We’re still working hard adding info to our database, completing overdue items, and correcting errors, but we also want to continue moving forward in other ways.  You may have already spotted a new feature we are rolling out: enhanced page content. Our non-ID team has developed this new way to improve the site, and we’re excited to share it with you and hear your input on what pages you would like to see enhanced.

We’ve begun by adding some extra details for popular players. You can take a look here at the new enhanced page for Michael Jordan:

We’re going to continue to expand this feature to more players, teams, and sets.  If you have a favorite, let us know in the comments, so we can build our list.  We have pages up already for Ken Griffey Jr., Wayne Gretzky, Bo Jackson, and several other players.

Benefits to Enhanced Content

A key benefit of this new feature is that pages with more relevant content are easier to find when people search Google or other search engines.  An easy-to-find page has more eyes seeing it, which leads to more sales for those items and more buyers on the site. Getting our sellers’ cards in front of more eyes is always a top-tier goal here at COMC, as is expanding our buyer base. This project helps to do both at the same time. Eventually we hope to have many enhanced pages, potentially even including enhanced content on personal portfolio pages.

Catalog Project Status

We’ve said it before, but we continue to appreciate the patience and involvement of our amazing community. We’re approaching 90% complete data on the site which means we’re digging into some of the harder sets to research and list, but we’re committed to finishing this project all the way. We also want to make sure you know that our team is reviewing all the submissions you’ve made using the “edit” button. We’re methodically moving through them, focusing on the highest-value items first, and we’re grateful for your help in getting all this crucial data.

Enhance Content – How You Can Help

This new project is one you can help with too. Our initial rollout pages have some new video content made by our team here at COMC, but we hope some will come from great outside sources. If you know of an awesome box break vid that does a good job of highlighting a popular set or a great mailday vid that shows off some sweet cards of a particular star, let us know in the comments – we may use it to enhance the content on COMC!  Thank you and please chime in with a comment telling us what players and sets you’d like to see with page enhancements on the site!

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.

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.

Thanks,

Grant Wescott
Program Manager
COMC.com

Hello to the COMC Nation!

We’ve been giving our sellers some love lately with The National special we’re currently running.  You have just a couple more days to take advantage of it, so send your submissions in ASAP!  Items must be postmarked by August 22nd.

Buyers, we have not forgotten you…

…Check out our new Store Credit program for buying in bulk on COMC.com!

It works like this:

For every 100 items a buyer has shipped from COMC.com within a calendar month, s/he will receive $5.00 in COMC Store Credit. And, the benefits add up.

• Ship 100 cards = $5.00 COMC Store Credit
• Ship 200 cards = $10.00 COMC Store Credit
• Ship 300 cards = $15.00 COMC Store Credit…and so on, and so on…

On the first of every month, every account that qualifies will receive the Shipping Credit automatically. We actually started this program on August 1^st, so you may have already noticed this Store Credit in your account for cards you had shipped during the month of July.

We always appreciate your input and feedback, as many of our new features come from the COMC Nation. Please feel free to leave any suggestions or ideas in the comments below.  As always, we ask that you stay tuned to our blog and be sure to join us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.