02 | July | 2011 | COMC Blog

Lots of additional feedback incorporated. Give this version a whirl.

I also added a link at the bottom of the page so that you can toggle between the old style and the new style to see what you like about each version. Let me know what you think.

Why are we doing this?
Many of you have commented that we shouldn’t fix what isn’t broken. Well, there is a significant drawback to the old design. It was optimized for the case when we only had 1 card for sale. This was an excellent assumption for the first few years.

Now we average 3 cards for sale per listing. As a result the old style gave a huge advantage to the cheapest card. This caused people to really fight for that cheapest spot. The data that we see that you guys don’t have access to is that sellers are undercutting prices unnecessarily. Buyers are willing to pay more, but sellers are trying to get that top spot.

Our solution: More than 1 “top spot”. The new page is designed to feature 3 cards above the fold for about 60-80% of our users. The rest of the users that have smaller monitors will only see 2, but that is still a lot better than the 1.

Now our sellers can focus on charging fair prices instead of slashing to get the top spot due to limitations with our old design.

I hope that shines some light on these growing pains.

After 4 years, our exhaustive quarterly stats are getting too long to put on fliers and business cards. So we are going to start using our yearly stats on printed materials. We will continue to publish the quarterly stats on the blog, but we will be doing the abbreviated year over year version of the quarterly stats.

Cards Sold
Since we have made it easier to purchase ports and to do large offers, there has been a big spike in cards sold. Though this is interesting, it dilutes that value of the cards sold stat. So we are now ignoring all transactions that contain more than 1,000 cards to try to get a more accurate representation of how many cards are sold.

Yearly Stats

* The 2010-11 Cards Sold does not include 0.25M cards that sold in transactions that had more than 1,000 cards.