Note – This week we are writing a series of blog posts covering several topics. When assessing the large volume of information that we want to communicate, it made sense not to simply pour it into one extremely large post, but to separate it out into bite-size chunks. Please consider each section in light of the others, and not as an independent post. The subjects we’ll be covering are:

1/5 – The Big Picture
2/5 – Design Goals for COMC.com
3/5 – Beta Testing New Markets
4/5 – How to Flip on COMC.com
5/5 – 5th Anniversary Special + Ad Campaign

4/5 – How to Flip on COMC.com

This is a post that we know a lot of people have been eagerly anticipating.

For every 1 person that uses the site to flip cards, there are more than 20 people that use the site exclusively for buying. So our challenge is to make the site more friendly to the buyers while still meeting the needs of our beloved flippers. The most common reason why shopping carts get abandoned is because users are surprised by added shipping costs. This is also one of our most common customer service questions. People simply forget to factor in shipping.

Integrating the shipping cost into the total item cost addresses this issue by streamlining the buying process… but we also want to support sellers who want to resell cards. Many sellers want to flip without taking on the additional overhead of paying for shipping that they do not intend to ever use. We will enable this by offering two user modes on the site.

Mode 1: Free Shipping Mode
This will be the mode for any guest visitors that are not logged into the site as well as for any new accounts created on COMC.com. The website won’t actually use the phrase “Free Shipping Mode” anywhere. That is just a name we are using to call this mode for the purposes of this blog. In Free Shipping Mode users will see the cost of shipping bundled into the listed price of items. Any items they buy will be “free” to ship in the sense that they have already paid the per-item pick+pack fee when they bought the item. They can therefore ship an unlimited number of items in their inventory or shopping cart for a flat $2.99, or they can use our new local pickup option to get the items for FREE.

Over the next year we will be adding more local pickup locations all over the US and Canada. We will introduce this in more detail in future posts.

Mode 2: Advanced Selling Mode
Once you are signed in to COMC.com there will be an option under My Profile & Options to switch into Advanced Selling Mode. In this mode you will not see bundled shipping or be charged shipping when you buy a card. You will however be responsible for the shipping cost of any item you decide to have shipped. You won’t be expected to pay the shipping in advance for instant purchases, offers, or portfolio purchases.

All account holders will have access to both modes and may switch freely between them to find the site experience that works best for them. Users in these two modes will be able to interact with each other effortlessly. Buyers in Free Shipping Mode will always see items at the cost it will take to get them in hand, yet they can still flip cards and make offers. Users in Advanced Selling Mode will be able to buy large volumes of cards without unnecessary overhead. They can reprice them to whatever they like, but will still have the option to have the items sent to them whenever they choose to pay the shipping cost.

Examples
Here are four brief examples of how these two modes interact.

1) A Consigner sells to a Guest buyer on the site.

2) A Consigner sells to a buyer in Advanced Seller Mode, who flips the card to a Guest buyer.

3) A Consigner sells to a buyer in Free Shipping Mode who flips the card to a Guest buyer.

4) A Consigner sells to a buyer in Free Shipping Mode… who flips it to a buyer in Advanced Selling Mode… who flips it to a Guest buyer.

Setting Asking Prices
We will post examples of how this will work, but the short explanation is that you will have two boxes where you can either control the price you want for an item or the price that will be visible to most buyers. When you edit one of the boxes the other one will automatically update so that you don’t have to do any mental gymnastics to set competitive prices or to make sure you are making a profit.

Making Offers
Another question a lot of people have is regarding how offers will work on COMC.com. The two-mode system actually simplifies things for each user. Buyers in Free Shipping Mode and in Advanced Seller mode will both be able to freely make offers, but each mode is tailored more to what different users value about the process.

A user in Free Shipping mode can simply make an offer without any math. “Will you take this price for the item, delivered?” The site does all the calculations and presents the appropriate offer to the seller: “Will you take this price for the item?” Sellers can still negotiate and counteroffer just like always, and will never be expected to subsidize the shipping costs.

Example:
– A card is priced at $5, and the seller’s minimum offer is set to 60%.
– A buyer sees the item listed at $5.25, and tries to make an offer of $3 “delivered”.
– The buyer is automatically informed that this offer is too low, and that the minimum offer is $3.25 (calculated as 60% of $5.00, plus $0.25 shipping; even through the “make an offer” feature the seller is not expected or required to contribute anything to the shipping cost).
– The buyer makes a new offer of $3.25 “delivered”.
– The seller receives an offer of $3.00 for their card (the other $0.25 will go towards shipping the item if the offer is accepted). If the seller likes this price they can accept. If they don’t they can reject or counter and continue the negotiation.
– Counteroffers will automatically respect the buyers mode without the seller needing to know anything about the buyers preferences.

A user in Advanced Selling Mode has an experience geared towards making many offers, purchasing ports, and flipping cards. Advanced Seller Mode users do not see any bundled shipping costs and so can make effective calculations very easily.

Example:
– A card is priced at $5, and the seller’s minimum offer is set to 60%.
– A buyer in Advanced Selling Mode sees the item listed at $5 and tries to make a $2.50 offer with no shipping.
– The buyer is automatically informed that this offer is too low, and that the minimum offer is $3.00 (calculated as 60% of $5.00).
– The buyer makes a new offer of $3.00
– The seller receives an offer of $3.00. The seller is never expected to subsidize shipping in either case, and the buyer in Advanced Selling Mode doesn’t need to pay for shipping that they don’t intend to ever use.

COMC is an amazing and wholly unique platform for flipping items. Some have suggested we decrease certain fees and add a transaction fee every time an item changes hands, but we really feel that such a fee would punish something very special that we’ve created here. We love flippers, and we are very proud to be a site that supports flipping so effortlessly.

Note – This week we are writing a series of blog posts covering several topics.  When assessing the large volume of information that we want to communicate, it made sense not to simply pour it into one extremely large post, but to separate it out into bite-size chunks.  Please consider each section in light of the others, and not as an independent post.  The subjects we’ll be covering are:

1/5 – The Big Picture
2/5 – Design Goals for COMC.com
3/5 – Beta Testing New Markets
4/5 – How to Flip on COMC.com
5/5 – 5th Anniversary Special + Ad Campaign

3/5 – Beta Testing New Markets

As alluded to in previous posts, we are going to start beta testing consignment of much more than just trading cards.

Over the next year we will be launching many new categories of collectibles on COMC.com. However, you can get a jump start and be the first to have items listed in these new categories.

Simply submit anything on the following list and we will only charge $0.50 per item for processing. There will be a $5 minimum per submission, so we recommend sending 10 or more items. It may take up to a year for us to process the items, but you will not be charged for processing until the items are deposited in your account for pricing.

You can send us the following items:

• Factory sealed complete sets
  • Factory seal must be intact
• Autographed 8×10′s
  • Must be authenticated by PSA/DNA, JSA, UDA, TRISTAR, Just Minors, ONYX, Panini Authentic or Steiner Sports
  • For other forms of authentication, contact us before sending
• Ticket stubs
• Programs from sporting events
• Sports related price guides
  • E.g. Beckett, SCD, Tuff Stuff
• Sports magazines
  • E.g. Sports Illustrated, SI for Kids
  • Nothing with a shipping label on it – retail copies only
  • No swimsuit issues or anything risqué
• Comic books
  • Nothing that requires parental advisory
  • Nothing with a shipping label on it – retail copies only
  • Nothing with explicit content
• Coins
  • No bulk precious metal coins… yet.
  • We are starting with coins that have numismatic/collectible value, rather than precious metal value.
• Paper money
• Tokens
  • E.g. collectable subway tokens

We do not 100% guarantee that we will be able to support every one of these collectibles, but this will allow us to gauge interest and determine processing difficulty and storage requirements.  Any items from collectible categories which we conclude that we cannot support will be returned at our expense and the processing fees will not be charged.

If you have other flat collectibles that are not on the list that you would like to consign with us, please call us before sending the items. We expect to eventually branch out into even more diverse categories, but we’d like to focus our efforts on relatively small, flat items for now.

Storage fees for all categories will start at $0.01/item per month once the items have been live on the site for 90 days, but we may need to increase that for large items like magazines or complete sets.

Hand Collated Sets & Lots
At first we will only support consignment of factory sealed sets. Please do not send us anything that is hand collated yet. We expect to eventually experiment with hand collated sets, partial sets, team lots, player lots, etc. However, that will not be open the the public until after we figure out how much to charge for it. We anticipate that it will be more expensive to verify the accuracy of a complete set than it is to simply take a picture or scan of a factory sealed set.

Per-Item S&H
The per-item S&H will try to approximate our real costs (e.g. labor to pick & pack, supplies, postage), and it may go up or down over time as we improve our processes or the USPS or other shipping services adjust their prices. The complexity of varying shipping fees with so many different size collectibles is a large reason for merging the per-item shipping with the seller’s asking price and having a single price for the buyer. We don’t want to have a super long fees page that buyers need to see to figure out what to set aside for shipping. 

Just like with cards, customers will be able to flip items, make offers, and combine multiple purchases of all different categories into a single shipment.

Note – This week we are writing a series of blog posts covering several topics.  When assessing the large volume of information that we want to communicate, it made sense not to simply pour it into one extremely large post, but to separate it out into bite-size chunks.  Please consider each section in light of the others, and not as an independent post.  The subjects we’ll be covering are:

1/5 – The Big Picture
2/5 – Design Goals for COMC.com
3/5 – Beta Testing New Markets
4/5 – How to Flip on COMC.com
5/5 – 5th Anniversary Special + Ad Campaign

2/5 – Design Goals for COMC.com

Here are some principles that we are using to guide the design of COMC.

Diversification
Check Out My Cards is very specialized, and that is great. We love that and don’t want to lose its appeal. However, we need to make sure that we have a solid foundation that will not be susceptible to things like lockouts. Last year we got very lucky. If both the NBA and NFL had been locked out, that would have significantly impacted our business. When the MLB and NHL went through their lockouts many card shops went out of business. Since you are counting on us to be here in the future, we need to protect your investment with a stable foundation. To do this, we will be gradually and carefully expanding into new markets so that a shift in any one market will not rock our foundation.

Network Effect
We have seen that our service has a “network effect.” Similar to facebook, twitter, youtube, and other websites that have gone viral, the more people that use our service, the better it is for everyone. The more sellers & the more content for sale, the more buyers will find the site, the more sales will be made… Also the more inventory for sale means that there are more things the sellers will want to buy so that they won’t have to worry about the 20% cash-out fee.

To attract more sellers and more content, we are going to expand our service to new markets. We will start with closely related collectibles, but you can speculate about directions we might head in the future. For example, imagine a day when you can use the store credit earned from selling trading cards to buy… clothes for your newborn. (Very long term example, but there is currently a very successful company doing consignment of baby clothes.)

Psychology of Free
This is often not intuitive, but most people are actually willing to pay significantly more for an item if they get “free shipping.” Evidence for this can be seen by Amazon’s efforts to offer free shipping. You can see this in nearly every successful shopping website today. This is the trend of the future. Amazon’s Prime service appears free (after paying the $80/year membership fee), but Amazon’s fulfillment service actually charges the seller $1 per order plus $1 per item to pick & pack, plus they charge the seller a shipping fee per pound, and a storage fee. Those fees are then reflected in the seller’s markup, but they appear to the buyer as “Free Shipping.” With this strategy, Amazon is by far the most successful shopping website on the planet.

We are going to experiment with our own way of achieving “Free Shipping.” Buyers want to know how much it will cost to get the product in hand. They don’t want to be surprised by extra shipping fees or confused by how to keep those fees to a minimum. We believe that giving buyers “Free Shipping” will generate both increased sales and increased profit margins for our sellers. As such, sellers want this too. Now the challenge is figuring out a way to do this without making it a burden on the sellers. Don’t worry, I won’t forget about flippers. You are near and dear to my heart. That was one of the main reasons why I built this site. We have a plan for people that are only intending to relist items to get them without fronting the shipping costs.

Research on the market reaction to free shipping has been consistent. UPS commissioned a study on buy decisions.  When asked the question, “Thinking of the last time you put items into your shopping cart but did not finish the online purchase, which of the following best describes why you did not complete the transaction?” the most common response was “Shipping and handling costs were too high.”  There’s a lot of other relevant comments in the UPS study on strategies for free shipping.

The Motley Fool studied the psychological impact of “Free” outlined in Duke professor Dan Ariely ‘s book Predictably Irrational, where in experiments people reliably chose “free” options that were demonstrably not as good a deal.

There’s a mountain of research that concludes that buyers respond to the idea of “free.”  On COMC.com we will have a “Free Local-Pickup” option that will be available for people in the Seattle area, and we will be gradually adding more “Free Pickup Locations” throughout the US and Canada. More details about this program will be released over the coming months. For the people that want the items delivered to their home, they will have an option to pay a flat $2.99, and eventually we might add an Amazon Prime style membership where for something like $80/year we give unlimited free shipping.

Still not convinced?

We invite everyone to see this in action before settling your opinion.  You will get a chance to try it before you make any decision.  Check Out My Cards and COMC.com will be running in parallel, so everyone will be able to see both side by side.  The storage fee threshold is about to become a lot more generous, allowing your card prices and profit margins to increase.  Give it a try before you decide.

We will continue listening to feedback and adapting as we go. We have already rolled up a bunch of feedback into design changes this week. For example a lot of the frustration appears to be around how flipping might work. Well, have a really cool way to address that. We will talk more about that in post 4, and you will be able to play with it in about a week.

Note – This week we are writing a series of blog posts covering several topics.  When assessing the large volume of information that we want to communicate, it made sense not to simply pour it into one extremely large post, but to separate it out into bite-size chunks.  Please consider each section in light of the others, and not as an independent post.  The subjects we’ll be covering are:

1/5 – The Big Picture
2/5 – Design Goals for COMC.com
3/5 – Beta Testing New Markets
4/5 – How to Flip on COMC.com
5/5 – 5th Anniversary Special + Ad Campaign

1/5 – The Big Picture

Hello, this is Tim.  I apologize for not giving more context and details in previous posts. I have felt that if I gave you the full story it would be a 100-200 page blog post of all the changes you will see over the next year, and I don’t know how productive that will be. So I have decided to give you the details in a sequence of posts.

The first thing I want to say is that we are not planning to make any significant changes to Check Out My Cards right away. COMC.com will be a new site, and it will be the place where we experiment for now.

Starting on August 1st, COMC.com will be a new website and will no longer redirect to Check Out My Cards as it does currently. All of the items listed on Check Out My Cards will also be simultaneously listed on COMC.com, but COMC.com will also be slowly introducing additional items such as comics, coins, magazines, 8×10′s and other things that are not appropriate for Check Out My Cards. Your same username and password will work on both sites, and a sale on either site will remove the item from both sites instantly.  You will be able to price cards, field offers, flip cards, buy ports, and so on using either site interchangeably, but COMC.com is where we’ll be focusing our development effort and where we’ll be rolling out new features such as enhanced searching and wantlists.  We’re doing it this way because we don’t want to force anyone into a change.  We’re confident the new features and upgrades to COMC.com will speak for themselves.

Thanks to Sam Jin, our full-time in-house designer, for coming up with the new COMC logo. He is also working on a ton of other design projects that look great! You will see much more soon.

Motivations behind changing the rules for COMC.com
Again I want to apologize for not making our motivations and intentions clearer in previous posts. I wrote the Preparing for Growth post just before going to a friend’s funeral, so my mind wasn’t as focused as usual. Hopefully this will help make it clearer why we want to do things differently from the way Check Out My Cards works.

First off, we aren’t doing this business for the money. Money is a necessary part of keeping this going, but it isn’t our motivation. We do this because we are passionate about our hobbies and because we believe we can make a difference that helps others. Our unique consignment service is changing the way people collect, and we want to help as many people as possible enjoy their hobbies. Each of our 40+ employees is worth more than we can afford to pay them, but they are dedicated, hard workers because they know they are a part of something special.

Since our core motivation is to make our consignment service accessible to as many collectors as possible, how do we accomplish this?

Here are some of the facts that I see.
– 95% of paying customers exclusively buy
– 70% of dollars we are paid come from customers that exclusively buy
– 90% of dollars we are paid come from customers that buy more than they sell
(Note: these figures are not referring to site revenue, simply the breakdown of site transactions)

Since 95% of the users only buy and 70-90% of the funds we are paid are exclusively for buying, it seems like our best chance of making the service more successful is by making the site appeal to more buyers.

However… as a consignment service, our success is also directly linked to the success of our sellers. If they are not successful, they won’t give us anything to sell. To help them be successful, we need to give them good profit margins and a good sales volume. To do that we need to attract buyers and make it easy for them to make the buy decision. If we don’t generate enough buy decisions, sellers will not be successful, and we will not be successful.

Ultimately we need to balance attracting buyers, keeping sellers successful, and also maintaining a viable business model. COMC.com is our platform for achieving these goals.