All I want to do is talk about COMC

[tommyfro21]

Originally Posted by mjohnatgt

Yes it does. Or they now have a "? Support" button at the bottom of every browser page. Maybe the bot can log your issue?

I absolutely hate that support button when using my phone in landscape.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[checkoutmydeals]

Quick update for anyone interested:

Around June 4, I submitted about 1200 cards for 16-week, 50 cent processing. These are the first cards I've submitted for that level.

The batches are due October 5. In the last 2 days, about 290 hit my account.

I don't know if this is typical, but it does seem likely that with "16 week" processing, COMC has a better chance of underpromising and overdelivering than the other way around.

[boxbuster7]

Originally Posted by tommyfro21

I absolutely hate that support button when using my phone in landscape.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

That support button is a fail

[Saraste]

Originally Posted by checkoutmydeals

Quick update for anyone interested:

Around June 4, I submitted about 1200 cards for 16-week, 50 cent processing. These are the first cards I've submitted for that level.

The batches are due October 5. In the last 2 days, about 290 hit my account.

I don't know if this is typical, but it does seem likely that with "16 week" processing, COMC has a better chance of underpromising and overdelivering than the other way around.

This is great news. Yet they still have not finished my 3 week order I sent in the day before they went to 16 weeks (just a coincidence that I sent it in then). I sent in about 500 cards and there are still about 40 outstanding.

[sthoemke]

Originally Posted by Saraste

This is great news. Yet they still have not finished my 3 week order I sent in the day before they went to 16 weeks (just a coincidence that I sent it in then). I sent in about 500 cards and there are still about 40 outstanding.

I have about 400 due from various 3-Week Guaranteed submissions. Estimate dates are about a month away, but I'm sure they will keep pushing those dates forward.

[JustinVerlander07]

Originally Posted by checkoutmydeals

Quick update for anyone interested:

Around June 4, I submitted about 1200 cards for 16-week, 50 cent processing. These are the first cards I've submitted for that level.

The batches are due October 5. In the last 2 days, about 290 hit my account.

I don't know if this is typical, but it does seem likely that with "16 week" processing, COMC has a better chance of underpromising and overdelivering than the other way around.

Had a 16 week myself due 9/13. It's 90% done at this point. It's so ridiculous though that these are going so early while they still aren't finishing over due submissions.

[PostBaloney]

My inventory keeps growing, monthly sales keep declining. Up to 4k cards now, last month only sold $466

COMC shipping failure + everybody traveling now/declining card market interest + PSA mess = sad times for my COMC account

[Dalston]

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?

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.

[alexlazarevich]

Originally Posted by PostBaloney

My inventory keeps growing, monthly sales keep declining. Up to 4k cards now, last month only sold $466

COMC shipping failure + everybody traveling now/declining card market interest + PSA mess = sad times for my COMC account

Same for me.

I mostly do NBA, RCs of Prizm Optic and the like, and have tons of duplicates.

Items in Inventory 3,493
Total SRP $25,384.50
Items w/o SRP 369
Total Asking Price $7,979.36
Items For Sale 342
Items Not for Sale 3,151

I run a continuous 20% sale and try to be the lowest on COMC. My last 11 day sale ending today, I've only sold $76.62. In that same time I've added $600 to my account to buy more.

I'm banking on COMC turning things around and buyers coming back in gangbusters. But my fingers are crossed and I'm a little nervous about it. I also recently started to get into baseball, hoping to increase my exposure to different buyers.

[Saraste]

This is a test. I just requested 412 cards to be shipped home. I am using economy as none of the cards are of any great value. I am hoping to see them by the end of the year. Let the clock begin...

[sthoemke]

Originally Posted by Saraste

This is a test. I just requested 412 cards to be shipped home. I am using economy as none of the cards are of any great value. I am hoping to see them by the end of the year. Let the clock begin...

How many items are ahead of your order?

[pfb11]

Originally Posted by tommyfro21

I absolutely hate that support button when using my phone in landscape.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

it definitely adds 10-20% lag time when loading/scrolling now

[mjohnatgt]

Originally Posted by pfb11

it definitely adds 10-20% lag time when loading/scrolling now

Which phone browser? I don't see any issue with it on Chrome on my Samsung.

[scotthenrichs]

I’ve got an Olympic card I want to auction off during the Olympics in four weeks, when should I hit the “send to auction” button?

[mjohnatgt]

Not sure if you can time it like that. Maybe email them at auctions@comc.com and ask about it. Is the card already Elite scanned? If so, wait a bit; if not, I'd submit it now and just hope it takes a month.

[mjohnatgt]

Latest Tim Getsch interview on Youtube's Sports Cards Live was live-streamed Saturday night. Mainly a question/answer from the chat box.
Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XjjWQmto0M

I'll take a look and update anything interesting on this post.

6:20) Tim addresses customer service and refund requests taking so long. 12,000 messages in queue at some point; now 6500. Addressing 70% of emails within 24 hours with goal of answering every email in 24 hours by end of month. Refunds only being done by specific employees upon approval process, some going all the way up to Tim. He tries to do them at least weekly. From later in the interview (1:00:00), once emails are all being handled in 24-hours, they will use the Support button to open up live chat with customer service.

9:00) When are you getting toploaders? Big shipment coming in 2-3 weeks and will be inspected before turning back on ability to purchase toploaders on site. Multiple shipments coming in, some from suppliers, plus BCW and Cardboard Gold. He expects to have them available by the National.

10:40) Number of cards ahead of you recently added to shipment page so you can follow along with progress/lack thereof. Economy orders from February are taking 2 or so months longer than they were originally projected.

12:40) eBay auction not paid for, been locked for 8 months. 9 emails not responded to. Tim says to contact him directly on social media (specifically on Instagram @timgetsch).

14:50) Do you regret not suspending orders like PSA and SGC did? Still doesn't think COMC should have cut off shipping of cards already on site. Could have cut off incoming submissions, but did not. Currently have 235 full-time equivalents on staff. Almost all new hires moved to shipping team, and some additional to customer service. He believes current processing/shipping time quotes are accurate or achievable (for new orders).

17:50) How can you possibly defend not shipping an order in 5 months? Could not grow company fast enough to keep up with demand, and fell months behind. Tim says they're studying their mistakes and trying to find improvement. Realized their processes when the company was small was insufficient now with the growth. Started creating "squads" to handle specific shipping types to catch up. Express orders shipped out on time now, Rushed now also has a squad to get those caught up. That means there are now dedicated people catching up basic shipments. Gives shipping crews a team mentality that can celebrate small wins (Dave Ramsey debt snowball like?). Tim mentions that having multiple buildings with multiple teams trying to coordinate between 6am and 10pm shifts was untenable and unnecessary. Rather than growing the size of those teams making it harder to accomplish the workload, they're going to throw more teams at the areas they're lagging on at any given time.

25:00) Still can't get rid of the random cards accidentally added to my account from another user. How often are cards misplaced? Tim said some new hires on processing team were not following rules and cards were getting uploaded to wrong accounts. "Reach out to customer service or me directly and I'll make sure this gets corrected." New feature being implemented that should make this "impossible to happen."

26:45) If you had cancelled your eBay listings, you could have caught up and not pissed off loyal customers. Our tactic was to change the expected delivery timeline on eBay out to a month and that limited our sales on their site; now two weeks handling time. "If we had completely cut off eBay sales, maybe at this point we only be five months behind instead of six months behind."

31:30) Canadian submissions: how long to get Remote Storage removed? Taking about two weeks to move cards across border into US warehouse. However, cards that were submitted in a large batch due farther away (like 16-week submissions where some pop early) were kept with their submission while those were still being processed, and may take much longer.

35:00) Tim didn't want to increase the size of the processing/identification team too fast, as that's something that needs more training. "We are dealing with your undocumented cards: a box of random cards that you send us. We do not want to make any mistakes there." So having only the 3-week service didn't give COMC enough time to ramp their new employees up to properly scan and list your cards in a timeline that made accuracy possible.
*editor's note: I probably submit five hundred error requests a month to them for free, to fix problems with their database or on individual card identifications. And they're still RIDDLED with errors: no signatures being listed as silver sig variations, gold signatures being listed as silvers (at 10% of the price), vintage cards not properly shown as rare parallels/variants, Magic cards in wrong sets: 4th as Revised, Unlimited as Revised, Alphas as Betas. They may be well-trained, but still mess up thousands a month. Many of these items can't easily be identified just through scans (gold/silver sigs) and may require point-of-scanning identification for the proper set/parallel.


44:00) Are you going to have cards sent out to grading companies again? Why not accept all grading company slabs? Tim: bulk grading services are effectively turned off at almost every company. We accept 7 or so companies and will look into more if you ask us.

49:00) I bought cards and the order was cancelled a month later with COMC saying they were out of stock. However they were still listed on site with the same serial numbers. These were probably bought by flippers and repriced. Sometimes COMC tries to buy the card from the flipper to fulfill the eBay sale. (ed note: really? never happened to me)

51:30) Has the IRS contacted you about reporting sales to them so they can try to Texas (sic, "tax us")? No answer to this question.

52:00) Brian Gray (Leaf) asked why Tim doesn't break off the auction side of the house to Texas so WA State can focus on BINs/BOs? This would hurt the COMC accounts who buy auctions on eBay and want them shipped with their BIN cards. Similarly, it would lead to less overall sales on eBay from people combining shipping once they win an auction.

Pro Tip: If you want to get a bunch of items bought through eBay at a fast shipping level for the entire package, buy a cheap auction item and check out the whole lot with it. The entire package will be upgraded to 1-day handling. However, Tim mentions that it would still be cheaper/faster to check out through COMC for all those BIN/BO cards because the S/H is built into the eBay price. (ed note: sale prices on COMC are also not ported over to eBay, so you could save a ton more)

56:00) Is the automation damaging cards? How about packaging with just penny loaders? Only two or three cards out of 800K have been noticeably damaged by the new process. Express orders DO NOT go through the automated sorting machine. Hopefully the new shipments of toploaders will allow them to not get damaged in shipping, but if they already did, contact COMC and they will "take care of it."

58:00) COMC is planning to do some kind of walk-through video to show their processing.

58:50) New SUPPORT button is to help them locate problems that were being lost in the email chain (spam filter, user forgot to click send?). So if you're not getting a response from Customer Service, hit them up on the support button on COMC's website. Also for "self-service support" which I believe is the term for a bot looking stuff up for you based on keyword searches through an FAQ.

1:02:30) Any update on having a branch location for ONLY mailbox services, not in WA State for state tax purposes? There are "plans", but they're still working on the weeds. Might be in Portland OR within the next year.

Rapid fire segment:
They will be at the National accepting cards for submission. 12 attending from COMC; half in customer service/marketing, half in accepting submissions. Once the backlogs are complete, they hope to go out to the larger national card shows.
If you have cards you really want to make sure get in toploaders (that were not purchased for more than $50 on COMC directly), wait until they enable toploaders again.
Why doesn't COMC use the low-priced eBay shipping option? They do not let all the employees directly use the COMC ebay account; which is the only place they can automate printing up a shipping label. COMC looks like they're trying to go direct to the USPS to also use it; cannot be exclusive to eBay. (Ed note: I'm actually shocked Tim would do this bulk cheap shipping option, since so much of their fees are tied into the shipping/handling costs. But maybe they've baked all those costs into the BINs on eBay already that it would be transparent)
They're also looking into third party shipping that would give tracking to foreign countries at a much cheaper rate than USPS right now.

1:08:50) I heard a rumor that Collector's Holdings (Nat Turner et al) is buying COMC; comments? Tim has not heard that rumor; they have been approached by a few VCs or companies for investments. Tim is very concerned about giving up some of his control of the company. Currently that investment talk is not a priority, more of a distraction. "I didn't do this for the money, so you better give me a LOT of money to give up COMC." Off the cuff answer: More than $100M to buy out.
He would rather allow customers to invest to make the service better. There are some things he'd like to add on the order of $5-10 million, which could be crowd-sourced through investments.

1:14) Back to eBay discussions. I think I'll end my recap here unless something really interesting gets discussed.

Nobody seems to have mentioned the 100 millionth item chase.

My biggest list of unanswered questions:
1) Why were they charging sales tax for states that didn't require it?
2) Who is their collectibles insurance under?
3) What happened to their attempt to gain investors / venture capital 6 months ago? ANSWERED ABOVE at 1:08:50.
4) Why is there no way to attach death beneficiary information to your account?
5) Has their "we are a site to trade cards for store credit, not sell them" ever been successfully or unsuccessfully claimed to the IRS?
6) When are the phone lines getting turned back on? (Seemed like about Aug 1 based on the previous online interview)
7) Why isn't COMC researching the print runs of ePack achievement cards? Low-hanging fruit that adds value to the card-owner.
8) I know you guys keep asking about "COMC App", so I'll put this here for you. ANSWERED at 1:23:30. No app (or other easier ways to buy cards) until shipping and processing are under normal timelines.

[Jim's cards]

Originally Posted by mjohnatgt

Latest Tim Getsch interview on Youtube's Sports Cards Live was live-streamed Saturday night. Mainly a question/answer from the chat box.
Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XjjWQmto0M

Thanks for posting. Seems like he's admitting without admitting that Ebay has alot of say with Comc's business model which has negatively affected the site. That includes ticket prioritization, shipping, card uploads etc. 2 month backlog on economy wasn't entirely surprising either although not in love with how some things have to go directly to Tim, he shouldn't be hands on like that anymore and have to wonder if that is impacting timing too. Hopefully they get this all sorted out.

[boxbuster7]

Thanks for that summary, mjohn

[mjohnatgt]

Originally Posted by boxbuster7

Thanks for that summary, mjohn

Make sure to read the updates. I added a lot more since you posted.

[Saraste]

Originally Posted by sthoemke

How many items are ahead of your order?

1.25 million.

[Saraste]

Originally Posted by mjohnatgt

Make sure to read the updates. I added a lot more since you posted.

Thank you John. My concern is number one in the unanswered questions. As you know, we have not had the internet tax prior to July 1. I have added credit multiple times and have been charged tax ever since this whole thing started. If they want to give me credit for the amount of tax they falsely charged me, I am good with that. I know I am not alone in this as it has been brought up by others before.

[discostu]

If Tim had credibility...

[KhalDrogo]

Soft ball interview. Bunch of answers that are either flat out lies or reflective of Tim’s lack of awareness about what is going on with his company.

[37Jetson]

Originally Posted by Saraste

This is a test. I just requested 412 cards to be shipped home. I am using economy as none of the cards are of any great value. I am hoping to see them by the end of the year. Let the clock begin...

You didn't specify the end of which year....

[37Jetson]

Originally Posted by mjohnatgt

Tim is very concerned about giving up some of his control of the company.

Tim should focus on selling Julia's share of the business to provide her with more time to Social Entrepeneur.