DDearing Sale is OVER!!

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Today all of the headaches are finally gone.  Every card will be disappearing from Dan Dearing’s account one by one throughout the afternoon and evening.

If you wanted to purchase one of them at 8% of book value (or 8% of his asking price on N/A cards), you have a few hours left because we do not have the ability to instantly take all the cards off the site.  Unfortunately, this is the only window — and the sale ceases a week shy of its last potential ending date.

We apologize for all of the stress the DDearing sale may have caused with the site slowdown, but are very relieved that the slowdowns due to this will not hamper any of your sales over this holiday season.  To all of you that participated in the sale, our hope is that you received some sort of benefit and that you enjoyed participating.  Once the site is updated and can handle these types of sales, everyone — including the staff — will be very happy!

Warm wishes throughout the season,

The Staff at Check Out My Cards

60 thoughts on “DDearing Sale is OVER!!”

  1. “The DDearing sale is back on. We apologize for the delays and don’t anticipate any more.”

    Boo

  2. JTBSPORTSCARDS is dropping prices 5% of book each day from now until Christmas, feel free to make offers also.Everything is 50% off right now.

  3. I don’t understand anything in this post. You’re removing the sale to relieve our stress? I think we were all loving the sale. Who was stressed?

    • Hi Dan,

      The site was stressed. I should have made it clear in the blog that a user purchased all of the cards at asking price. An immediate transfer would have locked the site for several hours, so we had to push it through slowly where the cards were leaving the site one at at time.

      Jeff

  4. Answering the following questions should clarify the situation:

    1) Did someone agree to buy the rest?
    2) If not, are they going to be returned to the site after Christmas?
    3) Were there problems with Cart and requesting shipments? This would be why some of us have not noticed a problem.
    4) How do you like the blog’s new skin?

    • Hi Joel,

      1. Yes
      2. They will likely have the cards back up as they build up their inventory on top of their huge purchase.
      3. The problems were on the back end where transactions were failing in different stages making us have to constantly stay on top of.
      4. I like blue so works for me.

      thanks,

      Jeff

  5. Wow Really! I understand there’s issues maybe for some. But this is the 2nd time sale was ended. If I new I could have done this sale and ended it early I would have done it too. Also what about the people who paid 87 or 90 percent off when they should have goten more of a discount, will they be given funds back? What about everyone else that sells daily at 90 percent off, when do they get the free publicity to everyone? Sorry but feel this sale was arranged to be done this early in the 1st place, brought back for a few days after everyone complained.

    • Hello Derek,

      I can assure you the sale was not brought back due to complaints. The original sale fell through, and I don’t believe we could have anticipated this sale happening as soon as it did. Personally I thought it may be a few more days before someone would pull the trigger. We did put up a blog post on the sale only after DDearing had an ad in Beckett and was committed to sell through his entire inventory of over 400k book. It may be possible in the future to have advertising of sales within the site, but its a little ways away.

      Thanks for your comments,

      Jeff

  6. I was buying cards like crazy yesterday and today. I didn’t notice any headaches at all. I’m actually pretty disappointed this is over.

    I have one question…

    …Was this sale ever going to last until the very end…like advertised?

    • Hi Matt,

      I think from the inception of the sale not many thought it would go to the end. The reason being that at some point someone would buy large portions of the inventory and there would be nothing left. I think it may have sold a little early but I believe the total book value made it appealing to the buyer. It was never our intent to frustrate the buyers and we apologize for the site not being able to handle the sale on many levels. We do appreciate all of the support we have received.

      Thanks,

      Jeff

  7. It must have been more stressful to the staff than it was to me. I enjoyed it. I just wish you would post your twitter feed and blog posts on the dashboard since I rarely go to the homepage. I would have bought a lot more stuff yesterday if I’d have known 90% offers would be accepted. I kept waiting for the prices to go down one more time before I bought anything else.

    • Hi Trauty,

      That is an excellent idea that should definitely happen when you log in to your dashboard. Ideas like this will definitely help our communication with users improve.

      Thanks,

      Jeff

  8. Over again? Heck if I knew I could do this sale and end it early, why wouldn’t I do that? Free publicity, clear some of my inventory and cash in. Heck most of us sell at 80-95 percent off daily and we don’t get this kind of traffic directed our way. I understand there may be issues but a lot of us weren’t seeing them, instead there are plenty of us that are upset and feel kinda scammed!

    • Hello,

      Its over for good this time. All the cards sold and now DDearing will be trying to rebuild his inventory. Like I mentioned in the earlier post, all the cards were for sale so they could go at anytime. The way we did it allowed for some final purchases to be made. I do apologize for the frustrations this has caused. It is a great learning experience for us in the future.

      Thanks,

      Jeff

  9. Hey ddearing, great sale, a lot of fun and intestine to see if you could hold out one more day to get that extra percent off. I cashed out at 89% off and then cherry picked a few remaining items today. a great gamble on some items, finished a bunch of sets and even started a couple of small player collections (Johnnie Knox and Brian Orakpo). Would love to see someone else take this gamble, it was great. Juts need some 10 cent ship specials to get this stuff home to me.

    Cheers all!

    • Hi Manning991,

      We are happy that some people were able to benefit from this experiment. If and when we attempt this again, we will be better prepared. Thanks again to all those who participated.

      Jeff

  10. So we go from “everything’s fine, sale goes til the 24th, automatically accept offers” to “shows over folks, go on home”, and give everyone virtually no opportunity to make any last minute purchases? At least if you would’ve made this post and given say a 24 hour deadline, you’d have gotten a TON more purchases. But oh well, it’s not my money / reputation that’s on the line here…

    • Hi Joshua,

      The amount of time we gave was the best we could do. I think the buyer would have preferred an immediate sale but we were not willing to tie up the site during the day. We hope you at least made some purchases and were happy to some degree.

      Thank you,

      Jeff

      • I think the biggest problem is that the post didn’t mention that someone had purchased all the cards. The post made it seem like the sale was over because you guys didn’t want to deal with the site issues anymore. With the additional info posted in the comments, the original post makes more sense.

      • Hi Joshua,

        You are absolutely correct! I was trying to get the blog post out as soon as possible, so the users could have time to buy any cards before the sale timed out. I should have triple checked it, I didn’t notice it till a day later. It is/was definitely a key piece of information.

        Thanks,

        Jeff

  11. ddearing is reporting that somebody bought everything, presumably at 92% off. Great sale! Thanks to ddearing and to the staff for dealing with the headaches. This was a truly impressive operation.

    • Hello Dan,

      This is correct. Assuming the site allows the sale to go through all the cards should transfer as I writing this reply. Thanks for your understanding through all of this.

      Jeff

  12. I noticed JTBSPORTSCARDS is running the same promotion DDEARING did.He is going 5% off of book everyday until Christmas Day and is at 50% of book today.

  13. Congratulations to COMC and DDearing for a job well done and thank you for the exciting sale!

    I would like to suggest a few changes to the bulk uploader:

    * It should be possible to set a “restore point” on your prices, so you can run a temporary sale and then get everything back to normal when the sale is over. Also, when the editor crashes halfway through submitting the new prices (which it frequently does), it will be easier to just deal with those prices.

    * It should be possible to save the bulk uploader data into a spreadsheet and work on the spreadsheet offline.

    * You should get rid of the minimum 90% discount and the minimum 25 cent price with the bulk uploader, or at least allow the user to override it.

    Some suggested changes to the site in general:

    * You might have a ‘sales and specials page’, where you give every seller a certain number of characters (50, 80, 140) to write some sort of message, like “accepting 50% offers on all cards” or “all prices firm” or whatnot.

    * The ability to block offers under a certain amount or automatically accept offers of a certain amount should be free to all users, or at least free to all users who have spent at least $50 or $100 on COMC fees in the past month.

    * If a seller is not accepting any offers, it would be nice if the word “FIRM” appears next to their price. One of the reasons you saw so much activity with the DDearing sale is that people knew the price was the price and they could either take it or leave it. When DDearing’s cards hit 90% off, people knew they better get in there and buy, buy buy. But if an ordinary seller were to price a bunch of stuff at 90% off, some people would think “gee they seem desperate to sell. I wonder if they’d take even less than that.” It would be nice if there was a way to set a rock bottom price, and then advertise that the price was rock bottom.

    Thanks!

    • The only thing that I would add is that if every seller gets a sentence to say whatever he wants that it still come from a list of prewritten text. Consistency of experience is what makes COMC what it is. Think about people that type in all caps on eBay and don’t know what a period is. People could think that it was COMC who had suddenly changed its writing style. The same tone sitewide helps prevent scams because it makes COMC look like it knows what it is doing.

      In other words, we don’t want COMC to become the MySpace of cards.

      • That could work. Especially if COMC had some sort of automatic sale feature. For instance, if you could automatically set your prices to go down by 1% off asking price (or book price) per day / week / month, and COMC could process these price changes overnight when it’s not peak hours.

      • Hi Joel,

        Totally agree, any communication would be from a list of prewritten text. I also agree this would be very useful to both the buyers and the sellers. We are working on it.

        Thanks,

        Jeff

      • When creating your prewritten communication, you might restrict everything to past tense and present tense. Stuff like:

        “Cardseller recently added more than 300 cards to their port, including rookies, jerseys and autos”

        “Cardseller recently lowered their asking price on hundreds of cards”

        “Cardseller is offering over 500 cards at 90% off book or less”

        “Cardseller is accepting offers of at least 75% of asking price on all cards, and will consider other offers”

        “Cardseller’s prices are at their bare minimum, and is not accepting offers”

        “Cardseller will accept an offer of 50% of asking price for their entire portfolio.”

        I think where COMC got the most heat from the DDearing sale is from the promise to do something specific in the future. “All cards will be 1% of book on December 24”, “Prices will go down 1% every day and no offers will be accepted”. Stuff like that. Then, when the future events didn’t conform with reality, people got mad. It doesn’t matter that it was not physically possible for the cards to reach 1% because all of the cards were sold at 8%. It’s better to underpromise and overdeliver than to overpromise and underdeliver.

        Anyway, I’d love to see such a page, where each seller gets a blurb, like a Facebook status update. Each seller gets one blurb, and the blurb goes away after one week or until they replace it with a different blurb. I don’t think it’s strictly necessary to restrict people to pre-filled blurbs. If they violate some term of use with profanity or personal attacks or something, then they can have their blurb-posting privilege yanked. This wouldn’t be like some message board with tens of thousands of posts needing constant moderating.

      • Well, sure, but in the interest of consistency it would be nice to have a list of radio buttons, some with text boxes for numbers (percent off, etc.). Otherwise you need a copyeditor. Not everyone cares about misspelling, typing in all caps, etc., but some people do, and their money is just as good here.

    • Hello checkoutmydeals,

      I must say I always enjoy reading your posts. I have only started to be proactive on the blogs as the company continues to grow. All really great ideas, some which are on a long list of feature requests that Tim is trying to work on. I do appreciate everyone taking the time to write down their suggestions.

      Thanks,

      Jeff

      • Aw, shucks. Thanks, kindly. I know you caught some heat for some glitches and miscommunication, but I have to say, as the former owner of two collectibles stores and a 12 year eBay veteran, CheckOutMyCards is nothing short of amazing.

        You guy create something in the neighborhood of 20,000 listings per day, every day of unique items with large, clear scans of both sides and no stock photos. Plus you organize it, store it and can pack and ship it within a few hours of the shipment request. Lots of these items, at best, will sell for 25 cents, yet you treat them with the same respect and care that you would give to an item worth 1,000 times as much.

        Can you even imagine an eBay seller doing anything even remotely similar? This is unlike anything that has ever existed in the history of commerce.

        You guys just sold an accumulation of 98,000 different cards in a little more than 7 weeks to hundreds or possibly even thousands of different buyers. Most sellers couldn’t create that many individual listings in 100 years. And yet, that seller is just one of about 1200 active sellers on the site, and the site is growing at the rate of roughly 100% per year.

        So, while there are some glitches and some room for improvement, you guys should be very proud.

  14. While we’re on the subject of the bulk price editor:

    Suppose you want to lower all of your prices by 1% less than your current asking price. The editor will round the discount down to the nearest penny, so that any card which is already marked less than $1 will receive no price change at all.

    It would be nice if the user could specify that, at minimum, all prices be discounted by a penny. THANKS!

  15. I am very upset. I wanted several cards of my favorite player and was waiting until they hit 93% off and now there gone. I had no way of knowing that this was going happen r I would have bought them earlier, and now I will never get them at even close to the price that I would have if the sale had run its course.
    In terms of fixing the website I have a few suggestions.
    1) Start allowing sales for 8×10 autographed photos, obviosly with respected COAs. Upper Deck and Tristar have had several releases with legit autos and I want to sell my stock on COMC.
    2) Make for some way for the buyer and seller to communicate.
    3) Make more auctions. It is extremly hard to price cards that have no book price (as I saw was the case with the Mariano Rivera All Star 1/1 patch). This would let the market determine the price on individual cards.
    4) Let everyone to be able to market their own cards.
    Thanks for a great site.

    • But the sale did run its course. There was always the possibility, even from Day 1, that someone would purchase every single card in ddearing’s portfolio. So yeah, you did in fact have every way of knowing that this could happen. You chose to gamble and wait on lower prices; turns out you lost this one.

  16. I’m sorry to hear the sale is over, but happy for ddearing. I bought a lot in the last few days, but was holding out for more….Even added funds to cover more yesterday. Oh well, ‘when you see a good thing – jump on it’ – as they say…..

  17. As the seller, not trying to sound heartless here, but I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who are upset that someone bought it all before you got the individual cards you wanted. Seriously, at 92% off, you were still waiting for a better deal? I did not give the final buyer any kind of discount. They realized that there were 60,000 cards in inventory which would have cost $9,000 alone just to get them listed on the site. They got the entire lot for a great deal and saved $9,000 in listing. You can’t be upset with COMC because someone else beat you to the cards you wanted. You can’t be upset with me either. The terms of the sale are that the cards would be discounted each day until they were all sold. They are all sold.

    COMC did not give me any “free advertising”. I paid a lot of money to put the ad in Beckett. Then I paid money again to have another ad sent to every shop owner in the country. For those of you who benefited from the sale or from the extra advertising, I am happy for you. For those of you who want to throw stones at me or COMC because you were too cheap to pull the trigger on cards at 92% off and because someone else was smart enough to see the value in buying the lot before yo got to it, I don’t have much sympathy. If you ever thought that this sale would actually get to 1% of BV without someone else coming in an buying it all, then you are naive.

    Quit being upset at COMC about this. If you want to be mad at someone, it should be yourself. If you want someone else, let it be me. I don’t much care. 🙂

    • Hey Dan, great sale and THANK YOU!!! As for avih6002 get real!! Waiting to pull the trigger at lower then 8% b.v. REALLY??? I bought many many great cards for such a great deal thanks to Dan and i really appericate it. As for the the salty folks on here I agree with Dan that u should be mad at ur self and no one else. Thanks again Dearing and God Bless

      • You misunderstood me. Why would I not want to get the cards at the cheapest price possible? Most, if not all the cards I wanted would have lasted at least one more day.
        For the guys harping on me, get real. We all want the best deals possibloe and get frustated when it doesn’t work out. Just look at ddearing and his first attempted port sale.
        And to ddearing, great sale, and there were cards that I would have certainly not gooten otherwise.

    • you don’t sound heartless at all. you raised awareness of the site with this sale, and for that we all benefit.

    • I have to agree with DDearing on this one. That’s like finding a $100 card on eBay, placing a lowball bid of $7, and then getting upset when someone else buys it for $8.

      As for the ability for sellers to advertise individual cards in their COMC port, I agree it would be useful if COMC had such a feature. At present, people do it all the time on the CheckOutMyCards Facebook page, and also at BlowOutCards Forum in the “Spam your eBay & COMC listings here!” section:

      http://www.blowoutcards.com/forums/spam-your-ebay-comc-listings-here-photobucket-sportslots-etc/

    • Hi Dan >>> great sale and Thank-You! You cannot please everybody, the sale created a huge buzz and I would have loved to buy more cards. I agree with your comments people need to realize when to pull the trigger on a great deal. If you waited and they are gone then you can only blame yourself. I recently sold some personal stuff and I have to admit my intentions where to sell everything knowing that someone got a really great deal. You flipped your cards for reason and we all got some great deals. This is what keeps us going, searching for that next great bargin. Can’t we all get along. Tis the season, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and good luck selling in the future!

      COMC >>> Hang in there, use the comments as a learning experience. I don’t know the entire history of the site. However, I have been searching cards on this site for almost one year. Never purchased any cards and didn’t have an account. I can honestly say the ddearing sale got me hooked and 183 items purchased later…I know I got some great deals on cards I would normally not have purchased. Everyone makes mistakes and you cannot please everybody. Grow from this huge sale and look for ways to improve with the comments and feedback pouring in.

      Just a suggestion, but as a benefit to your long time customers, maybe some sort of offer or promo that puts a little more savings in their pockets makes everyone happy. I shows your appreciation for their continued business.

      Keep up the good work, the site is great, your efforts and hard work with the sale overall was a success. Great job – Thx!

  18. I may not have put it as bluntly as Dan did, but all fair comments. I was quite happy purchasing some stuff at 70%, some at 80% and so on. I intended to buy whatever was left that I loaded into my shopping cart at 90% and did so and was very happy that I did as I am sure we all knew that once 90% off was reached, the was a good chance that a lot of people were going to act, or hat ne person may have came in and bought the remainder. I still say it took balls in the first place to do this, so hats off to Dan for taking the risk, and to those of us that realized some great deals, good for us. I bought over 800 cards from the auction and just got the batches I bought at 80-85% off yesterday and am extremely happy.

    Thanks again Dan and happy holidays to everyone on the COMC website, it is just going to keep getting better.

    Brad

  19. Great sale,I know I moved a few cards when this sale started going, thanks. I am surprised it didn’t sell sooner. It is probably a little late but if you change the title of this blog from- ddearing sale is over to—–dddearing sold out, you would get less confused people , as it does not state in the first blog that he sold out of all cards. Even though it is obvious to nearly all of us that this is what happened and that it was going to sell after 85-90 percent off .
    – having a easy way to sell a “lot” of cards would be cool.
    – buying packs on here would be nice too

    • also if the first blog was more positive , talking about the great deal someone got etc… rather then the headaches and stress it caused at comc it would get a better reaction. If it was me I wouldnt blog much about my website going down etc… I would make it a short one line apology for those who feel they need one and a nice long paragraph about great improvements made.

  21. Dan, great sale, looking forward to the next seller to get in the 2011 Xmas spirit!!! I started loading up on cards at 80% off, then 83%, then 87%, then 90%….it just depended on the player and availability to purchase the same cards for less in the future. If you were buying these cards for your collection, ask yourself how often your going to find the better issues of cards at just 15% of book or better.

  22. Great idea. Great cards. Great deals. Great execution.

    All smart buyers did well across the board.

    Thank you.

  23. All I can say is ……it was a “Great Sale!” ….if you didn’t grab the cards as you saw them, that was your lost.

    Have no complaints ….bought some, kicking myself for not buying more.

    “Happy Holidays to All” ….and buy them as you see them ….. 🙂

  24. I was VERY LUCKY, so thanks to Dan. I just happened (I forgot about the sale) to see one of the cards I was scoping out at 90% off and had to pounce. I then spent the next 3 or so hours buying a few hundred cards. Came back a couple of hours later and POOF…everything else was gone!!

    Only feedback regarding my buying experience is – it would be nice to have the ability to “tag” the cards by team. Not necessarily saying that this has to be part of the cataloging process, but maybe add it as a seller option so a seller could tag the cards based upon the team. As a team collector, this would be a very useful feature.

    Again, thanks Dan!!

  25. Hey, everyone, I will sell all of my cards for $300. My account is csg23. I will consider other offers, but be quick and get these cards while you still can.

  26. Anyone know why JTB’s cards are not dropping as planned, there is not blog to reply to. I don’t understand why this stuff is advertised and then not lived up to. Today is the 22nd they are suppose to be 85% off but everything is still 70%, I can’t imagine it is that hard to get these things right.

    • JTB is dropping as advertised. On December 15, they were 40% off. December 16, 45%, December 17, 50%. December 18, 55%. December 19, 60%. December 20, 65%. December 21, 70%. Today is December 22 and they’re 75% off.

    • There might be some confusion because the lowest price DDearing was going to get was 1% on Christmas Eve, while, if my calculations are correct, the cheapest JTB will be is 90% off on Christmas Day.

      If you’re champing at the bit to buy cards at 75% off, I suppose I could mention that I am automatically accepting all offers up to 50% off and most of my cards have an asking price of 50% of guide or less, so pretty much everything is 75% off guide or less.

      However, I’m not quite sure I understand when it’s appropriate to plug your own sale on this blog and when it’s not.

      • Well there is no real blog or means of comm. for us sellers so as far as i am concerned this should be just fine 🙂

      • Hey jeff i want to do a silent auction on all of my basketball cards in my inventory how do i go about that lmk thanks shawn

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