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Very very cool. No idea on the signature, but I wondered if the better way to search is the style/topic. How many artists carve wooden cat boxes? Turns out there are quite a few!
HA. Yeah, he told me about the tours people have to take for gift cards. $500 seems worth it!
What a find. Not sure if it has any specific monetary value? but a really fun find.
It’s so smart to buy people’s timeshares. It’s such a scam for the people that own and pay for it yearly. I knew a guy who was a salesman at a local timeshare company who explained how the economics of it are so bad for the buyer….but so lucrative for the building owner.
A weeklong vacation for a family of 8 for under $1000 is incredible.
Its weird that eBay hasn’t fixed that bug on multi-items. Why do you think it happens?
Congrats on your daughter playing in a symphony. exciting!
said that I had to go through the negative feedback removal link process.
Did eBay remove the negative or did you ask the buyer to reconsider and they changed it?
Whoah. 11 years ago. What a wild ride. Glad you guys could join us on your own adventure.
I’m a little surprised this isn’t as widely done in other niches. Maybe it is and I just don’t know about it. I guess selling Amazon FBA is the same kind of concept.
Im not savvy to current businesses, but I know there were several used clothing sellers where you mailed in a bag of clothes, they photographed and listed auctions, then paid you once the clothes sold.
Issue was people were sending in garbage clothes. If clothes did sell, it was for $10 or less. It wasnt cost effective. Assume photographing and storing clothes is much more work than a baseball card.
https://www.therealreal.com/ might be the closest example of a successful (i think?) business where you mail in product and then get paid. But they are very strict about what they sell. Only the most high end fashion. I guess you can also lump in the phone buyers who purchase old electronics, refurbish and resell.
Completely fascinating that they can make money with a very human intensive business. I know companies have tried this way if selling with clothes, but none have succeeded. It must be the way they can store millions of cards in a relatively small space.
As much as I appreciate people who are super efficient with their small stores, there is certainly a value to having a large inventory. Everything sells eventually. We just never know what will sell each day. Sounds like your large card inventory is the same.
It definitely is. Having a large inventory means you have a lot more options. You can wait for the perfect buyer on certain items or you can run a quick sale, move a bunch of inventory and raise a chunk of cash. I have been selling off a lot of cards from my COMC port which I bought two, three, even four years ago, realizing there’s a certain point where it doesn’t matter what I paid, it doesn’t matter what I thought the card was worth or what it might be worth in the future. I’d rather get what I can, have the cash in hand now and use it for something else.
But there are other cards where I keep the price the same, or even raise it a few bucks, still waiting for the right buyer to come along. With such a large inventory, a few of these cards sell every day, too. Then there are some cards which sell better on eBay than COMC. Usually it’s because the way COMC does the title isn’t the best way to market the card. I buy a few of these cards every week and get them shipped to me to sell in my eBay store. It saves me a few bucks on cash out fees and it’s a fairly easy way to keep my eBay sales humming even with a 250 item store.
How does COMC process the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of cards that people send in? Are there just rows of hundreds of people taking photos and listing each card? How is it profitable when many cards sell for <$5?
There are millions of cards for sale on the COMC site, and it’s amazing how far the company has come over the last 10 or 15 years. COMC started as a way for the founder Tim Getsch to share the steals he got on eBay! Now they have huge warehouses (at least one in Washington state, another in Canada) and large teams of employees to handle every area of operation (processing, shipping, customer service, etc). Plus I’m sure they employ a ton of people to deal with things like programming the site and app. They send representatives to every big card show around the country (this weekend there are teams in Philly and Nashville) where you can drop off your cards or you can ship cards to their warehouse in Washington, which is what I do every few weeks.
Every card on their site is individually scanned, 9 at a time for regular cards and 3 for graded since that’s how many fit on an industrial flatbed scanner. They have some kind of crazy expensive robotic shipping device (like amazon) which picks some/all? cards for shipping. Then employees package the cards up. You can keep cards unpriced in your port to be shipped for as long as you want. Or you can reprice the card to try and resell it.
COMC takes out fees at basically every step of the listing and selling process. Minimum 50 cents to process each card that you submit. A few percent from each sale. A buck or two to send an item to auction, and they have regular 7 day $0.99 eBay auctions ending every night and live auctions 3 or 4 times a week. A few bucks handling lumped into their shipping fees, and they ship tens of thousands of cards every week. A penny storage for each card on the 1st of each month. 10 percent to cash out store credit (every transaction happens in store credit, not deposits to your bank account or paypal). All a small price to pay if you know your cards and you build up your port like I have.
Many of the cards for sale on the COMC site are also cross posted to eBay. They currently have 6.8 million eBay listings to be exact. More than I would have guessed. For every user like me with thousands of cards in their port, there are probably 10-20 users buying cards one or two at a time. The old-school collectors who can barely use a computer. The casual users who don’t really know cards. The noob flippers who will move on to flipping books on Amazon in a month.
One of the best ways this marketplace works well for everyone involved (COMC, buyers and sellers) is through flipping. I’ll give you an example. This card which you can see I have is the only one listed on the site in NM condition. Yesterday there were five copies available, four by one seller and one by another. I submitted offers on all of them because I like this player and think his cards will sell well once baseball season gets in full swing. Plus autographed jersey cards are a fast nickel in the modern card market, as long as the player’s good and the set is decent quality. After browsing both sellers’ ports to find a few other cards I liked, and a bit of negotiation with the more stubborn of the two sellers, my offers were accepted and now I own five copies of this card.
I will have two copies shipped to me to sell on eBay and hope to sell the other 3 copies one at a time on COMC. COMC took a percentage of each sale when the sellers accepted my offers, and they will take a cut again when the card sells at my new, higher price. Multiply this by tens of thousands of transactions every day and you have big business. COMC has really become a platform where prices change in real-time, sometimes beyond all rationality, if a player is on a hot streak or setting some kind of record. Because you can reprice so easily, a lot of times flippers buy at $6 to reprice at $10, or buy at $1 to reprice at $1.99. I like the platform a lot, but I enjoy living my life and don’t want to live on COMC all the time, so I try to double my money with most flips. But I have also begun to realize that when you’re dealing in volume, even a buck or two profit can be worth it sometimes. Of course I’d like to make more, but with thousands of cards in my port, there will inevitably be some duds and sometimes it’s best to just keep it moving.
COMC is not a perfect company by any means, and some of their problems are a little ridiculous. They have a tendency to get backed up with shipping delays, like right now where it takes 2+ months to get cards shipped to you unless you pay extra for rushed shipping which is basically priority mail prices x2. It was even worse during the pandemic and their customer service is very hit or miss. Some of the reps I’ve dealt with are very helpful and really cool to message with. But I think other departments like processing have a lot more turnover, which can lead to problems.
A lot of people in the card world complain about COMC, especially the old timers who remember when fees were cheaper and communication was better. I’ve only been selling on the site since 2022, so I don’t know about all that. But your podcast taught me a certain way of looking at things which I try to apply to COMC, and everything in life. Best not to worry about things I can’t control or hypotheticals. Change is going to happen whether I want it to or not. Figure out how to embrace what’s different and find what works for me. I don’t sweat the small stuff with COMC and just focus on the big picture of selling and trying to keep my profits as consistent as I can. Some weeks, that means buying cards at prices where they’re a steal and then I flip them or get them shipped to me to sell on eBay. Other weeks (like this one) I run a 30% off sale in preparation for the processing fees on my most recent shipment which will see the cards uploaded to my account by March 22nd. I price those cards as they post and the cycle continues.
Sorry that happened, but it never got through so I dont see it. Email me and ill post it.
This is an exciting time for me as it’s cashing in on the many, many hours I spent buying and selling and building my reselling business during the pandemic. I have built up enough of a financial buffer from the last few months (mostly focused on monthly eBay auctions and my consignment sales) that I am able to shift focus like this.
As much as I appreciate people who are super efficient with their small stores, there is certainly a value to having a large inventory. Everything sells eventually. We just never know what will sell each day. Sounds like your large card inventory is the same.
How does COMC process the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of cards that people send in? Are there just rows of hundreds of people taking photos and listing each card? How is it profitable when many cards sell for <$5?
Can I create a system for listing bulk card lots and the other random weird stuff I’ve accumulated which works for me as well as listing a pile of individual cards does? What kind of income would this type of eBay inventory generate?
I think the answer is to out your time into what you enjoy. You’re clearly good at finding and selling baseball cards. Do you get the same joy finding random hard goods?
You also know what it’s like to change how your business operates, which I think many people are reluctant to do, and you’re careful to avoid burnout. And you don’t assume you know everything.
I think a lot of long time eBay sellers would do well running other businesses since an online store is a great low-risk bootcamp.
The risks are certainly much greater renovating and running these cafes. Meatspace locations cant be turned on and off like eBay. People depend on paychecks. Mortgages have to be paid. But the rewards are different if successful.
Your move to consignment a couple years ago was such a smart move. It’s nice to have that consistency. Do you ever imagine a time when you just purchase inventory on eBay, but then send it all into consignment?
