Promotions @ the National

Posted on July 27, 2009 by Tim Getsch @ COMC

Here are the promotions that we will be running at the National.

Free T-Shirt
Current buyers and sellers can get a free Check Out My Cards t-shirt for hanging out at our both for an hour and showing people how they use the site. We will have a nice 22″ touch-screen LCD for playing with the site. Swing by booth #1432 early to sign-up for your slot.

You can buy Check Out My Cards t-shirts for $10. The shirts won’t arrive until Friday morning.

$100 Free Express Processing
First time sellers get a coupon for $100 of free Express Processing that will be good through the end of August.

Extra Store Credit
You can pick up a coupon to get $5, $20, or $100 extra store credit when purchasing $100, $250, or $1,000 store credit by sending us a check or money order through the mail. We are only offering a limited number of each coupon (e.g. 8x$100 & 40x$20), so come by our booth early to ensure that you get a coupon. We will also have stamped envelopes you can pick up at the show. The coupons will be good through the end of the month.

$0.20 Priority Processing
You can drop cards off and get $0.20 priority processing with a 3 week guarantee from the drop-off date. There will be no additional $3 batch fee per 500 cards, and it is only $5 to have us ship as many cards as you want to drop off.

Drop-Off for Processing
You can drop cards off at booth #1432, and we will ship them for you. Processing fees are the same as stated on the website except for the $0.20 Priority Processing promo mentioned above. For everything other than Express Processing, there will be an extra shipping fee to have us ship the cards for you.
Extra Shipping Fees
– No extra shipping fee if you use Express Processing (1-week guarantee)
– Flat $5 shipping fee for Priority Processing (3-week guarantee)
– Extra shipping fee of $5 per 1,000 cards for Standard Processing (8-week guarantee)
All guaranteed due dates will be based off the drop-off date.

The season for great weddings

Posted on July 26, 2009 by Tim Getsch @ COMC

I am currently in Minnesota en-route to Cleveland for the National. This Friday Andy Bird got married. In November of 2006 I was home for Thanksgiving, and Andy was telling me how much he enjoyed web development and how he was looking for “the next garage startup” like google and youtube. That Christmas I decided to start recruiting Andy to move to Seattle to work for my garage startup. Yes, CheckOutMyCards.com was actually operating out of my garage at the time. Back then we weren’t open to the public. We only had my cards (timgetsch, LowPriceCards) and cards from a friend (Serf77).

A few months later Andy was enticed to make the move to Seattle. That summer he got plugged into Overlake Christian Church where he eventually met his future wife Leah. Funny thing is that they are both from Minnesota and both sets of parents even go to the same church, Wooddale Church. They had an amazing, outdoor wedding overlooking a fountain at the Carlson Towers.
Wedding

OK, funny story… the night before the wedding I was on my way to the Minneapolis airport to pick up another friend from Seattle. As I was trying to figure out if my friend might have checked luggage or not, I thought about the fact that he would be bringing dress clothes for the wedding… and it was at that moment that I realized I had totally forgot to pack for the wedding. I was so busy getting everything else taken care of for this two week long trip that I overlooked that detail. Fortunately I was able to call up my best friend and borrow some dress shoes, socks, a shirt and a tie. I only had to go buy pants and a belt.

While I was at my friends house picking up the clothes we saw a clip on the news about this couple that got married in St. Paul MN just a month earlier. Apparently they had just posted a youtube video of their wedding entrance and it had gotten more than half a million views in the first couple days. Well I just checked, and they now have more than 6 million views in less than a week.

They even got invited to recreated their wedding dance for the Today Show. Here is some more info about the wedding march.

Using technology to improve service

Posted on July 24, 2009 by Tim Getsch @ COMC

This morning at 5:49AM PST I got a text from one of my employees that the site appeared to be down.

Sure enough our firewall was having issues and needed to be rebooted. Everything is back up and running fine now.

For a while I have been having http://mon.itor.us follow our site to track any down time. Since there haven’t been any issues is a very long time, I never spent the time to configure their setting to actively notify me of any down-time. So I went ahead and configured it so that I would get notified through email and text messaging if the site ever goes down. Normally they charge extra for text messages, but they offer free Twitter messages and Twitter offers free text messages… so that is a nice trick to get free text message of site status.

Now I should get notified pretty quickly if the site ever has connectivity issues, and I can make sure that you have as little down-time as possible.

You can now follow us on Twitter to get the latest updates on things related to Check Out My Cards.

mocards crosses the 6 figure mark

Posted on July 22, 2009 by Tim Getsch @ COMC

Congratulations to mocards for becoming the second consignment seller to have more than $100,000 book value worth of cards for sale on Check Out My Cards.

Top Sellers 2009-07-22

Here are a few cards that highlight the mocards collection.

One of the best weddings ever

Posted on July 19, 2009 by Tim Getsch @ COMC

I just got home from one of my favorite weddings. Those of you basketball fanatics that are planning to get married soon should take note.

A buddy of mine from Microsoft, basketball, and poker just got married. Ceremony was great, reception was great, dancing was great, but the real kicker was that the wedding was at the Bellevue Club Hotel. The banquet hall happened to be right next to the health club which had a basketball court. Of course a big group of us knew each other from playing basketball, and nearly all of us had at least some basketball shoes in our car. In fact most of us were prepared with a full change of basketball close. So as the dancing was winding down, we migrated over to the basketball court and played a couple games of 3-3 and 4-4. I have never been so exhausted after a wedding. It was so much fun, and it worked out really well.

The groom loves basketball, so he naturally loved it, and I figure since the bride’s vows included supporting her husband through March Madness, she was cool with it too.

Help us @ the National

Posted on July 18, 2009 by Tim Getsch @ COMC

Coming to the national? Want to help the site grow?

If you are currently a buyer or seller on Check Out My Cards and would like to tell others about your experience, let us know you will be there and swing by our booth #1432. We will have a computer set up where you can sign into your account and show people how you use the site.

We are finalizing our promotional materials. We hope to have T-Shirts that we can give to people that spend some time helping at our booth.

Item #1,000,000

Posted on July 2, 2009 by Tim Getsch @ COMC

Congratulations to john9172 for sending us item #1,000,000 and winning the $100.

This was totally random, but it is fitting that item #1,000,000 happened to be a Shaqille O’Neal rookie card. It was added to the site the same week that Shaq was traded to Cleveland, where the National Sports Collectors Convention is being held later this month.

I think I might get it framed and bring it to display at the national. We just finalized out travel plans for the national. Steve Hollander, Dave Elmore, and I will be attending the national this year. We are now working on the promotional materials and specials we want to run.

If you will be at the national, you will want to make sure to swing by our booth to take advantage of our show-only specials and to introduce yourself to us. We will have opportunities for users of the site to volunteer at our booth and share their experience with people attending the show. Keep an eye on the blog for more details.