All I want to do is talk about COMC

[mjohnatgt]

Originally Posted by Dunkaccino

I have a rushed order estimated to be shipped today (1/17) yet there's thousands and thousands ahead of my order.. didn't Tim Getsch state in a sportscardslive interview all rushed orders missing their dates would be refunded?

And today's a Federal Holiday, so I'm not sure if they count printing the label and putting it on their loading dock as "shipped". If they miss the date, notify them on the Support button that your Rushed package was late. I sincerely doubt they will refund anything automatically.

[wizardsleeve12]

Originally Posted by Dunkaccino

I have a rushed order estimated to be shipped today (1/17) yet there's thousands and thousands ahead of my order.. didn't Tim Getsch state in a sportscardslive interview all rushed orders missing their dates would be refunded?
I am sure this isnt automatic and I have to go through hoops.. I'd have just done the standard option to get it in 11 months if I knew their dates meant nothing

They don't show orders ahead of yours. They show CARDS ahead of your order. Since today is a holiday I would contact them tomorrow or Wednesday if there isn't an update.

[BobCollects]

checkoutmydeals, thanks for the detailed advice about e-Pack and COMC.

Unrelated question, why are prices for some cards listed in blue and others in green with a little price tag icon? I took a screenshot.

[aguinness]

Originally Posted by BobCollects

checkoutmydeals, thanks for the detailed advice about e-Pack and COMC.

Unrelated question, why are prices for some cards listed in blue and others in green with a little price tag icon? I took a screenshot.

Green means that one of the cards available is on sale.

[BobCollects]

Thanks. I could not for the life of me figure it out.

[ThePatriotWay]

Originally Posted by BobCollects

Oh boy, it sounds like flipping on COMC takes a lot of work.

To be successful at it, yes (time consuming).
To relist a card for a minor profit, no (easy to relist).

My success with flipping on COMC was somewhere in the middle. At times, I had good flips (some very quick). However, the majority of my attempted flips sat around forever until I eventually decided to just sell my entire port all at once. Either, I was targeting the wrong cards or I'm not patient enough (probably both). COVID drama with the hobby certainty did not help.

[checkoutmydeals]

My success with flipping on COMC was somewhere in the middle. At times, I had good flips (some very quick). However, the majority of my attempted flips sat around forever until I eventually decided to just sell my entire port all at once. Either, I was targeting the wrong cards or I'm not patient enough (probably both). COVID drama with the hobby certainty did not help.

Suppose there is a sports card which was 1 cent in 1952, and is $1.8 million today. That averages out to a 2% return per month.

If the selling tools and marketplace opportunities we have today had been available since 1952, it would have been far easier for someone in 1952 to increase the value of their collection by 2% per month through buying, selling and trading than it would have been for them to guess which baseball card in 1952 would sell for $1.8 million today.

It may be possible to do this with COMC, but it's like watching paint dry.

Suppose your port has 100 cards which you paid $5 each for, and you have listed at $10. One card sells every 10 days. So you have $30 in sales. You pay $1.50 in transaction costs on the sales, and $1 in rent at the end of the month. So now you have $27.50 in your account. You buy 5 more cards for $5 each and relist for $10 each.

So, you had 100 cards. Now you have 103 cards, plus $2.50 in your slush fund. If you keep up your pace for another 10 years, you'll have over 6200 cards in your account with a total asking price of $62,000.

A lot of people just flat-out wouldn't care. They don't really want 6200 cards all that much, and if they factor in their time and effort, it wouldn't be worthwhile on a dollar per hour basis.

The only way it really works is if you actually like the cards, or at least, you like the thing you could trade the cards into. Maybe you reach a point where siphon off some of your profits to buy cards for your personal collection. Every month you take physical delivery of a $100, $300, $500 card that actually means something to you. Or maybe you blow out the whole port for $30,000 after expenses and use that money to buy a $30,000 card.

But the actual process of doing all this is a grind. It's like watching paint dry. And on a dollar per hour basis, you're probably better off doing something else. It only works if you actually enjoy the process of buying and selling, and if you enjoy owning the cards in the first place. It also helps if you enjoy helping other collectors to meet their goals- converting cards they don't want into things they do want - cards, credit, cash.

[mjohnatgt]

The other thing about flipping that takes time is regularly watching the newly listed items and % off sales. Many times underpriced cards are snapped up within minutes of being listed. But that's how you get $500 cards for $10 or $50. You also just have to know more about cards than the others on the site. I have some sets I scour every single card front and back looking for oddball variations to find the times when a $2 card is actually worth $300 just by being printed on a different type of cardstock or ink color. Or if you know the Topps Heritage gimmick super short prints and buy them when the seller doesn't know how valuable they are. But in doing so, you also run the risk of the seller getting COMC to reverse the sale if you immediately relist a card you bought for $20 at $350.
I am one of the many COMC sellers that rarely checks eBay comps on cards I'm looking to buy. Mainly because COMC is a BIN store whereas most sales on eBay are auctions, which can end much lower than a retail buyer would pay. COMC has, on average, much nicer/clearer scans than ebay, and you can combine shipping or ship internationally. So even if a card sells for $2 at ebay auction, it might still be worth $5-7 on COMC just because you have a different group of buyers.

[BoofBonser26]

COMC newbie. I switched to Advanced Selling Mode to see what it looks like, get my feet wet. And the cheapest cards I see are still 30 cents. I went back to my profile and it says I'm in ASM, not basic. What might I be doing wrong?

[mjohnatgt]

Originally Posted by BoofBonser26

COMC newbie. I switched to Advanced Selling Mode to see what it looks like, get my feet wet. And the cheapest cards I see are still 30 cents. I went back to my profile and it says I'm in ASM, not basic. What might I be doing wrong?

Did you sort by Lowest Price? Especially in hockey or nonsports? Maybe your pages are cached and you need to clear it. Or sometimes COMC has lag in updating prices, so you just have to wait a few hours to see them.

[BobCollects]

Try logging out and logging back in. I had the same issue.

EDIT: A word of warning, COMC logs me out automatically after an unknown amount of time. If I have a window open, the prices shown after I'm logged out are NOT the Advanced Selling Mode prices. Just transferred nine cards from e-Pack that I thought were selling for $0.50 or more only to discover I was logged out. When I logged back in, the Advanced Selling Mode prices were $0.02 to $0.05.

Live and learn!

[BoofBonser26]

Originally Posted by mjohnatgt

Did you sort by Lowest Price? Especially in hockey or nonsports? Maybe your pages are cached and you need to clear it. Or sometimes COMC has lag in updating prices, so you just have to wait a few hours to see them.

Originally Posted by BobCollects

Try logging out and logging back in. I had the same issue.

EDIT: A word of warning, COMC logs me out automatically after an unknown amount of time. If I have a window open, the prices shown after I'm logged out are NOT the Advanced Selling Mode prices. Just transferred nine cards from e-Pack that I thought were selling for $0.50 or more only to discover I was logged out. When I logged back in, the Advanced Selling Mode prices were $0.02 to $0.05.

Live and learn!

Looks like it was just a matter of waiting more time - nickel cards galore now. Thanks.

[JustMoe]

Originally Posted by wizardsleeve12

They don't show orders ahead of yours. They show CARDS ahead of your order. Since today is a holiday I would contact them tomorrow or Wednesday if there isn't an update.

Just because today's a holiday, don't assume COMC employees get the day off...there's no mail pickup, so that's why shipments didn't go out today...chances are, they didn't take the holiday into account when generating your shipment date.

[RobDerhak]

I have a shipment that I requested Economy on 12/16. Initial order estimation was 1/12...then it went to 1/16...now it is 1/20

The items ahead of my order has progressively gotten larger...just today it went from <40k to 40,672.

So frustrating that they claim they are all caught up on shipping requests...I presume they are using the revised dates as data points to be able to claim that? So shady and unnecessary.

[BobCollects]

How do the COMC Challenges to earn History Points work? Whenever I try to start a challenge, the page just reloads.

[mjohnatgt]

Originally Posted by BobCollects

How do the COMC Challenges to earn History Points work? Whenever I try to start a challenge, the page just reloads.

You have to do them when there is less than 100% completed. They open up new ones at 4pm PT on Wednesdays and Sundays.

[BobCollects]

Ah. That's going to be annoying to try to time correctly.

[mjohnatgt]

Originally Posted by BobCollects

Ah. That's going to be annoying to try to time correctly.

Well, they are usually open for a few hours, sometimes into the next day.

[checkoutmydeals]

IMO, the challenges only make sense if you want to help the community by improving the site, or if you see the challenges as a fun activity similar to playing a video game.

They make very little sense from a cost / benefit perspective. They're a holdover from an earlier time. When COMC first started, they had some sort of agreement with Beckett that COMC could use Beckett's card descriptions and prices. At some point, this agreement was cancelled. So COMC had to scramble to build its own card descriptions and catalog values.

They did this with the help of the COMC users. There were millions of COMC challenges available at that time. If you did a certain number by a certain date, you would get a little shield next to your name. They also gave you a History Point for each challenge completed, but bizarrely, the History Points disappeared after 30 days whether you used them or not.

IMO, History Points can be mildly useful, but not very. If you have one, it will reveal the total number of a card that have been shipped to buyers, and the highest price anyone in the history of the site has ever paid for a copy of the card, including pro-rated postage and handling. But it doesn't tell you when that sale was, or the circumstances.
Maybe a hot rookie's card sold for $90 one time in 2010, but then they broke their arm and they're now working at a car wash, and you'd be lucky to get 10 cents. Maybe a card sold for $15, but it was to the player's grandmother who lives overseas, and she paid 25 cents plus $14.75 shipping and handling.

People have requested many times that COMC give them access to better sales information, such as the time and price of the last several sales. Personally, I would love to see some sort of sales rank, and to be able to sort a search by sales rank (either as a raw number, or as a percentage). Amazon doesn't list completed sales prices, but they give sales ranks for items, and it works reasonably well.

[Budler]

Originally Posted by checkoutmydeals

IMO, the challenges only make sense if you want to help the community by improving the site, or if you see the challenges as a fun activity similar to playing a video game.

They make very little sense from a cost / benefit perspective. They're a holdover from an earlier time. When COMC first started, they had some sort of agreement with Beckett that COMC could use Beckett's card descriptions and prices. At some point, this agreement was cancelled. So COMC had to scramble to build its own card descriptions and catalog values.

They did this with the help of the COMC users. There were millions of COMC challenges available at that time. If you did a certain number by a certain date, you would get a little shield next to your name. They also gave you a History Point for each challenge completed, but bizarrely, the History Points disappeared after 30 days whether you used them or not.

IMO, History Points can be mildly useful, but not very. If you have one, it will reveal the total number of a card that have been shipped to buyers, and the highest price anyone in the history of the site has ever paid for a copy of the card, including pro-rated postage and handling. But it doesn't tell you when that sale was, or the circumstances.
Maybe a hot rookie's card sold for $90 one time in 2010, but then they broke their arm and they're now working at a car wash, and you'd be lucky to get 10 cents. Maybe a card sold for $15, but it was to the player's grandmother who lives overseas, and she paid 25 cents plus $14.75 shipping and handling.

People have requested many times that COMC give them access to better sales information, such as the time and price of the last several sales. Personally, I would love to see some sort of sales rank, and to be able to sort a search by sales rank (either as a raw number, or as a percentage). Amazon doesn't list completed sales prices, but they give sales ranks for items, and it works reasonably well.

Just love it when I look at sale price: They show, example: 10 cards sold, up to $2.75 So now all rest of the cards are listed at $2.75 or higher. They did not show a card that I sold was at .50

We have requested many things many times to help improve the site and never heard back from them.

Like the challenges they have ask for suggestions and really fall flat on both areas now days with replying what is really going on.

[Swipe79]

How does everyone think the economy on COMC is doing right now?

I've been primarily selling on eBay for the last year but the fatigue of listing/shipping on the lower end stuff is starting to get to me.

I'm contemplating giving COMC another shot on a limited basis...maybe some older basketball and other non-baseball stuff I don't really want to keep tabs on.

[ark8085]

Originally Posted by Swipe79

How does everyone think the economy on COMC is doing right now?

I've been primarily selling on eBay for the last year but the fatigue of listing/shipping on the lower end stuff is starting to get to me.

I'm contemplating giving COMC another shot on a limited basis...maybe some older basketball and other non-baseball stuff I don't really want to keep tabs on.

I would say look at how they are pushing eBay auctions, that would tell you that they just aren’t selling things on Comc as much as in the past.

I just sold a port at a huge loss because the cards were not selling at 70 percent off, so I sold them at a 92 percent discount.

I’m seeing some decent cards at fair prices listed on comc. Looks like there are some buying opportunities at least.

[justrun7]

Sales have been strong for me. December was my 4th best month ever thanks to the auctions, and I didn't even sell a card over $100. January is only $100 behind already and will likely surpass tonight. Looking through my sales I am selling more cards on COMC but I ran more of the expensive ones that I had sitting through auctions so the higher priced ones for the most part are eBay sales. I have been very happy with my sales lately.

[mc1]

September - November were the worst months I had since late 2019. Sales started picking up in December. January has been great.

[mjohnatgt]

Originally Posted by BobCollects

Ah. That's going to be annoying to try to time correctly.

Available now.