Monthly Archives: October 2010

Congrats to Tim Lincecum

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2007 Ultimate Collection #124 - Tim Lincecum AU RC (Rookie Card)/299 - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.com
Congratulations to Tim Lincecum for making it to the World Series and being the probable starter for game 1.

Tim Lincecum went to the University of Washington and was born in Bellevue, WA. Our office is technically in Redmond, WA, but we are 1 block from the border of Bellevue.

I just looked up some stats and realized that of the 100 players with the most book value worth of cards on our site, Tim Lincecum has sold the highest percentage. If you visit our Top Players page and select Sold % from the Sort By dropdown, this is what you will find.

If you have any Lincecum cards you want to sell, it looks like our site is a great place to do that.

2 Million, 3 Million + Auction Results

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If you have been following our Twitter, you might have seen some of this news.

2 Million

Today we surpassed 2 million cards currently for sale.

Congrats to ddearing for recently taking the top spot on the sellers list.

3 Million

On Tuesday I purchased item #3,000,000 from pskell02.
2009 Bowman Chrome Refractors #153 - Austin Collie - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.com

Auction Results

The bidding ended on Tuesday night for a batch of auctions we ran to help raise funds for a local shop owner. Here are the results.

Auction Bids  Winning Bid  Winner
$1K BV in Sports Cards from djssportscards 11 $200.00 mocards
$3K BV in Hockey Cards from djssportscards 14 $650.00 mocards
$12K BV in Basketball Cards from djssportscards 5 $1,300.00 Flipper
$12K BV in Football Cards from djssportscards 5 $1,209.51 JoelsHitShow
$20K BV in Baseball Cards from djssportscards 8 $2,063.60 JoelsHitShow

The auctions resulted in djssportscards getting nearly 50% more in pocket than he would have if we had just pushed through the portfolio sale that he had arranged with another buyer.

Thanks to all the bidders. I know this is very helpful for djssportscards.

$50 Flat & Vancouver

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$50 Flat Rate Special Ends on Friday
This is a reminder that there are only a couple more days left for you to take advantage of the $50 Flat Rate Special. Your packages must be postmarked by this Friday.

Thanksgiving & Black Friday are Coming Soon
The day after Thanksgiving is the biggest shopping day of the year, and that is true of Check Out My Cards as well. Here are dates that you should be shooting for in order to make sure your cards get on the site in time for Black Friday.
– $50 Flat Rate Special must arrive at our warehouse by Wednesday, October 20th
– 1 Month Test Service must arrive at our warehouse by Friday, October 22nd
– 3 Week Priority Service must arrive at our warehouse by Wednesday, November 3rd
– Special Sized Test Service must arrive at our warehouse by Wednesday, November 3rd
– 1 Week Express Service must arrive at our warehouse by Wednesday, November 17th
– Next Day Test Service must arrive at our warehouse by Tuesday, November 23rd

Vancouver Card Show this Weekend
We will be at the Vancouver Sports Collectors Fanfest this weekend. Bobby Clarke, Bernie Parent, and Dave Schultz will be there signing autos on Saturday and Orland Kurtenbach will be signing autos on Sunday. On the way up to Vancouver we plan to spend some extra time at the border to find out if we will be allowed to transport consignment submissions back to our warehouse for you. If so, we will allow you to drop off your $50 Flat Rate submissions at the show. If not, we will be handing out coupons so that you can still get the $50 Flat Rate special if you mail your packages the following week.

2001-02 Topps Archives Relics #SBC - Bobby Clarke S - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.com
1969-70 Topps #89 - Bernie Parent - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.com 2001-02 Topps Archives #66 - Dave Schultz - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.com
1966-67 Topps #25 - Orland Kurtenbach - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.com

$50K at Auction

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A local shop owner needs to raise some extra cash to cover family medical expenses, so we are helping by putting his portfolio up at auction.

There are 5 separate auctions to choose from. All the auctions end on Tuesday, October 19th.
$20K BV in Baseball Cards from djssportscards $1,500 minimum bid
$12K BV in Football Cards from djssportscards $1,000 minimum bid
$12K BV in Basketball Cards from djssportscards $1,000 minimum bid
$3K BV in Hockey Cards from djsportscards $250 minimum bid
$1K BV in Sports Cards from djsportscards $50 minimum bid

2009-10 Panini Inscriptions #132 - Michael Beasley - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.com 1948-52 Exhibit W468 Black and White #11 - Tex Coulter SP48 - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.com
2008-09 Upper Deck Super Skills #SS3 - Alexander Ovechkin - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.com 1953 Bowman Color #149 - Al Corwin - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.com

2006 JAG Debut Signatures #D11 - Patrick Labyorteaux - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.com

2010 Q3 Stats & Performance Notes

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Another quarter with steady growth on all fronts.

Website Growth & Performance Demands

It is interesting to follow the average page views per month from year to year for .
2007 Q3 – 0.1 million views/month
2008 Q3 – 1.1 million views/month
2009 Q3 – 2.5 million views/month
2010 Q3 – 4.4 million views/month

As the traffic continues to grow we need to make performance optimizations to handle the workload. In a post on Monday I alluded to some changes that might be noticeable by repeat visitors. The major update that I made was a performance optimization that affected nearly every page of the website. As a result many pages started loading significantly faster.

We migrated from using ASP.Net’s stored procedure profile provider for custom user information to using direct queries with Microsoft’s LINQ to SQL. This made it very easy for us to make highly targeted, optimized, and secure queries just when we needed the information.

This is just the first of many performance improvements we plan to make to the site. Over the next few weeks I will discuss a monumental change that we have in the works. Hint: The future is cloudy.

10¢ Shipping on 10-10-10

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The date on Sunday is 10-10-10. So we thought it would be fitting to offer a 10¢ shipping special.

This  special is 33% better than our regular bulk shipping special. So take advantage of this rare opportunity. Be sure to use your account to place your shipment request with the Special shipping option by 11:59 PM on Sunday.

Details
This Sunday (10-10-2010) from 12:01 AM to 11:59 PM (PST), customers will be able to ship their first 40 cards for only $10. Each additional card is just 10¢ more.
– Cards will be shipped out by Wednesday, October 20th
– Graded, Encased or Jumbo cards are each $1 extra
– Orders shipped outside the US are $10 extra
– Account required

Show schedule news and notes

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Oct. 9: Jantzen Beach Supercenter, Portland, OR

If you were planning on leaving cards with Steve Hollander on Saturday, October 9th at Jantzen Beach Supercenter, unfortunately you’re out of luck. He won’t be able to attend, so COMC won’t be accepting consignment submissions. He does, however, plan on being there Nov. 20 as well as all of the Greater Puget Sound shows in upcoming weeks. Visit http://www.twinoaksshows.com/ for more details.

Oct. 16-17: Western Canadian Sports Collectors Fanfest

Tim is scheduled to be at the Western Canadian Sports Collectors Fanfest Oct. 16-17 in Vancouver, BC.

Oct 23: Meridian Park School, Shoreline, WA

Steve Hollander will be accepting consignment submissions on Saturday, October 23rd at the Meridian Park School show in Shoreline, WA.

Nov. 6: Factoria Mall, Bellevue, WA

Steve Hollander will be accepting consignment submissions on Saturday, November 6th at the Factorial Mall show in Bellevue, WA.

Nov. 14-15: Washington State Sports Collectors Association’s Winter Convention

COMC staff members will be on hand to accept consignment submissions at the Washington State Sports Collectors Association’s Winter Convention on Nov. 14-15 at Meridian Park Elementary School in Shoreline, WA.

Nov. 20: Jantzen Beach Supercenter, Portland, OR

Steve Hollander will be accepting consignment submissions at the Nov. 20 Jantzen Beach Supercenter show in Portland, OR.

Thanks for reading, and we look forward to seeing many of you at these events in coming weeks!

Website glitch yesterday

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Some of you may have noticed some odd behavior on the website around 2PM PST Sunday. There was about 15-30 minutes where you all shared the same shopping cart.

Sorry about that, I was making a performance improvement to how our shopping cart and offer system works, and my initial code change wasn’t complete.

Everything should be working fine now, but feel free to contact us if you think you see any quirky behavior.

On a separate note… On Friday evening I made the largest single website update ever to Check Out My Cards. The update affected more than 50 different source files. Those of you that are regulars to COMC might have noticed the change. If you think you noticed something different, please drop a comment. I will be writing more about the change later this week.

Update Monday @ 5:30 PM

Several people have commented about cards that were added to the site over the weekend not being searchable. I tracked down the issue and it is now fixed.

The root cause of the issue was independent from any of the changes listed above. We recently got in some 1987 Garbage Pail Kids cards that were not listed in Beckett. So we got permission to use data from another site, but the data was in a format that ended up not working nicely for generating URLs. When we tried to push the data to the site on Friday evening, that ended up causing the website to fail to add any new items to the search cache. This is why new items added over the weekend were not showing up. We manually changed the data so that it would work for URLs, and we are in the process of making a fix that will prevent this from ever happening again.

Top Buyers, Sellers & Consignors

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Another one of the many features we have been working on for the past several weeks just went live a couple days ago.

We now list the Top 10 Users broken down by either the Hottest [Buyers|Sellers|Consignors] Over the Last 30 Days or the Biggest [Buyers|Sellers|Consignors] currently on the site.

2002 Playoff Prime Signatures Autographs #11 - Emmitt Smith/40 - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.com
Hottest Buyers
This is based on book value of cards purchased in the last 30 days. We ignore cards that were resold after being purchased. Cards sold in the last 30 days get factored into the Hottest Sellers ranking.

Congratulations to buymore for being the first user to grace the top of our new Hottest Buyers list.

1956 Topps #5 - Ted Williams - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.comHottest Sellers
This is based on the total book value of all the items sold in the past 30 days. You may regularly see people spike onto this list after they sell an entire portfolio. That explains the hottest sellers that have no cards for sale.

I am sure it doesn’t come to anyone’s surprise that our hottest seller is by far jseau.

2000 Bowman #236 - Tom Brady RC (Rookie Card) - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.com
This is based on the total book value of cards that first went up for sale in the past 30 days. These are the users that have had the most cards go live recently.

It is interesting to note that our first ever hottest consignor is from across the border. manning99 is from Canada, and if you look at the list closely, you will find manning991 in the #8 spot as well. This is a father & son duo, and they are both making a big splash having just started using our consignment service in the last couple months.

1933 Goudey #181 - Babe Ruth RC (Rookie Card) SGC GRADED 60 - Courtesy of CheckOutMyCards.comHonorable Mention
I have to give kudos to cccardfactory for being the only user that is currently in the top 10 of all 6 rankings. He is the leading contender for the double-triple crown. A triple crown would be to have the #1 spot on all three either the hottest lists or the biggest lists. The double-triple crown is the #1 spot on all 6 lists.

Special Thanks
I have to give special thanks to iluvfish2 for suggesting that we add this functionality.

Why book value?
Short answer: So that all stats can use the same metric and relative comparisons are easy.

Long answer: We can’t list consignor stats based on sales price because it is often measuring items that we just got in, and they haven’t sold yet. If we used their asking prices, people could just inflate their asking prices to game their way to the top. Since we have to use a metric that can’t be altered by users, we decided to go with book value. Since we are using book value for consignor stats, it only make sense if all the other numbers are using the same metric. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able interpret the stats and make apples to apples comparisons.