All I want to do is talk about COMC

[Soxrule111]

Originally Posted by cruiserdaddy7

So many of these types of posts nowadays. People were full of excitement when eBay partnership announced, now many are leaving.

COMC... you had great momentum going for you. You wrote about decreases in fees and instead raised fees. Instead of using ebay to grow your business, you gouged your customers by charging 36% to sell on ebay and get paid. That's outrageous. Seeing the current trend, your greed may do you in.

I know I'm pretty much done on the selling side of things on COMC, just kinda sad. Was such a great site.

[Jonathon M]

My eBay listings have dropped from approx 5100 to 4300 in about one week. What is going on with it?

[chezball]

Originally Posted by Jonathon M

My eBay listings have dropped from approx 5100 to 4300 in about one week. What is going on with it?

Wondering if it has to to with trying to save money on listing fees.

[cruiserdaddy7]

Originally Posted by Jonathon M

My eBay listings have dropped from approx 5100 to 4300 in about one week. What is going on with it?

Are they expiring and then not being relisted?

[donaldz]

Originally Posted by Soxrule111

I know I'm pretty much done on the selling side of things on COMC, just kinda sad. Was such a great site.

To be honest, now is the perfect time to buy what floats your boat. Buying to sell isn't the greatest idea, but everything is so affordable now.

I'm pretty sure that the big sellers liquidating has trickled all the way down. Everyone is selling for way lower and it works out great for buyers.

Baseball cards always dip now (aside from playoff teams) but everything is cheap. Hockey, football, basketball. All of them.

With that said, the tin-foil hat wearing part of me worries that these huge sellers got advanced notice about impending doom. If COMC was going down, it makes total sense to let the people most affected by it know first b/c those are the people with enough skin in the game to sue.

[JustMoe]

Originally Posted by donaldz

To be honest, now is the perfect time to buy what floats your boat. Buying to sell isn't the greatest idea, but everything is so affordable now.

I'm pretty sure that the big sellers liquidating has trickled all the way down. Everyone is selling for way lower and it works out great for buyers.

Baseball cards always dip now (aside from playoff teams) but everything is cheap. Hockey, football, basketball. All of them.

With that said, the tin-foil hat wearing part of me worries that these huge sellers got advanced notice about impending doom. If COMC was going down, it makes total sense to let the people most affected by it know first b/c those are the people with enough skin in the game to sue.

There's no such thing as "impending doom" at COMC...it's always clear skies and smooth sailing there.

Seriously, it's almost like a cult mindset; the true believers don't see a downside and rarely talk about any kind of negativity. If the end comes, they won't know it until it's too late.

[Swipe79]

I only see one seller liquidating right now and he let everyone know why in this very thread.

All I know is I am buying up a lot of solid flips and making money. I'd say half of what I made last month was on flips from cards purchased in the last two months.

[Triplelutz42]

I post this as an honest question/perspective, not with the assumption that I have the right answer.

After reading hundreds of pages of posts about COMC and talking with several individuals it seems the majority of the negativity comes from people who were around at the beginning. The stories I hear tell of a time when submitting and flipping cards on COMC was a license to print money. Now it seems times have changed a bit and what it takes to sell at volume have changed?

1) I discovered COMC on Christmas eve 2015, about a month after i began collecting again. I put ten bucks on and flipped my way into hundreds of delivered cards, hundreds of cards in my port, and about 20 buck over the last 1.5 years. At this years National I dropped off my first submission of 300ish (minimal rejected fwiw) and have since submitted another 500, and am getting ready to send an additional 300 or so. I've been very pleased with both my flips and my submitted sales.

2) I have other friends who are "newer" to COMC and have done very well submitting and selling.

3) I can't see a near term scenario where COMC is in any kind of trouble? Ebay sales are big, the Upper Deck epack partnership is a positive(at least for upper deck and COMC), and they have a ton of opportunity in other product lines if they decide to scale. Think fulfillment for group breakers, using the COMC platform for other non card products, etc. If i could invest I would.

4) Maybe it's not as easy as it used to be to make a quick buck, maybe you have to buy/price differently, maybe you have to submit differently, maybe due to their growth you don't get the handholding or special treatment you used to get, but maybe just maybe if you aren't seeing the results you are looking for you need to adapt?

5) COMC isn't perfect. Communication could improve for sure, a different process for handling "damaged" cards would be nice, building out a team for technological improvements will help, and the way they handle ebay sales for cards listed for under .99 is possibly grounds for a future class action lawsuit, but for Pete's sake there is a lot of entitlement mentality coming from these boards.

In the mean time I'll be happy buying, submitting, and selling and creatively profiting.

[mjohnatgt]

Good points. I have also been on the site about 2.5 years, and never saw the "old" website nor submitted cards for less than a quarter each. I think the main complaints people have is that they've consistently been lied to or ignored. That's just not good customer service. And yes, both your buyers and consignors are customers.
I used to be thrilled to look on COMC; now it feels like I'm just going through the motions. I was enthusiastic when they said "Once we get this eBay beta thing going, we'll REDUCE FEES!!!" And since then, officially, crickets. There still might be some stuff going on in the background, but they've raised the shields and won't respond on social media or here on the boards.

[jrod7290]

I joined in 2012 so I missed the "golden age" of comc. But honestly I haven't experienced the issues many people have. Any time I've reached out to customer service I've had an answer quickly.The damaged cards haven't been a crazy amount either, and my sales have increased much more with the ebay addition. I do think they have suffered some bad press and not being represented here makes people feel ignored. But it's still the best way to move $2-$10 cards that I'm aware of.

[hundley]

Originally Posted by jrod7290

I joined in 2012 so I missed the "golden age" of comc. But honestly I haven't experienced the issues many people have. Any time I've reached out to customer service I've had an answer quickly.The damaged cards haven't been a crazy amount either, and my sales have increased much more with the ebay addition. I do think they have suffered some bad press and not being represented here makes people feel ignored. But it's still the best way to move $2-$10 cards that I'm aware of.

I'm generally left assuming that these profoundly negative experiences aren't happening as often as it may appear from looking at the forums. If you go by what people on the forums say, you're pretty much guaranteed to get hit with at least 20% of any shipment you send getting damaged, presumably by them or by careless exterior postal handlers. Because of this negative press I held off shipping anything to COMC for a several year period of time and accumulated an amount of cards which added up to by far the largest shipment I've ever sent to them. I needed to move these and eventually buckled and sent them in, and less than 1% of the cards were reported as damaged, with at least half of that being cards that I knew were damaged and sent them anyway. Sure, that number is more than it used to be back in the golden days of COMC, but not so much that it was worth deterring me from shipping all together. At that amount, I can chalk it up to them being a little more picky about condition now, or me not spotting damage when I was sorting through these items.

The problem is that you should EXPECT a reactive service, cards processed and shipped carefully, and functional customer service, so it isn't at all noteworthy when these things do happen. You aren't seeing people as often posting their good experiences as their bad ones, or when they do, you're more likely to see people engaging in conversation about the bad. And hell, you're more likely to remember the bad than the good. People are going to scroll right past this post because it doesn't provide much in the way of enlightening or memorable anecdotal evidence, and that's fine, but that doesn't mean that the people having bad experiences are necessarily in the majority or that these bad experiences are guaranteed to happen to every user. Those people are just louder and more memorable.

I hope that the constant stream of negative press that this forum continues to generate isn't really actively deterring people from using COMC, because I think most people are going to have a positive experience using it. I've been around since 2010, which I think probably classifies as the golden age, and I can verify that it isn't quite as good as it was then, and they have a lot of areas in dire need of improvement, but I don't think that negates how good of a site it is now. You can buy neat stuff, you can still stuff for a good profit, and they still do the majority of the work for you. As long as that generally remains unchanged, the rest is probably going to be hair-splitting.

Don't let those nay-sayers fool you all. As long as you're approaching the whole experience correctly, this is still an excellent site.

[Branesergen]

Negative people bark the loudest.
Blowout has a lot of negative people.
For every 1 person quitting there are 2 joining. Which will take away from some of the good that people experienced back then. I had my 1st submission processed on Feb 24th 2017 and I love it! 20% cash out sucks but realistically I'm selling dollar cards that I couldn't even sell for a quarter elsewhere. I'll take 50 cents on the dollar for junk. It's just sitting in a box making 0 cents on the dollar otherwise.

[yazevans]

Originally Posted by Branesergen

Negative people bark the loudest.
Blowout has a lot of negative people.

This is very true. I've been on COMC since 2008 and I just broke my record for sales in a year, and its only October 2. I've had a handful of damaged cards with each shipment (never more than 5%, usually far less than that) and most of the stuff I sent for Basic processing is $1 or less cards anyway.

[Soxrule111]

As for the submission damage rates, you guys are doing smaller lots. That might be a safer way to send, but I always try to send 800-1500 per shipment. I swear I had an ENTIRE box come back with issues, why? Because they were all in that box when I sent it in. I find it funny how I send 4x 400 count boxes, and I get 300 damaged cards all back in that box.

[VintageVinny]

As a private company they'll keep their financials to themselves...thank you very much. Which just leaves us to speculate now doesn't it. But make take is this...

Beckett tried to muscle in on them. If you are cash poor, seeing no growth, and/or not having fun...Beckett is your perfect suitor by which to take the money and run. They did NOT do that. Instead they lawyered-up and build a new integration or two, and moved locations. Which tells me that more than likely they are profitable, growing and maybe even (gasp) enjoying the ride.

This is a niche hobby gents. Big money by some standards (plenty of cards I want but can't sniff at) but then again not exactly something where you're going to see Amazon-like growth. So if you just grow your port along with them or add to your PC or make a few bucks...go get em' man. If you are not having fun...bounce. Life is short.

As for me, all I can say is that sales directly hinge on prices. COMC is just like about any other 'market' devised by man. Humans are smart animals, they'll find the deals believe you me. I have some prices way low and am happy to sell at that level and some way high as it is borderline PC or speculation. But overall I'll sell tens of thousands of dollars in cardboard this year and have fun along the way. This is just a case study in supply/demand, risk/greed, and fun. Sometimes the problems might be the site...but me tinks that more than likely slow sales are seller-specific.

[mjohnatgt]

Last couple of days, the COMC cards are coming back strong on eBay. I have about 200 loaded today. So it looks like they've fixed the bug that was delisting the items.

[Jonathon M]

Originally Posted by mjohnatgt

Last couple of days, the COMC cards are coming back strong on eBay. I have about 200 loaded today. So it looks like they've fixed the bug that was delisting the items.

Looks like I'm down another 200 in that time to 4,100

this is really not good enough for me, that is approx. 33% of my listings on Ebay...

[mredsox89]

The lack of a bulk price editor is such a big loss. I'd be more than happy to mass reduce prices on some of my stuff that continues to sit, but going one by one on my port, let alone a port with 10x or 100x, is miserable, time consuming, and massively inefficient

[pfb11]

Originally Posted by Jonathon M

Looks like I'm down another 200 in that time to 4,100

this is really not good enough for me, that is approx. 33% of my listings on Ebay...

I'm up, but by a very small number, like.... 15.

[mjohnatgt]

I think the most I had posted was around 12,500 and I'm currently at 8900 with adding descriptions. This is out of 25,600 cards for sale.
About 170 more were added after I posted last night. So they've at least turned the upload back on.

[Swipe79]

It looks like I was down, but slowly climbing. I think around 40% of my stuff is listed.

[dustin42]

Originally Posted by donaldz

To be honest, now is the perfect time to buy what floats your boat. Buying to sell isn't the greatest idea, but everything is so affordable now.

I'm pretty sure that the big sellers liquidating has trickled all the way down. Everyone is selling for way lower and it works out great for buyers.

Baseball cards always dip now (aside from playoff teams) but everything is cheap. Hockey, football, basketball. All of them.

With that said, the tin-foil hat wearing part of me worries that these huge sellers got advanced notice about impending doom. If COMC was going down, it makes total sense to let the people most affected by it know first b/c those are the people with enough skin in the game to sue.

I am liquidating all my lower end stuff to start a card shop. The other guys relisted new inventory and probably pulled stuff off to sell at the National or to have money for the National.

[peterose4hof]

Originally Posted by dustin42

I am liquidating all my lower end stuff to start a card shop. The other guys relisted new inventory and probably pulled stuff off to sell at the National or to have money for the National.

I have bought hundreds of cards the past few months and it feels like many of them have been from you. I appreciate the great deals!

Best of luck with your card shop endeavor!

[Cactuspies]

haven't done a submission in 2 years so cards are piling up at home and port is stale. but 2016 was my worst year since 2008 and my initial batches. 2017 has been pretty poor too, though I did just sell 5 cards today of which 2 were ebay.

Since I'm getting ready to move I think they will just get the piles at home which I don't have the time to list for ebay or sportlots and just to clear up my mess. for the 0.30 and list at like $.50-0.75 they can sit for years there instead of with me.

[peterose4hof]

Originally Posted by dustin42

I am liquidating all my lower end stuff to start a card shop. The other guys relisted new inventory and probably pulled stuff off to sell at the National or to have money for the National.

Just bought about a dozen more cards. Shoot me a pm if decide to do another decent round of price dropping. Thanks!