is a sneak peek at some data that we will be adding to the site to help you know what cards to send us.
Hottest players, decades, years, sets, cards, sellers

Standard Processing
As of 6:30 PM PST November 1st, our standard processing fee has been dropped from 20¢ per card to 10¢ per card. This service is basically identical to our previous processing service. It should take 2-4 weeks for the first 1,000 cards and 1-2 more weeks for each additional 1,000 cards.
More about our processing service

Express Processing
Based on popular demand, we have also introduced a new express processing service. This is only slightly more expensive than our previous processing service, but with this service you can have up to 5,000 cards added to your account in 1 week. It will take 1 more week for each additional 5,000 cards. The fee for this service is only 25¢ per card.

Storage Fee
Now that we expect people to send in a lot more cards without doing as much weeding out of the junk, we are not going to be able to let cards sit in our warehouse forever. In order to encourage people to set fair asking prices and to help subsidize the cost of insurance, warehouse rent, website hosting, and other expenses, we are introducing a nominal 1¢ per card storage fee that is charged to your account at 12:01 AM on the first day of each month.
More about our storage policy

• All cards mailed to us prior to November 1st, 2008 are exempt from the storage fee until January 1st, 2011. That is 14 months of free storage.
• Cards that are added to the site will be exempt from the storage fee for the first 90 days they are in the original owner’s account.
• Cards purchased on the site are exempt from storage fees unless they are put back up for sale.
• Cards with an asking price of $0.25 or less are exempt from storage fees.

Updated on November 10th, 2008 based on user recommended improvements.

Inventory Management Features
Here are some of the features we are planning to add over the next few months to help people manage their inventory more easily.

• Inventory Analysis
  • You will be able to see what are the hottest & coldest cards, players, years, sets in your inventory
• Improved Inventory Searching
  • Search your inventory for cards that have been on the site a long time and that aren’t selling
• Bulk Price changes
  • Set some or all of your inventory to a certain percentage of book value
  • Drop your prices on some or all of your inventory by a certain percentage
• Automatically Decreasing Prices
  • Set a percentage that you would like a card’s asking price to automatically decrease by each week.
• Bulk Add to Shipment
  • Easily add large portions of your inventory into a big shipment ($25 max shipping fee) so they can be removed from your account.
• Donate to charity
  • If you don’t want the cards back, we will also be adding the ability for you to donate your cards to charity.
  • We will be providing detailed receipts so that you can maximize the tax write-off as well.

Our goal is that these tools will help you keep your storage fee at an acceptable level. This may be significantly lower than the full $0.20 we had been previously charging.

Shipping Fee
I am impressed that we were able to last so long with our original shipping fee. I came up with that fee structure more than a year ago when we were running the business out of my garage and when we had no employees. Now we have a warehouse with more than 10 employees. Over the last couple weeks we did a thorough analysis of our shipping expenses, and I feel very good that we can continue to maintain very high quality service with our new rates. They are also more easy to remember. $3 for the first card and 25¢ for each additional card. Graded, encased, and jumbo cards are $1 extra per card. Once shipping reaches $25, all additional items are shipped for free.

As many people are learning, the beauty of our site is that you can create a free account and receive combined shipping from all of our sellers over any time period. There is no rush to place an order. You can build up as many cards in our account as you want, and then request a shipment whenever you like.
More about our shipping policy

Cashing-Out
Nothing changes when requesting a PayPal deposit, however we are adding a $3 fee when requesting a check mailed inside the US and a $10 fee for a check mailed outside the US.
More about our cashing-out

Feedback
Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or comments about our new fees. We love to hear what our customers think. Customer satisfaction is our #1 priority.