Item #6000000, submitted by arcaiser
Here is a quote from CheckOutMyDeals who discovered that item #6000000 was live before we did. I guess we have been a little preoccupied with our move.
I think it’s wonderful that not only did you process an additional 1 million cards in record time, but you also improved the site to address at least 2 of the user’s top concerns since card #5000000 was processed.
People wanted an easy port sale feature and they now have it.
People wanted an increased customer base, and you’re now cross-posting cards to Amazon, potentially adding millions of new customers.
Some features I would love to see:
* The ability to tag players with Hall of Fame status, All Star status, major awards won, teams played on, etc.
* The ability to tag sets / cards as autographed or memorabilia cards.
* The ability to filter searches by several factors. For instance Yankees memorabilia cards over $10 book value that are at least 50% off book value.
One feature I would really like to see:
The ability for a seller to subdivide their port into several smaller ports. The port could then be sold as a bulk lot using the port sale feature. It could also be subjected to different auto accept percentages than other cards.
That way, if someone wants to accept 50% offers on basketball cards but only accept 10% offers on baseball cards, they could do so. Or if they would sell their hockey for 10% of book, but only as a bulk lot, they could also do so.
I’m very happy with COMC and all of the positive improvements that you are continually making. Good luck!
Let’s see how many of these feature requests are live by the time item #7000000 hits the site.
Side Note
Over the last few months we knew we were running out of space in our current warehouse, and we chose to spend our energies hunting for a new home instead of giving specials or trying to get more items on the site. As a result it took us 2 days longer to get from item #5000000 to #6000000 (137 days) than it did to get from #4000000 to #5000000 (135 days). This is actually quite amazing when you consider the fact that we ran virtually no processing specials during that time. When we don’t run any specials, people send us cards that are more difficult and time consuming to process. One way to approximate the difficulty of the cards submitted is by looking at the average book value. Generally the more valuable a card is the more rare it is and the harder to identify what it is.
As you can see from this chart, we had been hovering around $5/item for an average book value the past few years. Over the last 6 months as we have been working on the items in the 5,000,000’s you can see that our average book value shot up to just under $6/item. It was quite a feat to get all of those items processed in virtually the same amount of time as the previous million items.
For the next million items we will have room to hire more people and give them enough space to work efficiently. We will see how this translates to our stats.
Awesome, just, absolutely, AWESOME!
As a buyer, I have the ability to lot items together automatically, by just adding cards to my cart one at a time. As a seller, however, I would really like to be able to bundle items together as well.
For example, I could envision running an ad to sell all of the Mike Schmidt cards in my port as one lot. To do that now, I believe I’d have to mark every card in my port that did not feature Schmidt as “not for sale”, run a port sale ad, sell it, and then put all my other cards back out for sale. With thousands of cards in my account, that just isn’t happening. But if there were a way I could bundle the Schmidt cards separately without having to affect anything else I have for sale, I see myself running more classified ads in an effort to sell lots.
It seems there are a string of pros and cons from this idea we could extrapolate, but at the end of the day, this has to lead to more action on the site. Which, of course, translates into more awesome!
Keep up the AWESOME work, COMC, and congrats on the expansion!
Sincerely
Affordablecards
Keep up the great work guys. The best search option I would love to see is the team pictured/listed on the card. For example I know locally I could use a lot of the U of M stuff. But guys only want them pictured in their U of M uniforms. This could work just the same for Pro Teams but could increase the search ability for lots of users that are team collectors.
I agree with Affordablecards. Being able to do that would mean we can actually start selling sets. That would indeed bring a whole new level of awesome!
Thanks for all the changes and making this a great site to use!
One feature I would like added under “manage inventory” is “modified long ago”. I prefer to re-price cards that have the longest period of time between price updates. Since the sorting of the cards was changed, I’m no longer able to do this.
That feature is already available. Click on ‘Recently Modified’ then click on ‘Last Page.’ This is a backwards way of doing the same thing you desire to do.
That’s what I do currently but I would like to update 500 items at a time on one page. Doing it the way that’s available, you have to keep reloading the page and it gets annoying when you have way less than 500 items on the last page.
Woo hoo! They added “Modified Long Ago” to “Manage Inventory”!
Like I said, I’m very impressed with the way that COMC is responsive to its users.
Congrats COMC, your improvements are astonishing for our wonderful world of cards. Working in an IT environment for the past 10 years, i can understand the advantages and disadvantages to adding features that would make search many less steps.
I look forward to the day that we can sell cards in segments as mentioned above. It appears that as the site evolves and the functionality is quicker and easier for sellers to group by class, we will see the dynamic advantages. The day may come that I can sell a brand, issue, player or team in my “on sale” area that would be separate from my tougher issues or NMMT vintage cards that usually sell for closer to book price.
Keep up the great work!!!
Great job having only been a Seller for a bit over 3 months i am very pleased with the site and your service. The one thing I would like to see is an area on the site where people could put up wantlists for cards not alreay on the site to give sellers an idea of what people are looking for..
Congratulations, again!
If you want to encourage people to send in higher dollar cards, you might consider a listing sale to that effect. For example, it might be 10 cents for any card which books for $5 or more, and no surcharge for condition notes.
You might also get more activity on low value cards if the bulk editor didn’t have a minimum of 90% off guide / 25 cents per card. Suppose someone were to bulk edit all of their cards to 95% off guide or 5 cents per card. They’d be snapped up in a second. Maybe those restrictions were necessary when there were only a few dozen people on the site, but they really aren’t necessary now. Assuming that you make some profit from posting fees and shipping fees, you’d still be making profit off those cards.
The problem with the restrictions is that it makes it nearly impossible to undo the price changes. Suppose that a seller, instead of having a 50% off sale, decided to simply drop all of their prices by 50% and then raise them back up again after the sale. A card priced at 25 cents would be repriced at 25 cents. A card priced at 40 cents would be repriced at 25 cents. A card priced at 50 cents would be repriced at 25 cents. Now, when the sale is over, the seller doubles all the asking prices. The card that was 25 cents is now 50 cents. The card that was 40 cents is now 50 cents. The card that was 50 cents is back to 50 cents.
I’m very excited about the move to Amazon, and I’ll be submitting a lot more cards that I wouldn’t have submitted to COMC in the past. Once you’re comfortable with your Amazon sideline, you might consider a similar move to eBay. For $300 per month you could get an account which could list 30 day fixed price listings for 3 cents per. COMC users could specify which cards they’d like to be cross-posted to eBay. You could charge them 5 cents or 10 cents per card per month for this and make a small profit just from the posting. The cards could be listed to eBay at a fixed price with no best offer. If they sell on eBay, you could treat it as with Amazon, an offer on COMC for 20% off the asking price, which would be immediately accepted. The only other snag would be that eBay won’t allow your images to have the name of the website on them, so you’d have to cover the COMC watermark with some other graphic – maybe a solid black line with “Check Out Our Other eBay Listings” on it or something.
What’s encouraging about moves like this is that it brings money from outside the system. There are other off-eBay venues that you could do similar things with as well.
BTW, “CheckOutMyFurniture” sounds awesome, but if you’re thinking of branching out, you might consider either getting into vintage postcards or professionally graded coins.
Wow, wow, wow…could you imagine if COMC had a user account for all sellers on Ebay. Of course the options would be very well defined as stated in the excellent post above. I can see several advantages, like “sell only” card check box to list only the higher dollar value cards from your account. COMC would have a killer account with a potential 1000+ seller army. If thought out and a well prepared financial feasibility study was done, we can all still make this lucrative. Aside from just selling cards on ebay, how about the recognition of the ebayers that have not been to the COMC web site. Endless advantages if done right. Jerry at AZpleasantville.
What would be nice would be to list as a fixed price listing all of a single card. I wouldn’t want to pay three cents each for all of my cards, but if I could share the cost with other sellers who have the same card, that would be nice. If only cards that didn’t have condition notes were allowed to be on eBay, then it would reduce the number of eBay Buyer Protection claims that could open up for the item not being as described. (Really you would only be dealing with centering disputes.)
For example, http://www.checkoutmycards.com/Cards/Baseball/2006/Topps_Rookie_of_the_Week/13/Ichiro_Suzuki_01/3009716 has 117 cards at last check. This could be a single listing for all of the 117 cards that were from sellers that were opted in. The list price would be the highest sale price from an opted-in seller. If a buyer made an offer, the highest-priced card on COMC that was less than the offer amount could sell the card. This would keep jerks like me from undercutting everybody.
100% agree as the condition notes fee is the one thing I don’t agree with on this site and prevents us from sending in more vintage. I have seen cards with creases/corner wear with no mention and some with. There is no consistency and to charge sellers extra for something that is a benefit to buyers…. guys you do 99% right here… that one fee can only be called a cash grab.
They didn’t used to have condition notes, and then buyers complained because they didn’t look at the scan carefully enough. Generally, the smaller the card number, the more likely there won’t be a condition note. I don’t like the charge, but because most of the fees here are based on labor (charging to remove from top loaders, charging per additional card for shipping, etc.), I understand why they do it. It’s a business decision.
i do agree with the ability to put cards into smaller port. It doesn’t seem that hard to do program wise. it can be done by creating sub-accounts (temporary accounts tied to original account) where a person can transfer cards into it. Then the sub account can then by transferred into the buyer.
I agree with Affordable cards that being able to sell sets as a whole instead of individual cards.Foe me that would reduce some of the current issues within selling on the site.
I would hardly need to sell on eBay at all if I could sell sets here. I’d also like to see it dynamically determine a set price by taking the cheapest of each of the cards in a set and then paying out the individual owners if someone were to buy the set. It’d be no different than if the buyer put the individual cards into his cart and bought them all at once.