All I want to do is talk about COMC

[Swipe79]

3 Week Guarantee is for all cards - current year three week is for 2019-2020 dual year and 2020 single year cards only.

Originally Posted by alohasports

Comc newbie question here, but, can someone send in current year cards and pay .50 or does all current year submissions HAVE to be submitted with the .35 current year? I ask because your totally right, I’d much rather pay .15 extra per card to get faster service. Thanks

[alohasports]

I’m a little confused so let me ask instead. If I want to send in 2020 tops can I send them in regular 3 week submission for .50 cents a card or do I have to send in 2020 topps only with the .35 current year? Also sounds like a stupid question but can’t we just wait another month and send in all the 2020s regular rate since it will be 2021? If so I might just hold off in sending in. Thanks

[GoBeavs]

Originally Posted by alohasports

I’m a little confused so let me ask instead. If I want to send in 2020 tops can I send them in regular 3 week submission for .50 cents a card or do I have to send in 2020 topps only with the .35 current year? Also sounds like a stupid question but can’t we just wait another month and send in all the 2020s regular rate since it will be 2021? If so I might just hold off in sending in. Thanks

You can send any card in a regular submission. It used to be an advantage to send in the current stuff under the Current Year submission since it was cheaper, and was sometimes prioritized (as they want the newest cards to be active). Lately that isn't the case, and those batches aren't "guaranteed" to be done in the 3 weeks.

[boxbuster7]

Originally Posted by jjj5278

But only 2600 in your port right now? You must price them very well to only have 2 1/2 weeks worth of submissions in your port when you send so many in.

I can attest. He's a good seller. Very competitive prices. I also don't know him personally.

[alohasports]

Thank you! I guess with 2021 around the corner, soon my 2020 topps won’t qualify to do current year anymore. I’ll just submit them regular submission and pay the extra .15 cents per card. As it sounds like paying the extra .15 is totally worth it to me to get my cards listed faster. Thanks

[checkoutmydeals]

I draw a distinction between "making money" and "accumulating wealth". Right now, the yield on 10-year US Treasury bonds is 0.84%. This means that if you loan the Federal government $919 today, they'll pay you $1,000 in 10 years.

Suppose a person flips cards on COMC, purchasing them at an average price of 75 cents and selling them for an average price of $2.50. The $2.50 sale would be $2.375 in credit after the 5% transaction fee, for a net gain of $1.625 in COMC credit per sale.

If you sell an average of 1 card per day for 1 year, this would be about $593.13 increase in COMC credit, which would cash out as about $533.80.

To get $533.80 per year at the "risk free rate" of 0.84%, you would have to invest $64,314.22 in 10-year Treasury bonds.

Selling 10 cards per day in this fashion would yield the same as $643,000 invested in Treasury bonds. 16 cards per day would be the equivalent of more than $1,000,000 invested in Treasuries.

If you dealt with more expensive cards, yielding, say, $5 profit per transaction (net of storage fees), you could keep this pace selling an average of about 5 items per day.

This is different from "making a living". It's considerably more time consuming than making a phone call or clicking a mouse once every 10 years. And it's not "risk-free". There is a non-zero chance that COMC could go out of business, or that they could alter their policies so that these sorts of transactions are no longer as likely to happen, nor as profitable. Or, that the item you bought for $10 today is only worth 10 cents next year, and 3 cents the year after that.

As others have mentioned, if you are going to use COMC to "make money", it should probably be as one aspect of a larger business. For example, a person who buys collections and sets up at shows might have a $3 box on their table. As stuff gets picked through, maybe they send the picked over items to COMC. At the same time, maybe they use COMC to accumulate items for 75 cents to $1, offer them for sale on COMC in the $2-$2.50 range, and periodically take physical possession of 100-500 items at a time to restock the $3 box.

In the meantime, this allows them to concentrate on the higher dollar items, or bulking out the lower value stuff.

[Budler]

Originally Posted by shrevecity

Depending on your expenses 87000 in SALES may translate to less than 20K in actual profit.

You are talking SRP price NOT what he sold them for. We have no ideal what he made. I have purchased many cards for less then half of the SRP.

[Budler]

I'm wondering just how many members here are selling cards as their main income??

It is great that there are so many ways to collect / buy / sell / trade cards.

You have the guy that collects only one player and only buys cards he does not have of that player to the guy who sees cards as a product only just like a car or hat.

[gosanostra]

this "Covid delays" with shipping is #@#@#@#@#@#@#@#@. People are sending stuff to my mailbox just fine at normal time frames

[Dalston]

Originally Posted by Budler

You are talking SRP price NOT what he sold them for. We have no ideal what he made. I have purchased many cards for less then half of the SRP.

This is true, but not the whole picture. A lot of rarer cards (which tend to skew more expensive) don't have enough recent sales to have an SRP and so don't get added in any way, shape, or form to the SRP calculation. My dollar sales volume is about 2.5 times higher than my SRP sold, even though I'd guess 90% of my cards sold with SRP sold for under the SRP (and often for a lot under the SRP).

[longbomberz]

My 3 week current year due 9/28 has finally stopped having the ETA date continually moved back and now it's just stopped at 12/1 and apparently overdue. Go COMC go!

[WallyatJCCards]

Originally Posted by boxbuster7

I can attest. He's a good seller. Very competitive prices. I also don't know him personally.

Agreed

[thestark]

Love when Tim buys random Hershiser cards from me

[mjohnatgt]

Tim might not know about sportlots... ;-)

[mjohnatgt]

Originally Posted by alohasports

Thank you! I guess with 2021 around the corner, soon my 2020 topps won’t qualify to do current year anymore. I’ll just submit them regular submission and pay the extra .15 cents per card. As it sounds like paying the extra .15 is totally worth it to me to get my cards listed faster. Thanks

You can submit current year cards in any submission type, not just "Current Year." And you can continue to submit cards from 2020 until about July of 2021, presuming they hold true to their previous schedule. They send out a notification a few weeks before Jan 1 and Jul 1 about what still counts as current year so people have a chance to send in a last batch before they age out.

[alohasports]

Cool thank you.

How do people that have cards for sell for like less than .20 each make money? With processing fees at .50 it seems like they lose money. Even if purchased in a port that still seems like a losing situation? How do they do it?

[mjohnatgt]

Some people are really bad about submitting items (like commons from new releases) which have almost no demand, and then try to clearance them when 20 more arrive on site during the processing delay. They don't make money, just waste it, IMO.

I have bought port sales at 10 cents on the dollar before, so buying a card for 3 cents and reselling for 20 is profitable. Or buying the right Marvel/UD ePack cards and controlling the lower end market can be profitable. Just takes a lot of research.

Cards that are already on site don't have a processing fee (except for those Elite upgrade fees). So once they're on site, the price normalizes based on supply and demand.

[alohasports]

It’s very bizarre to me as I saw a card tonight listed for .6 cents (plus .25 for shipping) plus a TON listed for .7 cents. So if I buy it for .6 cents snd list it at the next highest price if .7 cents, if it sells I make .1 cent WOW! Actually, after comc fees there wouldn’t even be a .1 cent profit, so I just don’t understand it all.

[checkoutmydeals]

Many people look at a submission as a whole, rather than individual cards. They might lose money on submission fees for this card or that, but make it up on the pile. Or, maybe they lose money on the pile as well.

As an example, suppose you pick up a collection of 10,000 cards for $500. You sort out 1,000 cards you think would go well on COMC and spend another $500 on processing. After the cards are processed, you price some cards at $5, $10, $20, $50, but there are also some duds. It turns out that there are already 200 copies of this one Hall of Famer card and the cheapest one is 21 cents. So you price yours at 20 cents. Yes, you might lose on that card, but it would have taken weeks or months to carefully pick through every one of the 10,000 cards in that collection. And there's another collection and another collection after that.

After a few months of selling, maybe you have $1000 in sales from that batch. You might keep the rest for years and years, slowly selling one here and one there, or you might start to have progressively larger Promotional sales. You run a 30% off sale for 10 days. Then a 40% off sale for another 10 days. Then 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 85% and eventually 90% off.

At 90% off, anything you had originally priced under $5 is now below the 50 cents you paid for that card, but at this point it's all gravy. Say you have $3,000 in your account. You cash out $2700 and start with another collection.

In addition to this scenario, it's common for people to send in brand new cards when the sets are new and the prices / demand is high. "Oh, look. The cheapest copy of this card is $5. I'll send it in." Then, by the time it's processed, there are 75 other copies of the card, the player has broken his leg and the lowest price is now 15 cents.

If the cards are Upper Deck from the past 5 years (especially if they're hockey), it's likely the cheap cards are from the ePack program. Upper Deck sells virtual packs on their ePack website, and the physical cards are shipped by COMC. Since COMC charges 25 cents to ship a card, and some card sets can contain 900 different base cards, along with red parallels, gold parallels, silver parallels, rainbow parallels, etc, people are sometimes selective about what cards they have physically shipped. It might be that they only want the memorabilia, autograph and higher dollar cards, and the rest they might price as low as a penny. Then a flipper might buy the penny card and price it at 2 cents, and some other flipper might buy the 2 cent card and price it at 5 cents and so on.

It should also be noted that COMC's processing fees used to be lower than they are today. In the very early days it was 10 cents per card for processing. Later it went to 15 cents, but they would still have specials where you could send in certain cards for 10 cents, or a 550 count box stuffed with cards for $50. One way you could maximize the $50 per box special was to send in thin cards like stickers or gaming cards like Magic, Pokemon or Yu Gi Oh.

[SearchPatrol]

Does anybody know why so much love for 1994 Isaac Bruce Bowman Rookie card? Zero in stock and over 100 sold, that shocked me.

[checkoutmydeals]

Trading 6 cent ePack cards is just plain fun. Nothing wrong with having fun.

[mjohnatgt]

Originally Posted by SearchPatrol

Does anybody know why so much love for 1994 Isaac Bruce Bowman Rookie card? Zero in stock and over 100 sold, that shocked me.

It's his required Hall of Fame Rookie Card in the PSA set registry. There are 144 people trying to complete the set.
https://www.psacard.com/psasetregist...-present/12875

[shrevecity]

Originally Posted by alohasports

Cool thank you.

How do people that have cards for sell for like less than .20 each make money? With processing fees at .50 it seems like they lose money. Even if purchased in a port that still seems like a losing situation? How do they do it?

Sometimes it happens that way, and the old fee structure made it easier to do. I have used low value common cards as a filler. Say I have a 400 count box almost full and need 10 or 15 cards to fill it to get it out today. I will put random junk in there. May lose on the submission of those single items but when I would pack a sub if it was 400 cards I would typically have the entire cost of the submission in 10 or 15 cards. So say 400 cards costs 200.00 those 15 cards would make up that full costs. Most of the rest are going to be 3 to 5 dollar cards that I will price to move but tend to be in the 2.00 range in pricing. those 25 or 30 cent cards added on the end are really nothing the loses are more than covered on the rest of the submission. Many times the cards I send in are more than paid from before I even send them due to they have been on Ebay first but with Ebay upping the free listings to 50,000 for me I keep them on Ebay longer given the issues COMC has there is little incentive to change all COMC for me has been a way to keep items out of my closet gathering dust.

Also if you are flipping then that 25 cents if you do it right could turn around and grow to more by the time you want to cash out. Have to remember there are many that are on COMC with basically free money. I have never sent COMC a dime of money from my pocket. In the early days COMC gave you a 25.00 credit and allowed you to go into negative balance on your submissions.

As mentioned COMC listing fees and such has changed over the years. Used to be you could send in 25.00 worth of cards for free in your first submission. You could also go into the negative and your cards would be processed anyway. They also had specials once or twice a year send in a 600 card box or something like that for 40.00 or whatever it was. Another thing if a card was deemed not worthy they would not charge you for it so if you missed a corner ding or something they would catch it and not process it any further. Now they process everything and with the higher fees it makes a submitter have to think more about what they are submitting than they used to.

[alohasports]

Thanks for the response. When I look at it that way, now I understand it. So thanks

I was thinking of another question today and that’s can someone be a successful seller and a collector at the same time. I ask for two reasons, one I noticed that when I sell something on eBay I almost always use the sales money to buy something for me PC! So I usually never make any money even though I sell a lot because it goes right back into purchasing cards for my PC. If I didn’t buy cards for my PC then it would be nice to have all that extra cash for items I sold. And secondly if you look at Most of the big time successful sellers they never mention their PC or if they even collect it’s always about selling selling and selling! So I was wondering if you could be a successful seller and collector at the same time or if it’s better not to get attached to cards and only sell them!

[tommyfro21]

Gotta love flipping on COMC.

Bought at card today for $1.25. Listed it for $3.99.

Not even 2-3 minutes later, I get an offer for $2.50. I countered with $3 and sold it.

If only it was always that easy to flip cards.