Quote:
Originally Posted by seanrs1
So despite all the negative comments I sent over 1200 baseball cards to COMC this year. It took them nearly 3-4 months to add my cards to the site (current year and 3 week). I have sold precisely 159 cards and price my cards in general on the low (or the lowest) and most are lower than ebay comps. My question is if COMC had their stuff together and could ship out cards in a timely manner would the cards be selling faster and closer to ebay comps? What was it like in the past before they were overwhelmed? Did cards sell faster and closer to Ebay comps?
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Hi Sean,
First off, sorry for my advice on COMC last fall. Obviously, if I'd seen the fiasco of the spring coming I wouldn't have advised you to send cards in.
I agree with the advice that cards used to be closer to eBay comps - and hopefully they will sort the shipping out and it will get that way again. One thing I had to train myself out of on eBay comps was only looking at sales prices.
As an example, I sold a Machado 270 factory variation RC on COMC this morning for 12.35 offer accepted. Ignoring one with surface and corner wear, the best available price on eBay is 14.95 making this look at OK but a bit meh price.
However, if I look at actual sales of that card in the last 3 months on eBay, I see that (again excluding shipping) the prices realized were 0.99 (as part of a lot of 3 Machado RCs), 1.99, 2.76, 4.25 (PSA 8), 4.99, 5.00, 5.50, 10.13, 12.50, 13.00, 13.50 (free shipping so actually less), 13.50, 13.99 (with best offer accepted and free shipping), 14.95, 15.00, 15.50. When you look at it like that, there are only 4 sales where the seller likely netted $1 or more than me (fewer if I spend the COMC credit rather than cashing out) and looking at the dates none since May 16th. Which makes this a price I'd take any day of the week.
With that said, there clearly are cards where COMC is way under eBay at the moment. Personally, I'm taking the approach that if I don't like the price I'm not pricing the card for now. We're into the slow period of the year for baseball anyway, so on those cards no harm in seeing where we are next spring when hopefully more people will be trusting COMC again.
For me, I'll stick with COMC because even if it leaves some money on the table on average it is way less hassle. Most of my sales are flips, but I've added about 950 cards over the course of the last year and have sold about 500 of them, while I've got round to selling fewer than 10 cards lifetime on eBay. In some ways. And I'm pretty confident at least 2/3 of the rest will be gone by this time next year without the need for crazy discounting.