April 1st is our drop-dead date when we need to transition all the data on COMC.com to our new catalog. Due to this, starting midnight PST tonight, most of the site will be down for approximately 24 hours. You will still be able to play The COMC Challenges and access our blog, but you will not have access to your account or any items on the site. Additionally, once site functionality returns, please be prepared for missing data.
Due to the transition pains, we won’t charge seller storage fees for the month of April.
Please help us smooth the transition by playing The COMC Challenges, and ask your friends to do the same. This is the best way to help the COMC Community get up and running with the best data as quickly as possible.
Thank you for contributing to our new sports card catalog! You are a crucial part of building the most accurate, complete, and data-rich catalog the card-collecting community has ever had. With just a week away from replacing all the catalog data on COMC.com with our new catalog and price suggestions, we want to let you know what to expect in the upcoming weeks. We are working within a very tight time frame, there is still a lot of data to compile, and we need your help!
Our Plan of Action
We have tasked our internal experts with compiling difficult-to-find data and the crowd with notating what can easily be determined by looking at the card. Learn more:
This Week
By April 1st we need to swap all of the data on COMC.com with our new catalog. We will start replacing the data this week. These changes will be rolled out incrementally, beginning in some less-represented categories (like bowling cards), so any potential issues will affect the fewest cards possible. From there we will move on to more popular categories, such as basketball and hockey cards.
Due to our extremely tight time frame, the next few weeks will be a bit rocky. Some data will be missing. There will be errors, and there will be many opportunities for improvement. We ask for your patience, support, and feedback as we work together, building the new catalog. Learn more:
The Weeks To Come
With our new catalog, all cards will have at least a placeholder for data, but some cards will have missing data. You will be able to submit specific pieces of data that are missing or submit corrections for existing data. Our hard-working team will continue to burn the midnight oil creating sets and researching cards. The COMC Challenges will continue to run and add to our database, and this is the best way for you to help us get the most data quickly. The catalog will be a work in progress. Within a couple months we should have parity with the old data, and by the end of the year we expect to have better data than we have ever had before.
Price Suggestions
The beta version of our pricing suggestions will go live on April 1st. At first it will only be available for the most commonly sold cards. Over the coming months our catalog data will become more complete and the corresponding price suggestions will be extrapolated across less commonly sold items.
Sellers will automatically get access to the pricing suggestions for any items that they originally consigned with us. To get full access to all pricing suggestions during this beta period, you must earn 20,000 total points in the COMC Challenges.
If you earn 20,000+ total points before the end of March, the “Founding Contributor” badge will be added to your username.
We have a long road ahead of us. While March 31st is a huge transition, it is by no means the end of our mission. For a long and detailed analysis of COMC’s ultimate vision for our catalog and price suggestions, we invite you to watch founder and CEO Tim Getsch’s presentation at the 2014 Las Vegas Industry Summit (25 minutes):
Once again, we cannot sufficiently state our gratitude to you, our community, and advocates. Your response has been amazing, and we wouldn’t be here without you! Thank you for completing the Challenges, submitting suggestions, and participating in our community dialog here on our blog, twitter, and facebook page. This week we begin an epic journey together, and we are so grateful to have you by our side.
Want an opportunity that is more than just a job? COMC is changing the game, and we want you!
We need extra hands to help with Order Fulfillment, Sports Card Identification, and Inventory Processing.
Positions start at $10-$13/hour depending on experience.
Full-time employees are eligible for medical and dental benefits as well as nearly 4 weeks of paid time off per year.
We’re less than a week away from our annual trip to Las Vegas! As if you needed another reason to visit the COMC booth at the 2014 Industry Summit, how about we give you 250 reasons?
Hello, ladies…
If you are interested in our Drop-Off/Pick-Up/Kiosk programs, come to our booth, watch our demo, drop off your business card (or just write your COMC username on a piece of paper), and you’ll be entered into a drawing for $250 of COMC Store Credit!
At 4 p.m. on both Monday and Tuesday (March 17 & 18), we’ll draw the name of a lucky winner from all the cards/usernames we’ve collected, and we’ll deposit $250 of store credit into that person’s COMC Account.
Did we mention you need to have a COMC account to get your prize? Well, you do – and you can sign up at our booth.
So be sure to drop by our booth while you’re at the Summit and say hello to Tim, Julia, Geoff, Steve, and Sam. And definitely remember to give us your business card (or your username) so you can get in on the winnings!
Spring is on the way, and COMC wants to help you get ready. We’ve been getting a non-stop flood of new items, so we are going to be offering everyone on our site 3 free promotions to help clear out inventory.
Free Promotion #1: Sunday, March 16th – Saturday night, March 22nd
Free Promotion #2: Sunday, March 23rd – Saturday night, March 29th
Free Promotion #3: Sunday, March 30th – Saturday night, April 5th
Once you’re logged in, simply go to the Promotions Manager page from your Dashboard and you can set up your free sales. You can go back and edit your promotions any time before they go live on the site. We are excited for this next season and we hope you join us in making this spring a huge success!
Every March sees one of the most exciting times in the sports collectible hobby – no, not “March Madness” (even though that’s a lot of fun) – we’re talking about the Industry Summit!
We’ll be in Las Vegas from March 16th to 19th! It will be four days where some of the biggest names in the sports card industry get together and discuss both the current state of the hobby and work together to determine its future.
We can’t see our room from here, but we think it’s pretty sweet.
Come See Us
Tim, Julia, Geoff, Steve, and Sam will be there! You may even see us at the oyster bar in the Orleans Hotel.
Drop By Our Booth
Like last year, we’ll be taking submissions at our booth. We’re accepting both Basic and Premium submissions. The clock for Premium Submissions will begin ticking Thursday, 3/20 when we get back. By dropping cards with us, you’ll be able to save money on your shipping costs, as we’ll be transporting the cards back to Redmond for you. Just a reminder, we ask that any submissions come without toploaders or cardsaver holders, and any screwdown or magnetic cases will be processed as Premium. Make sure to prepare your submissions in advance of the Summit by using Submit Items on the Seller Menu on your dashboard.
Anyone with a store front who is interested in being one of our Drop-Off/Pick-Up/Kiosk Locations and drops off a business card will be entered into a raffle.
We’ll also have giveaways, so come see us!
New Drop-Off iPhone App
We’ll be demoing our new Drop-Off iPhone app! This will make it easier than ever to submit your cards.
Hear From Tim Getsch, Founder & CEO
Tim will be giving a 15 minute talk the morning of Tuesday, March 18th (time TBD).
As in previous years, Tim will be available to chat with you. Just contact us at timewithtim@comc.com – we’ll set up as many appointments as time allows.
It’s going to be an amazing four days, and we hope to see you there!
The COMC development team is pleased to announce the public release of the COMC Challenges, a feature that enables the community to contribute to the upcoming COMC catalog. Your support so far with this project is inspiring and we’re thrilled to team up with the COMC community to provide card collectors and sellers with the richest and most accurate catalog possible. With your help, our goal is to make the best collecting experience ever.
Our signed agreement with Beckett ends on March 31, 2014. Over the next few weeks, we will transition the website checklist and price guide to our new catalog and suggested list prices. For a quick and smooth transition, we’re calling upon the community to help by participating in a series of Challenges.
The idea behind the COMC Challenges is simple: we have millions of card images, and we’re asking the community to provide information easily gleaned from the cards while our identification experts research the best grouping and naming of the sets. Challenges are designed to gather data as quickly and efficiently as possible by showing a series of cards and asking simple questions about them.
How it Works (I don’t care, show me the money!):
The Sports Challenge asks for the card’s sport. Next, the Players Challenge asks for the first two letters of a player’s first and last name. Cards with that information are then ready for the Teams Challenge, which asks for the team represented on the card, narrowing down the potential number of players in that group.
While you provide information through Challenges, our identification team is analyzing each card in our inventory to identify years and compile sets.
By combining the sport, year, team and player initials we are able to analyze publicly available rosters to further narrow down the list of possible players that might be on a card. We will finish off the first round of player data by introducing a new Challenge that allows the community to confirm exactly which players are on the cards.
Prizes
While you take on Challenges, you’ll earn points and compete to move up on the Leaderboard. On March 17th, 24th, and 31st, we’ll award $100 Store Credit to each of the 10 contributors who earned the most points during the previous week (Sunday-Saturday). Additionally, every 5,000 points you earn before April 1 enters you into a drawing to win COMC Store Credit prizes up to $1,000.
If you’re one of the first 500 players to earn 20,000 points, you’ll also receive an exclusive Founding Contributor badge that displays next to your username so everyone can see you were an original contributor to the COMC catalog.
We released a beta version of the COMC Challenges a couple of weeks ago to a select group of customers and we’re now ready to provide everyone the opportunity to contribute. With the help of the community, we’re over 30% of the way through the Player Initials Challenge for the four major sports. Under each Challenge, you’ll see a Community Progress bar so you can track how close we are to the goal.
Bottom Line
We’re excited to eventually include more details like player hometowns, cameos, and T206 backs. Please tell us in the comments below the kinds of info you want to see. Also, if you’d like to offer your expertise with any particular cards or sets, please email catalog@comc.com with a list of your specialties so we can get in touch.
Your support has been great so far, but in order to complete our goal of a new catalog by March 31st, we need a lot more help. So share this post, tweet, blog, and talk to your friends and fellow collectors – let’s get the word out! Stay tuned to the COMC Blog for status updates on the COMC Challenges and catalog project as we approach March 31.
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