Thank you for taking part in our test services over the past few months. We have taken that data and have come up with new services and programs for 2011.
Please read through and get to know all of the changes. You will find that we have made an effort to improve satisfaction by offering faster services at lower rates. Visit our fees page for full details about all of these services. Also please check your email for exciting information about upcoming specials.
SHIPPING
Bulk Shipping just got better!
– Now offered every day of the month
– You only need 10 cards to be eligible for bulk shipping
– You can get cards put in toploaders for only 15¢ extra
– First 10 cards $5.00; 15¢ for each additional card
– 75¢ extra for graded, encased, or jumbo cards
– International orders $10 extra
– Packaged within 1 week
New Toploader Option
With any shipment you can selectively choose cards that you would like to have shipped in a hard plastic toploader.
– 15¢ extra per toploader
Graded, Encased & Jumbo Shipping Reduced
We reduced the extra fee for graded, encased, and jumbo cards across the board.
– Bulk: $0.75 extra
– Standard: $0.75 extra
– Priority: $1.00 extra
– Express: $1.50 extra
Priority Shipping Cheaper & Faster
– First card is now only $7.50
– Shipped out within 1 business day
Express Shipping Now Cheaper
– First card shipped is now only $17.50
PROCESSING
4 Week Service
– 20¢ for each card
– No Grade, Encased, or Jumbo cards
– No Coins or Poker Chips
– $3.00 batch fee (per 1-500 cards)
– Your cards will be processed at 15¢ if we miss the due date
This replaces our old 8 week service, but you have another six weeks to use it. Since that service is no longer published on our site, simply specify “Standard” on your package and make sure it’s post-marked by Feb. 14.
1 Week Service
– 35¢ for each card
– No Grade, Encased, or Jumbo cards
– No Coins or Poker Chips
– $3.00 batch fee (per 1-500 cards)
– Your cards will be processed at 20¢ if we miss the due date
This replaces our old priority and express services.
3 Week Special Sized Service
– 75¢ for each item
– $3 batch fee (per 1-50 items)
– You can use this service for any size items
– You items will be processed at 50¢ if we miss the due date
Next Day Service
– $2 for each item
– $3 batch fee (per 1-50 items)
– You can use this service for any size items
– You items will be processed at 75¢ if we miss the due date
ACCOUNT UPGRADE OPTIONS
We are proud to offer the chance to sign up for our first official membership program that begins on January 1, 2011.
$50 Per Month Membership
– $50 account upgrade fee is charged along with monthly storage fees
– This gives you free storage on all items with an asking price of $1.00 or less
– This also gives you the ability to customize the following settings for incoming offers
- Auto-accept offer percentage
- Minimum offer amount
- Minimum offer percentage
Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.
Thank you,
The Staff at COMC.com
If your lowest processing fee is .20 then I guess that your site no longer supports common cards. When it was .15 processing per card you could place common cards on the site at .16 – .20 and make some money but what you did was provide the collector with common cards at a good rate. Now with the .20 processing fee being the lowest you now have to charge .21 or higher for the same card.
Please re-look at the prosessing fee’s.
Too many people are sending in commons. Look at 2010 Topps football. There are 10 of some of them, and I haven’t even sent mine in yet. I’ll probably donate them instead for the writeoff at this point.
I understand as I too sell a lot of commons but that is what keeps the price down. I sell mostly commons but I am also a big buyer of commons and I see me no longer buying commons at a good price with this increase in processing fee’s.
On the flip side, though, you can upgrade your account to the $50 per month and get unlimited storage for cards up to 99 cents. So, while you might want to cut back on some of the 16 to 20 cent cards, there is potentially a huge new market for 26 to 99 cent cards, once you’re committed to spending the $50 per month. There are a lot of cards on the site marked at 25 cents which could easily be relisted at 50 to 99 cents by a dedicated flipper.
The $50 per month also includes auto accept / auto decline, which I have found tremendously useful.
Also, it seems likely that COMC will have some processing specials here and there like they ran in 2010. A favorite theme seemed to be one flat rate for as many cards as you could cram into a box, provided they are from no more than 4 different sets. When they run that sort of special again, that would probably be a good time to send in commons.
One strategy might be to fill 550 count boxes with cards of the same set. When the boxes are filled, offer them for sale at a fixed price on eBay / Sportslots or at shows. When COMC has some sort of processing special, send in any unsold lots to COMC for processing.
All good points. And honestly I’d be interested in buying some of those 550-count lots myself.
There is a ton of opportunity in buying cards for a quarter and flipping them for 50 cents. I do it all the time. I’ve bought more than 11,000 cards on the site.
It would be nice if there was a “commons” special for maybe a nickel a piece, that way you could make money, but I think the time consuming part would be determining who is a “common”.
All cards are equal here, in terms of labor (except for the really expensive ones). It seems that it would not be cost-effective to them to make it cheaper to process commons, because the labor cost doesn’t change.
1) Are you doing away with the 5-cent top loader submission fee?
2) Hopefully the 20-cent charge will keep people from sending in so much base (although it’s obvious who is sending in the most of that, yes I am looking at me).
3) 15 cents seems high for top loader service on delivery. You might want to say here that it’s a nickel for the top loader and 10 cents for the labor because otherwise people will think you’re just charging 15 cents for the top loader.
4) Thanks for the new reduced rate for graded cards. I just sent about 100 in Tuesday, so I hope to get that cheaper rate!
The 5-cent toploader submission fee is still there. It is a huge pain for us to remove then, so we encourage you to do so.
Regarding the 15-cent toploader delivery fee… We will keep an eye on this and see how it goes. I am sure you would rather see us reduce the fee in the future than have to increase it if we came out too low.
Glad you like the graded card rate. We are looking forward to using more of our new graded card scanning technology. You may have noticed that the most recent graded cards have consistently great scans.
I have.
I just sent in a bunch in Card Saver IIs. It’s a pain for me, too. Glad to pay the nickel 🙂
I have definitely noticed the better pictures for graded/encased cards. I didn’t realize you had newer technology to do this though. That’s great news as I have a lot of these types of cards on COMC.
Thank you!
Matt
I like the faster services . But the option to have a slower service for cheaper was nice as well. Is it possible to keep the 8 week service at .15 for just base cards exclude auto’s or game used from that service?
For those of you that liked the 8 week service, keep an eye on your email. We will be sending email about this.
I, too, am disappointed that you are doing away with the 8 week, 15 cent processing service. I have the patience to wait the extra month and it allows me to keep a better margin. It’s not just base cards that are selling for 25 cents or less, but many of the newer inserts and/or parallels.
Keep an eye on your email. We will be sending you more info about the 8 week service.
I’m generally pleased with the new price structure. The 20 cent, 4-week processing is a good combination of quality and value, and I’ve had good results with the COMC auto accept feature (at present, I am automatically accepting all 50% offers).
Plus, I’m used to eBay quadrupling fees and calling it a decrease.
Some possible tweaks:
* You might consider bringing back the 15 cent, 8-week processing and restricting it to cards from no more than 4 products per batch.
* You might consider allowing sellers to choose between the 20% cashout fee and a pay-as-you-go final value fee of, say, 10%. Since you’ve stated in the past that cashout fees are less than 10% of total sales, that rate should be revenue neutral.
Anyway, I appreciate all of the opportunities and look forward to doing lots of business on COMC in the coming year, and many years to come.
Thanks for the suggestions. All of your input is good. We will likely offer selective 15-cent specials as you mentioned earlier.
Another tweak: it would be nice if we could easily see how much money we would be saving in rent by upgrading to the $50 per month service – I. E. – how many cards are subject to rent that are priced between 26 cents and 99 cents.
Yes, this would be a great feature.
You can try using the bulk price editing tool to calculate this, but I will try to add something to the Account Upgrade page.
Thanks mate. Had no idea this feature was available.
I like the idea of a membership for those of us who use the site the most and depend on it to help us run our business. It’d be worth it for extra features and advance notice of specials. Whatever it is, you know it’s going to work right. The best way to deal with the flooding of commons is to raise the prices… it’s about time! I never could understand why you’d list a card for 20 cents after paying 15 cents to list it. I’d rather donate what I can and keep my inventory where I’m always making money. That’s another good thing– the donation account. I’d like to know about it though.
Personally, I find this post a little offensive. In my opinion, one of the biggest reasons COMC has been so successful is it’s ability to provide valuable services to both dealers and collectors. As a collector, I have paid 15 cents to list many cards for 25 cents or less. Whether this makes sense or not is obviously a matter of perspective. I am not selling cards to make a living, I am selling cards to buy other cards for my collection and also help others do the same. I think of it not as buying and selling but more akin to trading. The raising of the listing fee from 15 cents to 20 cents will likely reduce the listing of less valuable cards on the site but whether or not this is an entirely good thing remains to be seen.
I always found comc to be an excellent resource for picking up less valuable cards. I’d much rather buy a 20 cent card here, then wait til I got a good group to ship them all, than to pay $1 per card on ebay plus shipping (which would usually be $2 per card, unless I lucked out and a single seller had a bunch that I was wanting).
I’d like to thank COMC for taking the users and their feedback into consideration when implementing the final version of the changes you make. I think the proposed changes are about as good as any reasonable seller could have hoped for.
The only question/concern I can think of would be the toploaders for bulk orders. Will the expensive cards (say cards with a book value of $50 or more) still be put into top loaders automatically? Either way, I’d be curious if you might consider using team bags (or even tape) when top loading thicker cards. My last order I had 3 expensive cards that were top loaded only and because the thicknesses of the card didn’t match the case, the 3 cards were half hanging out of the holders by the time I opened the bubble envelope. Luckily the cards did not get damaged, but I was probably very lucky. Using a team bag or tape to ensure the cards stay in the holder would probably help prevent having to do a lot of refunding for cards that got damaged during shipping because they slid out of the holders.
This is a great suggestion. Thank you for letting us know. I have passed along the team bag suggestion to shipping.
We will still be extra careful with expensive cards, and will guarantee that they will get to you securely. However, if you want a toploader that is specifically designed for your card, you should select the new toploader option.
I would like to see the .15 cent processing fee reinstated in some form. For small dealers, the ability to list cards for .15 cents and sell them at .25, thereby avoiding storage charges, provides a valuable service to those chasing common or oddball cards. It also helps keep prices down, which should lead to more transactions on the site.
If it is becoming a burden, the idea of limiting it to four or five different sets per box makes a lot of sense.
Everyone knows that Sportlots is the King of Commons. I see very few on COMC that interest me or that I need, so to me as a buyer, less on site probably won’t affect my purchases.
I was hoping you would do something about that crushing $10 fee for International Orders. Being just across the border in Niagara Falls, that works out to $1.50 for each of 10 cards! There’s no difference in handling & packing- only in postage cost. I’ve had complete sets of 660 cards shipped for approx. 16$ from the States. Maybe charge .20 cents for each added card or a more reasonable flat rate.
COMC is only about a 2 1/2 hour drive to Canada. Maybe once a month, someone could take a bunch of Canada-bound packages to Canada and ship from there.
LOL. I like that. Trouble is you’d need a whole whack to justify gas & salary costs.
I would recommend that you get a PO Box in the US.
Good idea!!!!
The 4 week shipping sounds great, but unfortunately I’m trying to get out of the collecting business, and I won’t be buying, or sending in any more cards to COMC. I wish someone would make me a reasonable offer on my entire lot – everything in the lot I believe is pre-1993, and there are some great vintage cards in there!
What are looking to get for your portfolio? I would be interested. I am looking to build mine up.
Well, the total book value of the lot right now is over $3,000, and they’re already priced to sell, but… if you made an offer of $400 I would take it.
To put it in other terms, I would accept any offer of 65% or greater for the entire portfolio.
Hello i see ur bv is about 2600$$ i would be willing to offer you $300 right now lmk if not thanks anyways and good luck and sorry to here you are done collecting
Thanks buymore, for buying out my portfolio! Thanks COMC for scratching my itch to have all the awesome cards I wanted when I was a kid. Perhaps someday I will become a collector again, but for now, it’s on to gold and silver!!! Ahoy!
Alrighty – I’ve been at this long enough, and spent too much time browsing the sight, so go ahead and put the offer through, and it’s all yours – thanks!
thanks and u should think about starting again some time int he future!
What is the preferred method of using the ‘Add Cards’ feature if we plan on using the old Standard processing (8 week) level? It is no longer an option. Should we just input the number of cards as ‘4 week’ on the submission form as long as our actual boxes we send are clearly marked for Standard processing or would you prefer we notify you of shipments by e-mail to avoid the confusion?
The main thing we look at is what you write on the actual boxes. We use the information you enter in the website only if nothing is written on the package.
When I first joined it was 10 cents a card, making it a great deal, then prices went up to 15. I have over 10 million cards I would like to send in but I guess that won’t happen now were up to 20 cents a card. What happen to the monthly deals for sellers to send cards in at a discount? Also as COMC has grown bigger why are rates going up? 20,000 users so now we got to raise rates? I use to love COMC but lately I’m not that thrilled. Sorry but had to say it!
Thank you for voicing your feelings. There was only about a 6 month window when we offered 10 cent listings. Back then we had 4 employees processing incoming cards and we couldn’t guarantee any due days. It was taking 6 months for cards to get on the site when we retired the 10 cent service. We how have about 15 employees dedicated to processing incoming cards and we are able to guarantee 4 week service. We have learned that for a typical random mix of cards our cost of listing them is quite a bit higher than 15 cents. As we get caught up with our current backlog, I am sure we will look into offering some specials.
I think it’s worth mentioning that, though it is more expensive in some instances for sellers to get cards onto the site, it is also now cheaper for buyers to get cards off the site. The bulk shipping option is now available all the time, not just for certain times of the month.
To your buyer, the cost of purchasing 100-200 commons and getting them shipped just got cheaper, so you might even see increased demand for commons, even as the cost of listing goes up.
Honestly, I’m amazed that COMC actually takes the time and effort to scan the front and back of every single card, and to distinguish between 200 different copies of the same card. If COMC were to cater more toward commons, a possible tweak would be to toss every copy of a certain card into a communal pile, and offer stock pictures or no picture at all. Maybe they could process cards like that for 10 or 15 cents, if they are submitted separated by set and in numeric order.
HI, I am new on here and have bought a few cards. I was wondering if there is a way to post a ‘request’ for cards. Like I only collect autographed cards issued from card companies and am looking for a few players that are on my favorite list, and would like to get the word out so that the dealers can somehow notify me and tell me what they have and what kind of deals they will make on them. And if they dont have the particular players, they can at the very least be on a lookout for the cards in their daily deals and know that they may have a prospective customer for the card. Thanks..again I am new on this site so not too familar what is one here and what program is available for the ‘buyers’.
This is a good suggestion. It would help me decide what to send in next.
This is something that we plan to add to the site. I love this feature, and plan to use it myself once it is built.
I love this idea, too. I’m a collector myself, as well as a reseller. I’m constantly searching for cards for my collection, and surely if I could advertise on here what I was looking for I’d get more of those cards sooner. This is an idea we need to see pursued!
A lot of times, the card is available, but the buyer doesn’t like the price. It would be interesting if a buyer could make standing offers on all of the cards they are willing to buy and the price they are willing to pay.
For instance, you might say that you’ll pay 50 cents for a 1989 Donruss Ken Griffey Jr rookie card, and the first seller to accept your offer sells the card. You might specify that you’re willing to buy one at that price or 10 or 50. You might even have some deal where you’ll pay 10 cents on the dollar for any Ken Griffey Jr card.
The buyer should be able to specify how much, in total, they are willing to spend on cards on their want list. Once that money is spent, all of the buyer’s offers disappear from the site, though they could be reinstated once the buyer has more money to spend.
This would be kind of like the bid / ask prices on the stock market. Right now, COMC only has ask prices. It would be interesting if there were bid prices as well.
To qualify, a card should have no condition notes.
I realize this would be slightly more complex than a simple want list, but the problem I have with most want lists is they aren’t binding. For instance, eBay has some ‘want it now’ feature which is totally useless. It gets spammed with millions of people saying they want items which are commonly available on the site, and anyone with an actual unusual want is lost in the shuffle.
At the very least, if you’re going to have a want list feature, it would be nice if you could also include a feature where people indicate could at least have the option of indicating what they’re willing to pay.
Tim I appreciate everything you have done for us. Is there any thoughts to a discount price on HUGE inventories sent to COMC? I have 1000+ monster boxes full that I always hoped I could send everything in one day. Everything is already sorted by year and number order. It would benefit us both. Increase the quantity available to customers to complete sets. But with increased prices that’s not gonna happen. Also with the economy and the down turn of the card market, most people would prefer to save money even if it took 3 months or so to get them listed on the site. Also what ever happen to looking into supporting card lots?
If you’re very serious about processing 10 million cards, you might consider getting a job at COMC (I would think anyone with that many cards sorted by year and number would be well qualified to work at the company), and then process your own cards in your spare time.
Even if you are paid $0 by the company, the potential savings in fees would be $2 million.
I’m serious, and if I lived in the area I would volunteer my time to process cards as its my life. But I hope you see how these cards added to the website would be a great thing for everyone. And I’m sure many other sellers would want to do the same
Some thoughts
1) A want list/request option would be terrific. I personally like collecting serial-numbered cards of Red Sox players. As one seller echoed above, it would help determine what cards would be more worth the trouble of sending in.
2) I see that there’s a list of the most popular-selling cards in terms of players. But how about for sets? Again, this would help sellers, and especially combat the over-abundance of common cards. I’m sure that it would be better for us to send in 2010 Topps Allen & Ginter commons (to pick an example) than 1988 Donruss cards. But it would be beneficial to have that data available for us.
3) I understand that this would take a lot of time and resources on your end, but what about sales history of cards? If I knew that 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Junior has consistently sold for X amount over the past year or so, that would definitely encourage me to send in some of my higher-value cards. As is, I’m just working on sending in stuff I want to get rid of. You can get market reports on ebay, but that only goes back a couple months and doesn’t include shipping, which factors in a great deal on how much you spend on a card, from a buyer p.o.v.
Honestly, if you had this feature, you could create your own price guide and put Beckett out of business. Hard market data and accountability to back up how much cards are truly “worth” would be a very, very popular feature, I would imagine. I dislike Beckett for this very reason; they’re only relevant because they have a monopoly on price guides and have little to no accountability for their pricing. But I’m digressing.
4) Here’s a unique idea. How about free store credit for reporting errors on the processing end? Even .25 per card or something would be enough incentive for shoppers to report mistakes. I’ve reported mistakes before, but I feel like I’m doing your job for you. You would have better quality assurance for the website by offering a incentive program, however small.
Thanks for seriously considering our suggestions. This is a brilliant site with a lot of potential.
I am looking to sell my portfolio if anyone is interested. I have about 550 cards with a wide variety mainly baseball. Some nice vintage cards. I would be willing to take serious offers of 5-6 hundred. I was hoping to do one of the promotions starting cards at 50% off and dropping the price daily like ddearing did but it didn’t happen. Please take a look at what I’ve got and make an offer if interested. Thank you and Happy New Year!