trauty closes in on 100K mark

Andy Kimball stumbled upon sports cards when he was 8, using money that was dedicated for Halloween candy.

“My mom and stepdad had some crazy idea that my sister and I weren’t going to go trick-or-treating, and instead, we were given $10 to buy candy at the store,” Kimball recalls. ” I’m not sure why, but for some reason I ended up buying a couple football packs.”

Exactly 30 years later, Kimball estimates he owns “3 million, maybe 4 million” cards. And any day now, Kimball (user name trauty) will become the 10th COMC seller to ever reach $100,000 in total book value (of cards listed).

Kimball, who was born in Ohio, moved to Indiana when he was three months old and lived there for 10 years. Due to Kimball’s father being a store manager for Kroger, relocating would be a staple of Kimball’s life.

2009 Upper Deck Gold #459 - Zack Greinke Gil Meche David DeJesus TL/99 - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.comAfter spending a year in Kansas (which explains the fact that his favorite professional team is the Kansas City Royals), Kimball lived in Nebraska for the next decade and a half and worked various jobs following high school while also doing several card shows annually.

After a brief stint in Oklahoma, Kimball moved back to Nebraska and bought his friend’s card shop. “That didn’t work out so well,” recalls Kimball, who went back to Oklahoma after about a year.

2001 Quantum Leaf #219 - Correll Buckhalter SP RC (Rookie Card) - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.com
The Sooner State is where Kimball still resides, with his wife and two children. But during Big 12 football seasons, there’s only one team he’s rooting for: his Cornhuskers, of course.

Kimball, who lives in Talihina (with a population of about 1,500  in the southeast corner of Oklahoma), was a seller on Beckett Marketplace from 2002-04 but stopped because he “hated the shipping and having to deal with all that”. Kimball’s cards sat, for the most part, for the next five years before becoming a seller on COMC 10 months ago.

“I think I’m about $1,000 away (from reaching 100K),” said Kimball when we spoke earlier this week.

If his current pace continues, Kimball will be there in no time.

2006 Exquisite Collection Gold #123 - Leon Washington JSY AU/99 - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.com 2004 Press Pass Autographs #16 - Dale Earnhardt Jr. E - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.com

Cards_For_Alzheimers UPDATE

COMC, and Dave Elmore in particular, would like to thank everyone who has purchased from or donated to the Cards_For_Alzheimers account in recent weeks. Special kudos to donors dawgfan72, DKSchultz, laburgher, odiegoat (who actually dropped off cards here Monday while on vacation from Minnesota!) and SteveSC.

Just one quick clarification, however: as stated in the original post, offers are not accepted on this account. Dave has been flooded with them, and unfortunately he’s had to reject them all. That’s because he’s committing to getting the most for each and every card, with the understanding that he’ll drop the prices by 10 percent on a weekly basis. (For instance, the majority of the cards with book prices are currently at 47-48% of BV.)

Hope this helps. Thanks again!

The first official “Port Sale”

Congratulations to bigchili73 and jimscards for completing the first official “Port Sale”.

In any case, many people have successfully made offers on entire collections (or portfolios), and have transfered them from one account to another, but there has been a recent rash of people trying to do this with larger collections. Generally when people try to do a transaction that involves more than 1,000 cards, the server can’t handle the request in the standard 30 seconds allotted to a web request. So we have had to manually run the commands to give them enough time to complete.

After having to do this twice in the past two days, we decided to build a feature in our in-house software to automate the process. Now people can call in to have us facilitate a portfolio purchase.

Once we get the agreed upon price, we send email to both buyer and seller to have them verify that they are happy with the transaction. We then run a command to transfer the entire inventory of cards that are for sale at the specified price.

In this case, 3,204 cards were transfered from bigchili73’s account to jimscards account. Here are a few of the cards involved in the sale.
2007 Topps Total Gold #456 - Adrian Peterson - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.com 1999-00 Topps Chrome Refractors #231 - Lamar Odom - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.com
2004 Playoff Honors Rookie Tandem Jerseys #RT1 - E.Manning/J.Jones - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.com

Vintage Processing Special 5/14-5/29

COMC.com is running a Vintage Processing Special.

15¢ Priority Processing for Topps cards from 1976 or earlier

Restrictions
– Encased cards, box-toppers, jumbo and graded cards are not eligible for this promotion
– Packages must be postmarked between May 14th and May 29th
– Boxes must be clearly marked with your user name and “15¢ Priority”
– Follow the instructions for how to ship to us
– Note: There will be a $3 batch fee per 500 cards.

Thank you for all of your Support!

The Staff at COMC

Shipping Improvements

Here are a few shipping improvements that we implemented this week. These currently apply only to packages shipped to the United States. We are working on similar improvements for international shipments.

Delivery Confirmation
All domestic orders are now shipped with delivery confirmation. We used to only do delivery confirmation for ~$50+ orders. This is being provided at no additional cost to you.

You will receive an email with a hyperlink that takes you to the UPSP.com website for delivery confirmation status once we have shipped the package.

Address Verification
We now use a service that makes sure the address we are shipping to is valid. This should catch cases where a zip code is entered incorrectly.

Stealth Postage
Most of the cost of shipping is labor. The domestic packages we ship will no longer display the postage paid. This should hopefully avoid some of the confusion about what our shipping fees are paying for.

Network hardware upgrade

After more than two years of faithful service one of our switches caved in after trying to keep up with more than 1 terabyte of traffic per month.

RIP little guy

If you noticed any network hiccups this weekend while trying to access the site, you now know what caused it.

Today we installed our upgrade. It was about 15 times more expensive, so it should be able to handle the traffic.