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.
I’ll start the discussion by saying I do not see how raising fees for sellers is of any benefit to buyers.
But I need an explaination for this “70% of dollars we are paid come from customers that exclusively buy”
How can this be? Buyers do not pay anything here directly to COMC….other than the insane $1 you are charging them to get item specifics on condition of cards.
How are buyers paying you? Or are you including the thousands of cards that your company owns that are on this site?
This blog post has no mention of fees. That is a whole separate discussion I would like to reserve for posts dedicated to the fee details.
– 70% of the payment funds the site receives are from buyers that have never tried to sell anything
– 20% of the payment funds are from accounts where users buy more than they sell
– 10% of the payment funds are from the sellers that primarily sell
That is a breakdown of the cash that flows into the website. It is not a breakdown of how people use store credit after it is within the website.
Fair enough. Tim…I may be critical…harsh even sometimes with my commentary. But I can assure you…I want to see this site not only do well..but blow the other sites out of the water (especially the BMP….yeah…we are a little bitter over here lol) The vision and the concept are great. We may not always agree with how you go about things…but if we are going to disagree it is our hope you prove us wrong and that this site continues to grow and thrive.
There is serious over simplification going on here. For example, the the 70% is best described as “not having decided to try to sell anything YET” Also, the quantity relationship of sellers to buyers belies the relative importance of each.
Also…to say you aren’t doing this for the money…are you guys a registered nonprofit?
I am not trying to be difficult. I think you guys do a great job at what you do. I think your customer service is second to none and with recent events aside, this site tends to be stable and working most of the time.
We did ship 40 vintage cards to you this morning in an experiment to see how many would trigger condition notes. We were planning on taking advantage of the $55 promotion however since Jeremy changed his statement to us regarding the timeline for coins being put on the site…we are going to hold back since we had planned on using sales money from those cards to buy coins.
We are going to keep a toe in the water here but we have serious concerns (as do several of your top sellers) about the direction this is heading. We spent over 6 years on the Beckett Marketplace listening to promises and di proposals that either never happened or sent the site into glitch chaos. So forgive us if our faith is not leading us to dive in head first. We are hopeful…wishful…but not as trusting as we used to be.
We are a for-profit, but our primary motivation isn’t money. I didn’t start this business because I thought I could make a bunch of money.
My motivation for all the effort we put into this site is to change the way people buy & sell online. I believe there is a fundamental flaw in the way online trade works today. It is too inefficient for people to list everything themselves and too risky for buyers to buy from all these little guys. We are pioneering online consignment, and there have been a lot of growth pains along the way.
I understand your apprehension. The more you get to know us the more you will understand that we are not like other companies.
Tim I hope so. I do believe your hearts and minds are in the right place and experience has already shown your customer service is at a standard that businesses of all types should aspire too. We aren’t going anywhere. The shipment of cards we put out today though small was a symbol that we want to see where this goes. As a full time retailer of cards, coins, stamps and comics, your vision for this site is exactly what we are looking for both on the buying and selling end.
Ok i understand you want to open the new site. But why push the fee hikes on us for that and the shipping fee up front? we already got hit with the fee for notes now because of Amazon. Most if not all of the buyers and sellers on the main site understand what they are getting by the picture. A condition note for edge wear on a 50 or 60 yr old card is a little much. I can understand on cards that are missing paper or have a crease that is not noticeable on the scan. bur some of the notes are just a little much. Also i know we all asked in the past but have not seen it brought up in a long time . what ever happened to the possible trade feature? I know a lot of us would like that and you could put a .10 to .15 fee for them ? I hope that the new site does great but please don’t hurt the site that started it all.
Thanks
Ernie
A quick note on the fee changes… We got rid of or significantly reduced a bunch of fees (e.g. batch fees, storage fees, graded cards…). The only way we can do this if we balance that out somewhere. I don’t anticipate that the fee changes will be a significant change in our bottom line. It is just fewer different fees. Any excess fees we are collecting get reinvested back in the business. You will learn more about our advertising campaign in a later post.
More than 50% of buyers already pay shipping at the time of purchase. On COMC.com we will just make it easier for them to see the final price without being confused by a separate shipping charge. This is the direction nearly all successful shopping sites are heading. We are just staying up with the times.
Yes, we will have a trade feature. Our time frame will depend on how soon we can get another good developer. We have a job opening for a full-time developer.
What successful shopping sites are selling thousands of items for under a dollar? Doing a quick check it appears roughly 60% of my sales are $1 and under. What cards will be effected the most by adding the shipping cost upfront? The answer is quite easy, cards priced $1 and under. It is pretty easy to see where I stand on adding shipping fees to the prices.
Using data from sites selling brand new items does not do anything for me. The only remotely comparable site is Amazon and we obviously know that they do not have free shipping or pricing with shipping added unless you BUY a Prime membership for their products only. The sport card industry does not have an infinite number of buyers, there are only going to be so many.
This is my concern as well. I wrote elsewhere that any card listed on this site under normal conditions will have to sell at 51 cents to turn a profit (25 cents listing…25 cents shipping 1 cent profit) oh but wait…you do have to include your shipping cost to get the cards to you which at least adds a penny or two.
So the only way to sell $1 cards in the 40 cent range is to do a port sale if you guys decide port sales are not subject to those fees…. But WAIT….
I buy a port….those cards….will they be then subject to that 25 cent fee to my buyers because they weren’t subject to that during the port sale? I might end up being stuck with cards that won’t sell because I had no way of knowing as the buyer of the port that the cards would be subject to the shipping fee.
So how will COMC handle the built in S/H fee for port sales…and for the people buying the port to flip?
You say:
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
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.
I agree. But I would like to understand why embedding a hidden shipping cost was chosen as the way to “appeal to more buyers”.
A rational repeat buyer should want to minimize shipping cost by batching items, something e-bay and other sites can’t offer. In your case a flat shipping cost (with tweaks to accomodate weight and ship time) will, over time, minimize your labor cost. So I agree with a flat shipping cost high enough to encourage batching (and repeated visits). That is the buyer behavior you should encourage.
I suspect you have determined the shipping cost required to cover your expenses (labor and materials) would make a flat shipping cost “too high” for most buyers. What that means is that you need to consider another way to generate revenue from operations other than “storage fees”.
I recommend a transaction fee any time a card changes hands with the fee charged to the seller. As a seller who basically “buys less than I sell”, I would much rather deal with a “one time transaction cost” and price my cards in accordance with the market value rather than dealing with an embedded shipping cost that with introduce complexity and market distortions to cards hosted on your site. You should want this also, you would gain revenues as long as volume grows, not caring if the item was purchased by a real buyer or a card flipper.
Our changes for shipping are not intended to increase revenue. They are literally only intended to make the site more appealing for buyers to pull out their wallets. A post later this week will highlight the research that has been done to show the advantages for not having a separate shipping fee.
These are the proposed fees:
Standard: $2.99, 3-5 days to package + USPS First Class Mail
Rapid: $4.99, 1 day to package + USPS First Class Mail
Priority: $7.99, 1 day to package + USPS Priority Mail
Express: $29.99, packaged same day + USPS Express Mail
As a buyer, I do want to add more items and “batch my purchases” based on this fee structure rather than the existing one and it encourages me to buy more.
I believe you when you say shipping charges are not intended to increase revenue. I understand that you can not continue to “ship at a loss” and remain viable. On the other side of the coin, shipping needs to be a “break even” operation where shipping fees offset the cost of labor and materials required to package and ship.
If all of the above is true, I do not understand the “business reason” for embedding a “by item” shipping cost into the price of a every card. Why not a transaction fee when a card changes hand?.
Tim,
Any chance of running another voucher offer like last year? Think it was $78 for 500 items in 5 weeks. Obviously, that would raise more immediate capital for your marketing and website development costs.
Thanks.
J
The voucher special we offered last year wasn’t intended as a way to raise capital. We just wanted to give people that really liked the old processing fee an opportunity to pre-pay for more.
I hadn’t really considered doing the same thing for the new fee changes because we are reducing the storage fees. With our current fees for 500 cards we make $103 up front + storage fees down the road. With the new fees we make $125 up front and a lot less storage fees down the road. We expect to net less from processing + storage fees over the lifetime of the average card with the new fees.
So you are admitting up front that cards in that price range will no longer sell… I think you are well aware that future submissions will have fewer cards that will not have storage fees as those cards will be hit the hardest by the addition of the shipping charges percentage wise.
Hi, cardsrus1.
I believe you are misunderstanding Tim’s math. He is not saying that any cards will or will not sell. He is pointing out a change to our revenue stream. Currently we earn $0.01/card/month for cards priced at over $0.25. Under the new model we earn $0.01/card/month for cards priced at over $0.75. If every card’s price on the site was unchanged, (so not counting the people adjusting prices slightly to take advantage of this new threshhold) this single adjustment would mean a net decrease in revenue. That has nothing to do with how well the cards under the threshhold do or do not sell. It simply means we will earn less overall in storage fees because more cards are now free to store.
Actually Jeremy I was simply pointing out the hypocrisy of the point that you guys are taking. You are pretending that these changes are to increase sales, yet you are trying to claim you will lose money in the long run because cards will not sell. And Tim’s example was for new cards being added, not old dead stock.
You are using some fuzzy math. Of course the buyers are the ones giving you guys the pure cash flow. Most of the sellers cash flow through you guys is with store credit received from those same buyers with the exception of the newer sellers.
Indeed, but I doubt they can pay the light bill with store credit 🙂
Bazinga
Actually you are wrong, they cannot use our store credit to pay the bills. It cannot be used until it is their money via fees. Luckily for us business’ cannot be run like our Governments.
cardsrus1, I believe that’s what he said. It’s not like these online poker sites that recently shut down for sticking their hand in the players cookie jars to have an abundance of cash flow.
I can’t pay mine either and more fees don’t help.
So, Tim, you guys are a company that pride yourselves on listening to your customers and adressing there concerns. You wrote a blog outlining some INCREDIBLY unpopular changes in regards to shipping fee changes, and you are telling us all now that your FINAL decision is to ignore all that was said and stick to your guns on adding a hidden shipping fee to not only all newly processed cards but also all previosuly existing cards?
Then, go the Netflix/Qwikster route?
Netflix is not a good business model.
We are going do experiment with doing things differently on COMC.com. CheckOutMyCards.com will stay virtually the same. We will study the numbers and listen to options. My gut tells me that people get this better once they can see the feature and play with it. I could be wrong, but I don’t see the danger in experimenting and letting people see the real numbers.
Hi Tim,
First of all, my condolences to the you and the family and friends of the person who passed away.
My two cents on the changes is as follows. The thing that has allowed your site to grow so fast is the simplicity of it. Comparing cards and prices, being able to buy, flip or ship has been effortless and fun which makes the site so appealing. Even though there is a cost in labor to do the shipping, the idea has been and should be that you make your margins on the 20% cash out of the high volume you are doing and not on shipping.
If you make this change to add shipping to cards the first time they are for sale, you will create two types of cards in your inventory. Those that are on the site and have been purchased and those that have not. I am assuming that buyers won’t know when looking at a particular card listing whether the price includes the shipping or not, only the sellers will know. This means that in order to compete with cards that shipping has already been paid on, we will have to drop our price by $.25 to be priced competitively. Therefore, the sellers are the ones absorbing this cost making listing cards here cost $.50.
I think this may be good for you at the beginning because nobody will be sending you cards that don’t sell over a certain threshold. Lets say $2. Sounds good right, you make $2 on a $10 sale (ultimately upon cash out), but only $.20 on a $1 sale. But you are missing the bigger picture. If people stop sending you volumes of cards and buyers can’t find the cheaper cards they want the activity on this site will slow down. Not to mention once people start getting frustrated or angry about the site, they will stop using it. I am sure you can tell that people already hate this change, myself included. You are basically telling people only send cards that COMC can make a nice profit on and don’t bother us with the smaller stuff. This really goes against the spirit of what this site has been about. I usually send in 500 cards at a time and the current box I am putting together, I have pulled out half the cards that I wouldn’t send under your new policy, and frankly I may not send the others either.
When I’ve been at my local card shop the last few days, I am already hearing from other hobbyists that you guys are screwing up what has been a great operation. Ill will and poor word of mouth is not what any company wants. These comments are coming from the people that introduced me to your site and told me how great and easy it was.
As a business person, you want your customers to be happy which means sometimes selling stuff at a lower profit so they keep higher margin stuff going to.
Please! Keep this site simple and fun. I am fine with the extra nickel on shipping, but adding the shipping in to the pricing on the cards is a horrible and confusing.
We have had the same discussions at my card shop and the 5 or 6 guys(2 are buyers only) are turned off and they tell a guy and he tells 2 more and the reputation can be spoiled fast….The one thing i always told people about comc was that they listen and are very fair and its getting harder to talk comc up.The added “hidden”shipping is a dealbreaker with those guys
Love the new logo. On my first cup cup of coffee ,so I’ll chime in once this really gets rolling 🙂
Thank you. I am glad you like the logo and no one’s dislike it so far. 🙂
Logo is good. 🙂
On a sidenote, is there anyway I could block user [edited] from sending me offers…guy just sent me a bunch of 50% offers on jerseys that I have priced under a buck…whenever I counter this guy, he just rejects…flat out annoying lowballer…
Just reject the offer or ignore it. Ignoring it will tie up his funds until he cancels or expires. Rejecting it will start the 3 strike process.
Yes, this would be a nice feature to have as part of your account settings, where a user could input users to auto reject offers from. That would be one way to avoid pesky offers of .50 on a card that is already priced $1 and oh by the way, is already 90% off book and the lowest price on the site.
I think the per item hidden shipping cost is going to do a lot more harm than good. I think adding the $.25 to the processing fees would be more beneficial. The fee has to be there somewhere, so just add everything up front and offer free shipping on all orders of all sizes. This would attract the buyers, it would also eliminate the confusion on hidden charges. This way people are not held hostage for the cards they have already sent in or purchased here. That is my biggest complaint. If all of these fees were up front and clear it would work out so much better. Not only that, but the increase in buyers from the free shipping would probably make this site grow beyond belief.
Ok so i see that your minds are made up on the .25 shipping fee up front. I can already see this as a problem for flippers and just for the normal buyer. You seem to think not but i can tell you it will hurt sales not help. I do understand the fee hikes but don’t agree with them . You have gotten so much free advertising from the loyal buyers and sellers here from us just talking up the site . I can see people now bashing it due to some of these changes i won’t bash since i still like it but i hope at the nationals people that talk with you can help change your mind or get a better grasp on why this change is a must for the site. I can say ever since Amazon got involved issues started to come up and fee’s jumped. I hope the trade feature can get done soon i think that would bring a bunch of extra money as well.
I am not saying to pay the shipping fee upfront when you buy. I am saying pay it at processing. We are going to have to pay it either way, but that way the costs are not hidden so no one can be upset with the changes. If someone was not in agreement with the new processing fee they could just not send their cards in. With the proposed change, I have not option but to have that $.25 shipping fee added to my prices. I understand their research telling them that the hidden shipping fees attract more buyers. It is common sense. Same thing when trying to buy a car. If someone has a car listed for $10,000 and you negotiate down to $8,000 you feel like you have gotten a deal. If someone has the same car listed for $8,000 and refuses to lower it by even a penny you do not feel like you got the same deal. It is all about how the human brain works. So again, with that being said, the hidden shipping fee is going to hurt the site more than it will help if it is done in the proposed manner. Small value hard to find cards will be eliminated from the site because people will not see the value there. All you have to do is set your processing fee to $.50 or $.75 or whatever you feel is needed. Then leave it at that with no other hidden fees anywhere. Not for the buyer, and not for the seller. I see it as a win-win. No confusion and mind games.
a 50 cent processing fee will all but eliminate low end inserts from this site. Speaking only for us we won’t pay 25 cents (20 was our cap). 50 cents would put us on a different planet. What would attract more buyers is putting a reasonable cap on shipping. I know the cost of labor in packing and pulling cards. When we had 400,000 unique items on Beckett and got one of those orders for 260 cards in 140 different boxes it sure was a pain. But we could not get away with charging $65 for shipping.
In FACT we (and many other dealers on that site) offered free shipping on orders over $50…BUT we did not inflate prices on cards at the time of listing to “cover it”. Built in 25 cents or not buyers will simply pay what they want to pay for their cards. When we buy here we know we are getting taken to the cleaners on shipping so we calculate that into our decision to purchase. So what this will do is inflate the numbers up front and cause buyers to offer accordingly
The difference of course is that we owned the cards and made some money on the sale, not just the service. But the buying public doesn’t care. Nor do they care about “If I had gone to scambay and bought these 260 cards from 120 different dealers my shipping would have been X dollars” The fact is they are coming from one website
It is our opinion that the fees (all of them) as they currently stand are/should be enough….or at least as much as we are willing to pay for the service. If the service is not working under the current fee structure the solution should be changing how they do things on their end… not us having more fees pushed on us. That is why once the listing fee increase goes live we won’t send in more cards.
NO Premium1981 NO !!! I don’t think any of us want to pay an extra 125.00 on a 500 card order up front. I think they could do some sort of a monthly fee very small fee of course. But something to make the money on handling they desire. They are losing some of the storage fee so it seems to me the shipping fee is the way they are thinking of fixing that . i understand they changed some fee’s etc . But did they change the .95 fee on graded cards? they are making a killing off those. But again upfront charge is not something any of us like.
This is still the only site on the internet that can get away with charging $25 shipping and handling to ship 100 cards…..
That is why the fees should be added to the processing. Because that is what it is. It isn’t shipping fees, it is processing and handling fees.
If folks are willing to pay 50 cents to have their cards listed here I am sure COMC will be happy to know that.
You are missing the point. Those fees are going to be paid anyway. All I am saying is be upfront about it. Do not have 4 different fees in 4 different places. Have 1 fee in 1 place.
I guess that is the ultimate question…
WILL those fees be paid (will enough sellers accept them)?
Just so I am clear…you as a seller are willing to basically pay for the shipping for your buyer? By paying the 50 cents yourself up front yourself and 25 cents of it going to shipping that is what you are doing. If so…you are a better person than we are here. For the sake of the future of COMC I hope more than I think will feel as you do. Our line in the sand is at 20 cents and the buyer pays the freight.
To answer your question “yes and no” to whether I would pay $.50 processing up front. I would pay it, but only for certain cards. I would just stop sending in and buying other cards. Just like I am going to have to do anyway if/when these changes happen. They are looking at hard numbers (as shown above), but what they are not calculating is the butterfly effect. Sure there are more buyers than sellers. Start adding extra onto sellers asking prices and it will do multiple things. It will inflate prices, eliminate harder to find lower end cards, cause sellers to leave, etc, etc. Overall, the concept of helping the buyers is what will come full circle and actually hurt the buyer. Player collectors have a hard time finding lower end inserts from 10 years ago. They can find those here. Change the shipping structure and they can’t anymore. You are making it sound like I am in favor of these changes. I am as opposed as anyone here. What I did was offer a solution instead of just complaining. It may not be the right solution, but it would be an option.
Premium fair enough. Hopefully Tim and the guys will see the light here and adjust… if not now…then after they try this experiment.
TAS, it’s the only site on the internet that can put 100 certain cards together in one lot you want o purchase and ship them to you. Imagine how much it would cost you to buy those 100 individual cards from buyers on Ebay and pay shipping for each one. COMC just needs to rename “shipping fee” to something else because it’s more than that.
That is not true. The Beckett Marketplace has many dealers who can do that at the drop of a hat.
Well…at least they can when the site works properly. 50-100 card orders were a daily occurance for us and we only a mid size dealer there.
It has to cost them a bit in labor to have someone pick through muliple ports to pull individual cards (print, pack, label etc). I have no idea what kind of system they have set up ,but it can’t be that quick. Thepit.com charges .35 cent per card, 2% transaction fees, and base shipping charge to pull and ship. They are the only other company that has some similarties. COMC is just a whole different monster. How does Burbank handle it? I know they move quite a bit.
And I am not into “imagining” as I addressed in an other thread I know full well the costs of pulling and packing orders. The fact is the items are coming from one place.
And if COMC wants to charge $25 “handling/processing” at the time of shipping to someone who wants them delivered then people can build that cost into their buying decision.
Trying to integrate it into the first time the card is purchased….
Wow I typed a long response to your question regarding “B-S” but something tripped the censor and it didnt post. Don’t have time to retype.
Short answer is…he doesn’t like us and we don’t like him so you’ll have to ask him. Our orders averaged 27 cards on that site…some single card and many many 100 or more. We know labor costs. As a buyer I calculate the shipping fee into any buying decision made here. I think it is high but it is easy to figure into the cost. As a seller I don’t see many here happy about their newly added listings having the 25 cents added to it.
Tim
So if I go to comc.com I will c my cards with .25 extra on them. Is this correct. One more question I have a domain name that connects me to your website. Cardko.net. What site will this go 2. Thanks
One more thing to add if COMC.com is in fact a new website. I did not buy or send my cards to that site. So I would ask that my cards not be listed on that site. No more then I would want my cards I sent to checkoutmycards.com put on Ebay. If this is not possible I would like you to send my cards to me free of charge, for breaking consinment contract. It is illegal at least in WI to change companies without first telling the customer. On top of that if YOUR business decisions are risking and un warrented the customer should have a opertunity to leave this bussiness. I think you have a great bussiness as it is. If you guys want to go down in flames thats fine, but I refuse to follow this bussiness model. This is nothing personal I am only watching out for myself. Thank You
Cardko,i don’t think there is any “negative” in having your cards listed on the second site. Worst case is that none sell through there.
You’d really ought to jump to 4/5 since that is 95%+ of the concern about these changes. Most of us don’t care too much about COMC since we don’t sell other things. We just see you as building it on our backs, and BTW, no one believes you aren’t in this for the money, only a fool would run a business as a charity.
Hey, Cousin Jimmy, ask me how I know you’ve never met Tim Getsch in person? The man is a visionary who sees forests, not trees. If he keeps doing what he does, the profits will come, but what he does is about his passions for the hobby and for helping people have more fun in our hobby. If he were about profits, he’d have ditched this project long ago.
Amazon orders call so y’all get a break from me lol. I can’t wait to read this blog in a few hours. Keep the thoughts coming everyone… Make them concise and for Pete sake keep it civil. Tim and the crew are reading and the more sane the postings are they more likely they are to respond.
So if I would buy 500 common cards for the local Card shop you are going to charge me $125 to ship them? WOW! Then tell me this why can I ship you 1200+ cards for around $16 in a Large Flat Rate Box? I will not be buying anymore from this site.
You gotta remember they are pulling cards from tons of different ports. Not just from one box. It’s a lot of work. I don’t agree with the upfront shipping and they can possibly find a better solution. But if thats what they plan on doing then thats hurts many of us. But they will see this and hopefully fix this.
It looks like (and someone from COMC can correct me) that each card is assigned a number and the cards are kept in that type of order. I can’t believe everytime a card changes hands they run around moving it from section to section.
They are placed by batch number and then the individual item number. There are also over 4.5 million cards for them to go through, likely stored in 9 pocket pages.
Correct they do have a batch number . But they have to still keep them put by seller etc. or they would have a big issue. So they still have to go to seller A’s section and pull said card from page whatever. Then put into the shipping pile so they don’t just have one big pile. But maybe someone can confirm this or how they do this?
I don’t think they organize them by seller. I think it is strictly based on card number (8,000,000 should hit any day now).
I have never had a batch with consecutive item numbers, they have to be stored by batch number first and foremost. They could do wonders on the ENTIRE shipping debate by simply showing everyone how they are stored and pulled. But that would be to easy of a solution…
It probably depends on the order of the cards when you price them. Mine are always in numerical order if I want them to be, provided I haven’t submitted different stuff, like graded cards.
Do they sort by batch? Sure, they could. But within a batch all cards are consecutively numbered, so in essence it would be the same thing.
I can assure you that you are 100% incorrect as far as my batch’s are concerned. They are most definitely not consecutive numbers. My last batch ranges from at least 7543315 to 7516943. If I were to send in commons then it is possible to get a large grouping that is consecutive.
I think this would be a worse case scenario, assuming that none of the 500 cards you bought had ever changed hands and had the .25 tacked on to it already, then if you bought those cards, you would be paying $125 (500 cards * .25) in “shipping” + whatever the cards cost. Since you wouldn’t know this when you buy the cards. Potentially you could scoop up 500 cards that a seller is taking a bath on and you buy them for .20 each (someone else already paid the shipping fee), so in this case, you would simply be paying: Standard: $2.99 shipping.
Apples and oranges, on comc they are basically 500 cards you specfically want or need. Not 500 random cards.
plus the local card shop is prolly not as organized or as well stocked, also they do not deliver is to your door. Better not show up at the store in your underwear. But feel free to browse comc in your underwear. (just leave cam off lol)
it sounds like the only way to avoid the new changes is to not have your cards listed on the new site. You have a legal right to demand that. Also I was in contact with the BBB. They will be investigating these changes for any laws that are being broken. I am a rather small dealer on here so I am willing to take the risk of being ban from the site, to stick up for the card dealers that can’t afford to be. Very sorry to checkoutmycards.com for puting the heat on you guys. I really do like your service but I will not sit here and watch you destroy manys way of life. Enough is enough stop playing games with the bread on the table and make a decision.
Really Cardko they are telling us what is going to happen with plenty of notice. Also all sellers here can stop selling here at any time. I still think this site will work and i will give them the time to figure out what the plans are. Don’t get all bent out of shape over this .
ernieren please try to picture us as stock holders in bussiness. Bussiness decisions are being made by one man right now. Yes I am bent out of shape with good reason. There is no need to ponder this decsion, make your decsion and stand by it. It’s really getting old to sit and watch blog post to see whats going on. The BBB seems to agree that blog posting are not offical. Certified mail is acceptable.
Futhermore, If risks are to be taken, as you guys have stated in other blogs. Leave my cards and money out of your risking bussiness. I came to this site because it was a safe place to sell and buy cards as you so boldly advertise.
You have lost me. it’s a mirror site that will run exactly the same for your cards. why are you being the way you are. just call them up or place all your cards for shipping back to you. Getting the BBB involved over this will just make things worse. They are BBB accredited A+ if I remember correctly (don’t hold me to that as I didn’t actually look it up) Tas, you and a few others just need to take a breath and hold on for a bit. The changes are still a few weeks to months away. I for one and sick of hearing about beckett marketplace. I made one purchase eons ago there. I dont think I know of one other person that has made a purchase there. Maybe there is business, but I dont buy it. The fees alone scared me and that was as a buyer. I was able to sell a little on their old trading boards. I have not found a better alternative to ebay until now. Sportlots gets my common singles as they do not belong here. Again I said before I can’t get 0.18 cents there, but the same cards are listed on comc for 0.25 and higher and there are also 100 of them. Those cards have no business (unless they are vintage) on comc. Someone TAS?, was sending folks emails about other places to go, those who want to jump off the bridge can do it. I have tried out at least 7-10 alternatives and have dropped all of them. I have made more sales through the amazon mirror this month than any other month combinded since it started.
Same here. Seeing COMC use data from the amazon experiment to make further product decisions sounds like a good idea to me, because I’ve had nothing but good experiences with amazon via COMC. I sold a Bryce Harper auto for full book last week via Amazon (2011 Bowman Draft green /350). I never could have sold it for 80% of book here.
“Mountain”….
very briefly…(very busy here)
Nobody from my business has sent anyone any emails advising them to go elsewhere. And if you decide you feel like accusing us of something again…well I would strongly advise you not to do it.
As to the rest and what you are sick of…and what in your opinion does or does not belong here…..
TAS I apologize if it wasn’t you directing folks somewhere else. I’m currently going through the older blogs (over 600 posts or so) to see who it really was. You do keep bringing up your time on beckett and it has nothing to do with the business that COMC does or offers. Sportlots, I offer cards for .18w/.75 shipping for the first card, $1 for 2-4 cards and then I go up slightly more from there, and max out at 16.99 currently. I have never sold more than 100 cards to one person but I have sold over or around 4000 cards there in 3 years, but what I do there has nothing to do with here. COMC needs to show that this is shipping and handling and not just shipping. We are all forgetting about the other items which will now be included in our basic “stores”. I’m still not in favor of fronting the cost of cards that may or may not ever get shiped. I really don’t want to go above 0.25 per cards for listing unless its the week processing. I know that I will no longer send in base cards or cards that will have a billion of them here and I will have to find another way to get them out. We are all in the same boat here. Threats to each other, bbb, comc will go nowhere and just get us more riled up.
Apology accepted…
As to Beckett having nothing to do with what goes on here..I strongly respectfully disagree. The only site that can compete with the selection on this site as far as being able to buy large numbers of cards from a single source is Beckett. Most of the dealers on there have inventories of 100,000+ cards.
If you have read my posts you know I am not a big fan of what Beckett became. Broken promises and a few knuckleheads turned a site that we used to do $2500 a month in sales easily into an unusable mess. So when I see things happening here that remind me of what I saw there…forgive me but it raises red flags. There is nothing wrong with comparing experiences and ideas from other sites. That goes for good and bad.
So far this site despite being only a few years old is miles ahead of what is going on there. They STILL haven’t gotten on Amazon yet and have been talking about it for at least 2 years.
I want this place to be the best it can be. That is one thing I think everyone here has in common.
Great point Cardko, their end user agreement did not mention this at all. We, as sellers should have the legal right to either elect to not partake in the new site, or have our cards returned to us.
What i dislike the most about this all, is the fact that all these low end cards that sellers have already paid processing on, are now having an additional fee added on to them. Rendering the seller trapped, because nobody will buy that low end card that is now .25 more expensive the seller wont sell at a loss.
Thats why it’s illegal. Lawyer up.
Wow guys stop !! just wait we still have over a month and this is an online site so remember that some of the rules they go by are going to be a bit different . The BBB is going to tell you what they think but they probably have not gotten any info on this yet. So when Tim or who ever replies to any complaint they will know what is going on. When the fee hike happens it will be posted and emailed out to people . If you want out i think Tim will take care of the people like you who want out. If i were him your cards would be shipped back today. They are reading this and somethings will prob get corrected or grandfathered in before the rate hikes. I don’t think any cards on the site as of now should be charged the extra fee and we will see in due time what the full plans are. If your unhappy as much as you are then pull out or sell out of the site. Or just sit back until the full information comes out and then make the final decision .
Cardko I admire your passion and how fired up you are but they aren’t holding your cards hostage. They did tell us in advance what they are planning to do. I give them credit for being transparent.
Keep in mind you yourself will see no increase in fees on cards already on the site. In fact your storage fees will see a decrease. There is nothing in the contract that tells us they cannot grow and change. You did not sign a lease promising your fees would not change. If you don’t like what they are doing by all means get your cards shipped back. However my unsolicited advice would be to keep what you have on the site here, don’t send more in and wait and see what shakes out.
Just to be clear. I am not looking for a reply from Tim or Anyone at checkoutmycards ERNIERIN. I personally don’t give two shits what they do to destroy there site, as long as they don’t involve me. It’s Tim’s site he can do what he wants.
They will still buy it when they realize the shipping is (mostly) paid. The actual cost to them is not changing much. It might slow down the flippers though.
“It is better for someone to think you are ignorant than to open your mouth and prove them right.”
Some people are talking complete nonsense that adds nothing to this discussion. Please keep the discusions rational so the powers that be will continue to respond. If I was Tim I would have stopped reading these posts by now. Everyone here is pationate about this hobby. That is why we are here. Offer solutions if you see a problem. Maybe there is a new idea that no one has thought of yet.
Will people pay 50 cents for a low end card? I am not sure. Flippers won’t. But someone wanting that card for their PC is already paying 20 cents to have it shipped…is 25 going to mean than much? COMC is gambling it won’t make a difference.
It’s not much of a gamble. Since COMC added the commons account, I’ve experimented by putting some of my commons at 49 cents, 74 cents, and 99 cents. (A few other sellers do commons at 99 cents as well.) The sell-through rate is roughly the same as those priced at a quarter. What matters is having the best condition, the best price, or both, depending on the buyer.
Time will tell. I don’t think the collector is going to associate much of a difference between 45 cents and 50 cents for a card they want for their PC. The interesting thing will be what they do on port sales. If I send in 500 low end cards…do an immediate port sale because I don’t want them being sold with the attached fee… you buy them based on the expectation that you can flip them…you go to relist them and suddenly that $1 card you bought for 30 cents that you want to flip for 55 cents turns into 80 because they are now charging that shipping fee… You might not have purchased that port knowing that. Perhaps they will put a notation on the port that “cards in this port are subject to 25 cent shipping fee”… Just stuff to think about as this all gets sorted out.
While I have a fair amount of negative to say about the new fees coming, I do want to say something very positive here: The new shipping fees for buyers is -very- nice and helps both buyers and COMC. Buyers will be able to get their cards shipped cheaper (good for buyers) and get the cards out of COMC’s warehouse (good for COMC).
While we’re talking about changes though, have a suggestion: Can we get it on the seller side, when managing inventory, where we can see the current lowest price on each card is? It would save on the clicking, especially for those of us with larger inventories. (Or anything over say 20 cards, really!)
Shipping will actually be 50% higher than it was 6 months ago and 26%-37% increase over the last rate increase. If you read through the 400+ comments on the first blog on this discussion you can find the real facts. The real shipping cost for 12, 25, 50, and 100 card shipments are compared towards the beginning.
Think about the changes from a buyer’s perspective. They will pay 0.50 for a previously priced 0.25 card and do so happily if the shipping is low (which is it under the new model). Buyers will understand the upside of making larger quantity purchases with the fixed shipping absorption. And, many of the cards will be flipped cards that don’t have the 0.25 added charge. In any case, I’m looking forward to the changes… streamlines things and I think this will attract more buyers in the end.
The shipping has changed MINIMALLY since before the existing Limited Offer which expires July 31. Shipping was $3 for 1st card & $.25 ea. after that for standard shipping. Now will be $2.99 + $.25 ea. Doesn’t matter to me whether it’s on the front end or back end. It’s still costing me the same for 100 cards, give or take a few pennies. And dealers, a common is still only worth what one is willing to pay for it, as are all cards. Sportslots still sells them for 18 cents. Through the convoluted math I’ve been seeing lately, sounds like the price of a common is going from 0.25 to 0.75.
This will be my last post because its out of my hands i’ll leave it to the professinals. That should make some happy. I want all user to think about what these changes mean not only money wise but what it makes the market like. It makes cards look more expenseinve then they are. Driving up the market. This could have negitive affects on other sectors like gold, silver, copper. I no this is not a huge amount per card, but it can affect these areas. For example if you go to buy gold off the internet they DO NOT include shipping in there price for that reason. They want you to no what you are paying for your gold and what you are paying for s/h. If you where to pay the shipping on gold in the way Tim is proposing gold would lose value once in your hand. Can you amagine gold stocks or any other being traded like this.
Didn’t you say that about a post in a previous blog post?
ummm…I’ve purchased silver online where shipping/insurance was included. I’ve also purchased it where it wasn’t included but an xtra cost. I factored the mean of the pricing compared to spot, plus whatever other fees over spot were included to make sure I wasn’t getting a bad deal. more and more I think you are letting personal feelings get in your way of the big picture. I’m with you on not wanting to front shipping or having a mixed fee on some cards but not on others. I’ve made my fair share of buys and sells since 2008 on comc and shipping is always factored in on what I buy something for. Ebay basically makes us give shipping in the selling price. I’ve seen only a few actual sellers put exact shipping for charges (1.64 for a 3oz bubble mailer) Everyone probably makes a little xtra on shipping. I don’t see you hitting ebay or ebay sellers for hidden costs as we know there are (anything above $3 shipping for 1 basic card is a crime in my mind, and seems yours too if I understand your thinking on comc changes) COMC is giving sellers better items for our stores, going to a flat shipping rate and starting a new section of business by changing where the fees are coming from. There just really has to be a better way to make everyone happy. I don’t think there will be any convincing of you at this point and you have stressed you are out and done. I don’t plan on getting anything new to send in as cash flow is low from some personal things going on, but I don’t plan on pulling out what I already have on there since most were tried on ebay multiple times and never moved, so what else am I going to do?
Mountain you have the right idea. I have told anyone who will listen (that isn’t many obviously) that it is ok to be upset, ok to complain (in a civil rational way)…but other than to save a few cents on return shipping fees…no reason to rush to pull items off the site. I am at least open to the idea that I am wrong and COMC is right and their idea could work. Just because we won’t send in anything new at 25 cents doesn’t mean we won’t buy/flip here. To give up on that or have our stuff returned would be cutting our own throats….at least that is how we look at it,
Your rationale makes zero sense. I fail to see how adding a $.25 shipping fee affects the gold market.
I am strictly a buyer, so I may have a different point of view than many of you. I do not understand the shipping changes and why they are necessary (as a buyer). Whever I buy a bunch of cards, I know there is going to be a shipping charge involved at the end. Any buyer that is not an idiot should realize this. We already pay a flat fee + a per card fee now, so what is really changing other than creating a lot of confusion. I would much rather pay the shipping at the end that up front. If I see cheaper cards listed a .25 more, I am going to buy less than if I pay the .25 when I have them shipped. It is only natural, because the cards just don’t seem like as good of a deal. Even though shipping can get expensive, any rational person should realize that it is way cheaper than buying from multiple sellers on any other site. It seems like these changes are geared towards preventing complaints from irrational people that expect to be able to ship 100 for $3.00.
I had the opportunity to speak with Tim last night about some of the proposed changes. My suggestion to all is to let COMC explain all of the changes in detail over the next few days and then make an assessment. I would encourage anyone going to the National to take advantage of the time to speak with Tim and grab a slot.
How about you just bring back the batch fees and raise it to 5.00/500 cards instead of 3.00 and do away with the listing hike to .25c and put the listing fee back down to .10 or .15c I’m sure you will get more business that way.
1. Nobody really complains about batch fees because they are straight forward and fair.
2. Lower listing fees means they are more likely to send in more cards which means more batch fees for you and instant $ for you.
You can also leave the storage fee where it was or drop the storage fee down to .20c instead of 75c for cards to help make up the difference. That way people will want to move their cards more often since more cards in their port means more storage fees for you since nobody seems to whine about storage fees much. I think your business would benefit and people may try to sell more cards by competitive pricing.
1. Nobody really complains about storage fees so far that i’ve seen. So lowering that threshold to .20c probably won’t scare too many people and it’s easy to understand for everyone.
I don’t buy that much but maybe ease up on fees for the buyer somehow to keep all the noise down.
Play around with the new site and new merchandise and how to work fees with those but when you try to open a whole new site with new types of items, it’s probably best to leave your old site working really well in case the new site doesn’t take off right away. Making the beehive angry from your old site does not help drive business with your new site. (my2cents.comc.com)
Just FYI, I sell cheaper cards on your site and my business is being hurt by this uproar. Please don’t drop the other shoe on me.
Thanks
Just posting to say thank you to checkoutmycards for working with me to resolve my matter. I wish you much success. Good Bye.
This is not related to anything on this blog just thought it may help some people out if this was a option. Some of us use becketts card organizer, which is really nice if your like me and have to have all your cards on paper. You guys do alot of work to look up cards using beckett, then when I get them shipped home I have to re do it. It would be cool if there was a way to work with beckett and get the list trasfered.
The paper sheet that accompanies each of your orders show both what you paid for the card and what it books for. At least, this has been true for every shipment I’ve ever received, and I have received one or two within the last six weeks or so.
I do get it but it would sure be nice to not have to type it again in the beckett site.
I am strictly a buyer here so far. I might sell down the road. I DO buy commons and I really hate when they are priced $.50-$1.00. And most times they are not worth $0.10!! But sometimes I will pay anyway if I cant find it a cheaper way. But if you add on $0.25 its just going to make me think more about grabbing them for my collection. Sadly the way I collect sometimes I have no choice but to pay the price listed or go without the card. I just cant see paying $.75-$1.25 for a base card that not to many people want and its not worth $.25 anyway. I love the idea of the site and how it works. And saving is a huge plus, as before I found this site most of my buying was one ebay at $2.50-$5 per card for shipping. And half the time it coming in a plain white envelope and getting bent up do to poor packing! The shipping on here is extremely low compared to buying 1-1 on ebay. But I have about 280 card in my acct right now for shipping and slowly adding more, but its going to cost me $47 for bulk or $59 standard right now!!! That is crazy. I understand thay most of that cost is from pulling cards and packing. BUT WOW. I would say that the fees should fall on the sellers, but then the sellers just have to list stuff higher and then instead of pay the high shipping and handling I would be stuck paying higher prices for the cards. The idea of the site here is right on point, but there are just a couple things that somehow need fixed. But if you collect higher-end stuff paying a extra $.25 on a $20-$50 is not that big of a deal, but for people like me to add that on a $.25-$1 card thats a big jump. But not everything can be perfect. Just my little rants and thoughts. -Jason 🙂
So far, I have strictly been a buyer on checkoutmycards. I’m not crazy about the shipment fees associated with every card I purchase, but I do expect them. The site has been great so far, but I understand that from a business perspective, they may feel a need to make changes. If it works, good for them. If not, then change it back. Other than adding a “search by team” option, I was very happy with everything. I agree with many of those posting comments that the ability to find a cheap common for your personal collection will become a thing of the past if the sellers are going to have to hike their listing prices or the site is going to add a fee to that card. I’ve searched everywhere online trying to find that one StL common from 1-90 years ago and this is the only online place that I have been able to find it. For all of you sellers out there, thank you for not just sending in your $100 cards, but also providing your box loads of commons, as well.
I gotta say they’re doing something right here..my last 2 months sales are as high as ever sans this past March where I spent several bucks on classified ads with a half off special..I haven’t sent in any cards during that period so I was stuck with my original inventory plus 2 or 3 ports I picked up cheap and am flipping..so I think there’s definitely more traffic and people buying now..I just hope everything works..Tim and Jeremy and the others here seem smart enough to know what they’re doing with the site and hopefully they can make the appropriate changes when necessary..I’ll take advantage of processing special then take a wait and see approach on the new site..I really hope it works out since this has been an amazing site and as a guy who works 50+ hours a week and trains for road races on the side, I could never be this successful selling cards on my own..
COMC …..I guess should now stand for Check Out My Collection
I sent a 1000+ batch of cards a few months ago, and I have been very happy with how they have sold so far. However, from what I can see from the change in fee structure, it will be very difficult for me to continue using this site to sell my junk game-used cards, inserts, and low-valued autos. I wasn’t planning on using this site for higher value items, as ebay generally works just fine for those cards. The new fee structure really hits the margins for low value items….maybe that’s the goal? It must be quite labor intensive to deal with 500+ lots of cards that lead to low profit margins for COMC, so I’m not sure if I would blame you guys from a business perspective.
Tim,
I think the root of these issues is the labor costs (time) associated with pulling and packing card orders (large and small). Have you considered hiring some consultants in the consignment warehousing, packaging area? There has got to be some people in the Seattle area that are former/current Amazon employees that can access and help optimize how your dealing with the 4 million plus items in inventory. I sell non sports card items on Amazon through FBA (fulfilled by Amazon) and they don’t add any hidden shipping charges to the price the customer sees and they ship the majority of my items for free and I am certain they are not losing money. There system of warehousing ten’s of millions of consigned items from probably a half a million sellers has been solved, try to mirror that system. Get the help from experts to optimize your current processes, then make changes. You can’t guess at what you think will fix the issues, 40 employees and I am guessing 100’s of sellers make most or part of their living through the site. My feeling is you have a responsibility to not gamble on people’s livelihoods. The site works because of the vast number of diverse sellers (small and large) and a growing number of buyers.
One or two wrong decisions could have significant impacts. Just think when the majority of Internet users want to search for something nowadays they don’t Yahoo it….
OK, let me preface my question with the fact that it was just dizzying to try and read all 100+ comments and replies, hoping my question got answered somewhere above, so I just stopped half way through and decided I would ask MY question and hope it gets addressed.
I am one of those 90+% who only buy, and I love to do so. I usually get 20-60 cards at a time, probably over the course of a month or two, and get them all shipped at the same time, in one bulk shipped order. With all of the proposed changes in shipping and built-in costs and all, if I buy, for the sake of easy numbers, 50 $1 cards, and have them shipped all at once in basic bulk shipping, what are the before and after site change numbers? What is my change in cost of doing it this way on COMC as opposed to checkoutmycards?
Previous shipping charges: Bulk $11, Standard $11.99
New shipping charges: Standard $15.49
With the changes there can no longer be any shipping specials or discounts, the prices will be what they are.
as a seller here i would like an honest opinion from you. Do you think it would be worth it for me to send in commons such as 1982 topps, 1983 topps, 1984 topps, 1988 topps traded, 1990 topps traded, 86 topps, 87 topps, 88 topps, 90 fleer, 92 score, 1996 topps, etc, etc, you get the point. i just REALLY like to know because if im going to pay more money to list my cards here (i actually dont mind the 5 cent increase0 would it really be worth to send in commons like the ones mentioned or should i focus more on sending in better cards? i ask, because i really love this site and the direction its going and i want to be a successful as i can be so i can list my cards here for a long tim. please let me know your thoughts on this as i dont want to spend a ton of money on cards that are just going to sit on your site and not sell, if you think it isnt a good idea to send those type of cards in. thanks
Elbert… 82,83,84 topps are pre “overprinting” era. I would check the site to see how many are listed and then decide for yourself. same goes with 96 topps. The others fall into an area where I can tell you we pay $1 per thousand because there is just so much of it out there.
JUST CONFUSED!!
These blog posts are looking more and more like the national tax collecting rule and policy books!
When and will all these changes take place?
Are you reconsidering some of the changes and has seller comments made a difference?
Are there two sites? Is there going to be two sites? Will the changes apply to both sites? What in the world are you all thinking? Why are comments regarding one site on, oh gees…I don’t know?
Why is this so confusing in the first place?
What benefit is there to the seller? What benefit is there to the buyer? Why all the psycosis lingo?
Why are you going to kill common and cheaper card sales?
Why are other sellers asking question that really don’t matter right now and just adding to the confusion?
Why does there have to be 5 blog posts to explain all of this? Isn’t that confusing to everyone?
Why does everyone think $.25 processing, 20% cash out and $.20-$.25 per card plus $2.99 flat fee for shipping is not is not ugly and gouging? eBay is cheaper and you have more personal seller control?
Why the comparisons to Walmart, Amazon, etc.? I thought COMC was for sports card sellers and buyers, what in the heck does Walmart have to do with that?
Why are we even considering the addition of other items to an “all card” site? Coins boys have their own site, comic geeks have their own site, and isn’t this site for us card folks?
Why am I already considering my mistake and considering the tear in my eye based on these annoucements by an online source that I thought would not become just another silly e-commerce choice!!? And I have only been on here 3 months!
WHY? WHY? WHY? Why is this just the MOST confusing thing I have ever become a part of?
Shortly after I started on here I noticed that there was a great search engine and that all the singles (cheap singles) I needed for my sets that had been sitting around would be easily procured and those sets would be completed with little or no effort. Some of them dated back to 2005 and had been sitting on my shelf for that long.
Card shows did not have them (all dealers want to sell there is the big stuff unless you want to dig through all their mixed and matched 3000 count boxes). Nobody sells them on eBay because of the fees unless you want to get a couple singles needed in a bulk sale but, what are you going to do with more commons and the shipping fees charged by the seller for bulk buys would kill you! So I was stuck with all these partial sets (over 100 of them) and no forseeable way to complete them. Though I had faith that someday I would make that happen and along comes COMC!
Ureka!! I finished almost 60% of them in one fell swoop…200 commons shipped in one week! I was the happiest camper in the world and was looking forward to starting on my Contender auto sets! But then THIS!! If its not broken why fix it?? Yea, the shipping fees were a little scary at first but then I opted for the bulk fee. I was more or less happy and understood the “handling” that would go into the processing of my 200 singles. So I paid it. This was a GREAT experience and one I thought would never happen and now I am just really confused!
I have over 35,000 MTG commons and uncommons in my personal inventory. I would love to be able to send them into COMC and was going to do this to really get that part of the site powered up a bit. I was really having a problem with the $.20 per card processing for the commons but thought it might work out with the limited number of MTG’s on here…NO WAY AT $.25 a card and then adding $.25 onto my price for shipping…again, this is a very confusing part of these blogs??
Going through school I was always taught that there are three important parts to the successful business solution: Quality, Quantity and the Client…You all have a “quality” site that has everything the “common buyer/seller” needs, the “high-end buyer/seller” needs and the “investment buyer/seller” needs, thus Quality! You currently have everything in place to warrent large numbers of submittals and inventory procurment from sellers with the structure to allow for buyer large order and multiple shipment requests, thus Quantity! Now you are wanting to throw all that away with confusion and changes that muddle the great business format you have related to card collector needs…you must of forgot about Client somewhere in there? Sounds a little “political” to me…feed them bull and soon they will moo…cattle to the slaughter-house, MOOOOO…
Though this may not make it on the post, and many may not even see it, I do want to commend your willingness to listen to those who have made you what you were being scoffed at back in 2005. But remember, they can also give up on you and make you only a whisper of what you could become…MySpace anyone. Please, take charge, give it to us straight, and stop beating around the bush…the more confused we become the more likely we are going to say, “ah, the heck with it” and pull up stakes. IT’S NOT BROKEN, YOU DON’T NEED TO CHANGE OR FIX IT! This isn’t and Obama campaign…
hey tim, astros1962 here, what is the cheapest way to send 5 550 count boxes to you? thx
Hi, Astros1962. We usually recommend a flat-rate box, the Post Office gives them out for free. You can use two medium size boxes, or I think a single large box would hold five 550cts as well.
Thanks,
Jeremy
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