Following the example of the NBA and NFL, the owner of Check Out My Cards has decided to lock out the workers over a labor dispute. Despite push back from workers that love their job, the owner feels that all workers should get a 4 day weekend after reaching all quarterly goals and setting a record for most cards shipped in a month (92,254).
This lockout will last until Tuesday July 5th. At this point, workers will be allowed to resume their regular schedules. No phone calls will be answered or emails responded to during the lockout.
Since it is only the workers that are being locked out, you can expect that the owner will likely continue to make updates to the experimental Card Details page during the course of the lockout.
🙂 Enjoy your holiday weekend!
I hear the COMC marketing department has been locked out for years… 😉
Ouch!!!!
Priceless….Hope all the COMC staff has a wonderful and SAFE weekend.
Hope everyone at the COMC office enjoys their long weekend (especially the shipping department),
Brad’s comment brings up a good question: Does COMC do any marketing / place ads anywhere? In Beckett maybe? Don’t know because I rarely look at a Beckett. I know DDearing put the ad in Beckett last Thanksgiving or so but that’s all I know. I have seen blog posts where COMC sets up at some shows. I actually don’t have any great ideas how to attract more people to the site but then again I’m not in marketing.
I just wonder what’s going to happen when the inventory on the site far outstretches the buying power of COMC’s present number of customers. I’m sure we will get an update sometime next week showing how many cards were added this month due to the voucher special. Obviously there’s been a massive amount of cards added. I routinely run into vendors and buyers at card shows who have never heard of COMC! This completely surprises me.
I’d love to hear back from COMC on this.
Great questions. We do some advertising with Beckett, and we have done different click-ad campaigns with Google, Facebook, etc. But there are two marketing campaigns that we have found to be far superior to everything else.
#1 Word of Mouth: Provide a service that is so good that our customers naturally want to give unbiased recommendations. Thank you Affordablecards and everyone else who continues to plug the site and to get the word out. Unlike many other products, companies, or websites, our service is extremely dependent upon customer trust. Both buyers and sellers need to trust us in order to be willing to give us their money and valuable possessions. It is very difficult and extremely expensive to try to earn a potential customer’s trust through advertising. On the other hand, the best way to gain someone’s trust is through someone they already trust. That is why we invest the vast majority of our revenue in providing the best service we can. In essence we are crowd-sourcing our marketing department. We don’t just have a few people in our marketing department… We have thousands of happy buyers and sellers that want to see the service succeed.
#2 Organic Search: Google makes billions of dollars a year by helping people find what they are searching for. We currently get about 12,000 visitors per day, and 60% of them come from search engines. It would cost about a million dollars per year to generate this much traffic from click-ads. Even if we were to spend $100,000 per year on click-ads, that would only increase our traffic by about 5%. Instead, we have chosen to spend a fraction of that on website development to make the site faster so that search engines could crawl more if it and send us more traffic. From our analysis this has been a much more cost effective investment.
Another major marketing effort that we do each year is at the National Sports Collectors Convention. That is a month away, and we will have 6 employees there this year.
It is fun to see how passionate our customers are about getting the word out even faster. We have a lot of major developments in the works, but they are not going to happen overnight.
Note: We have nearly doubled from 12 to 22 employees in the last 18 months. I know I haven’t made 100% perfect decisions, but when so many companies are just trying to survive the recession, this growth rate seems pretty good to me.
Thanks Tim. Always great to see how COMC is open to discussing and addressing questions. I was asking because I actually didn’t even know the answer to the question. I agree that having the best possible initial presentation and excellent customer service will do more than anything else to get and keep customers. I was hooked the first time I visited the site in 10/2010. The only upgrade I am hoping for (which has been discussed a few times) is search-ability by a single player’s memorabilia and autos.
Keep up the great work and happy 4th!
Tim, I know I’ve asked this before and you expained why it wasn’t an idea you were interested in, but I don’t understand why you guys don’t do an affiliate marketing campaign. The cost would be nominal and it would further inspire your sellers to advertise for you.
We are actually looking into doing something like this. We are thinking of doing something where people can earn a couple bucks store credit if they refer a few people that do business with us. This is on a long list of feature work that we need to do. So we will see when it can happen.
Not one user responded to my classified listing to give a free Albert Pujols card to any users who found me at the Houston Tri Star show. I ended up spending the entire weekend telling attendees about COMC and giving them a free Albert Pujols card just for their promise of joining the site. The dealer next to me said my middle name should be “check out my cards dot com”. So far, ONE new member has joined the site that I know of based on their promise to me (thanks again to user blee132325 for joining the site!). Considering the four-digit amount of expenses I incurred to be an exhibitor at that show, I cannot imagine what COMC should be doing. I did see beckett price guide editor Chris Olds give COMC props this week, writing an article about cards he bought off COMC for his personal collection. I assumed that article was essentially a paid advertisement.