All I want to do is talk about COMC

[obzezzed]

Anybody have an idea or guess when the basic service (.30 cents a card) will be coming back? When the vaccine is given out by summer maybe?

Thx,

[Dalston]

Originally Posted by mjohnatgt

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

Still a bid odd that there are around 15 on eBay, 7 on Sportslots, and none on COMC. Don't see that very often.

[alohasports]

Even though I hope the .30 rate comes back , I don’t know from a business sense of its beneficial for them to bring back the .30 rate because as a business owner, why would they lower their prices and lose money when people are sending in and paying the .50 rate? Seems like they will lose money if they lower their submission price.

[aguinness]

Just had this happen twice in the past two days: made an offer on a card, seller sent a counter offer, but when I look back, the card price has been lowered and is less than the counter offer. What strange behavior.

[papercards]

Has anyone been getting signed out lately, even when being on the site? This just started the other day and I figured it was a blip. However, it keeps happening now and then multiple times a day.

I haven't seen anyone else mention it and it isn't a huge deal, but it gets frustrating when you're trying to price something, or purchase a card.

[checkoutmydeals]

I don’t know from a business sense of its beneficial for them to bring back the .30 rate because as a business owner, why would they lower their prices and lose money when people are sending in and paying the .50 rate?

My impression is that they didn't raise the rate to "make money". They raised the rate because they were falling behind processing submissions during January / February / March of 2020, and were trying to discourage people from sending in cards faster than they could handle.

There are a variety of reasons for this. In addition to COVID restrictions on their activity, they were running eBay auctions for the first time (which created a huge influx of orders for them, as people who win eBay auctions also add buy it now items to combine shipping). They were revamping their catalog, adding condition buckets to post-1980 cards, not just pre-1980 cards. They were going through old submissions and purging cards they suspected had been "trimmed" or "altered".

Also, Kobe Bryant died in January, and it created a huge influx of orders from people who hadn't purchased sports cards in years, if ever. My impression is that a lot of people who were kids in the 1990's / 2000's started getting back into sports cards. When sporting events were shut down and people were locked down, a lot of people started paying more attention to their card collections. Netflix series such as the Last Dance and the one about Aaron Hernandez probably added fuel to the fire as well.

I don't think raising the price to submit cards is the answer. They've raised the price from 10 cents to 35 cents and people are submitting more than ever before. What they need is some sort of way to filter out undesirable cards before they are submitted.

I'd like to see some sort of system where if there are more than a year's supply of a particular card already on the site, priced at 75 cents or less, that the card can't be submitted, or is rejected when it is submitted.

I'd like to see COMC institute some sort of sales rank, either as a raw number or a percentage, and to be able to sort a search by sales rank. Amazon uses sales ranks and I know a lot of sellers who will only deal with items which have a sales rank in the top 1% or 5% of a given category.

I'd like to see COMC publish some sort of list of cards which are worth submitting. Or allow people to generate their own lists by allowing people to filter a search by price (by range), number in stock (by range), sales rank (by range), and so forth.

I've seen this sort of thing happen with other websites. People who run warehouses (and run consignment services) worship turnover, turnover, turnover. People who sell long-tail inventory like to watch their pile of inventory grow higher and higher. In general, they'd rather sell an item for a profit in 10 years than sell it for a loss just to "sell something".

Raising the processing fee isn't going to solve this. When the processing fee was 10 cents, people would send in crap cards with the intention of selling for 15 cents. When the processing fee was 15 cents, people would send in crap cards with the intention of selling for 25 cents. When the fee was 35 cents, they'd send in 50 cent crap cards. If it permanently becomes 50 cents,they'll just send in 75 cent crap cards.

In the Magic the Gathering community, it's very common for sellers to publish "buy lists" of specific cards they want to purchase and the price they will give in sale / trade for those cards. At one point, COMC published a "hot list" of cards / players which were worth sending in. IMO, that's the sort of thing they should work on, after they're caught up with their current backlog of processing and shipping.

[checkoutmydeals]

Has anyone been getting signed out lately, even when being on the site? This just started the other day and I figured it was a blip. However, it keeps happening now and then multiple times a day.

I haven't been getting signed out, but I have had the browser lock up on me at times. One thing that can help in my experience is to open a different browser. For example, I was logged in to both Firefox and Chrome. When Firefox would start to stall, I'd copy the URL from Firefox, paste it into Chrome and was able to proceed as normal.

[JEA2880]

I just went to request my first shipment of COMC purchases in a while - "economy" and "priority" shipping are MARCH 15TH and MARCH 13TH respectively?!?! What is this BGS? I have to wait 4 months just to get my cards shipped to me?! Alternative is pay $30 to ship a bunch of $1-$3 cards to get them December 22nd... when did this change? It seems insane to me that I have to wait over 3 months just to get my items shipped, domestically, to me.

Someone tell me if I'm being crazy or if this has already been discussed.

[nam812]

Originally Posted by JEA2880

......Someone tell me if I'm being crazy or if this has already been discussed.

Not alot, just 99% of the 13,632 posts before yours.

[mjohnatgt]

Shipping delay for non-rushed orders has been over 3 months long since like May. They went minimum manning for a while because of the WA state governor and never caught back up.

[alohasports]

I guess by not one single person responding that they make a living on comc makes me believe it must be very hard to do that on comc only (probably need to sell on multiple platforms) but now I’ll ask if not making a living on comc can one reasonably make a couple thousand dollars a month selling/flipping cards on comc? (Been there done that With eBay not doing the eBay thing again!)


I was also 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! Thanks

[mjohnatgt]

Originally Posted by obzezzed

Anybody have an idea or guess when the basic service (.30 cents a card) will be coming back? When the vaccine is given out by summer maybe?

I talked to one of their employees last week and he said they're modifying the training for intake to try to speed it up so they can bring back the basic submission level. So it's still in the COMC plans.

[mjohnatgt]

Originally Posted by Dalston

Still a bid odd that there are around 15 on eBay, 7 on Sportslots, and none on COMC. Don't see that very often.

That is odd, and a good flipper would realize that buying them from sportlots and sending them to the COMC mailbox may be a good arbitrage opportunity. Very few buyers are aware of sportlots compared to COMC and items cross-posted to eBay.

[shrevecity]

Originally Posted by alohasports

I guess by not one single person responding that they make a living on comc makes me believe it must be very hard to do that on comc only (probably need to sell on multiple platforms) but now I’ll ask if not making a living on comc can one reasonably make a couple thousand dollars a month selling/flipping cards on comc? (Been there done that With eBay not doing the eBay thing again!)


I was also 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! Thanks

Never put your eggs in the same basket. Cards only make up a small percentage of what I sell, and I mainly deal with Ebay and sell online for a living. However putting your eggs in one basket could be disastrous if not careful.

YOu can be both, but when you do it for a living you have to learn that emotional attachment to some things needs to be put in the back seat. If it comes to making sure bills are paid

[mjohnatgt]

Yes, people can make thousands a month profit just by flipping on COMC. The fact that nobody has said they make their living off COMC doesn't mean they aren't. It means they don't want competition or maybe don't want the IRS knowing.
But there are also some major $$$ wasters (like buying ePack packs) and then trying to sell those cards. Much better to buy them for pennies and sell for quarters if you figure out the right sets/players/etc.

[alohasports]

I find it so funny that many in our hobby are worried about “competition” it’s like do people think no one else in the world is selling on eBay comc sports lots etc?! Tens of thousands of people sell sports cards it’s not like one more seller added to the group is going to stop someone from bring a billionaire selling cards. With all the people on our hobby selling there are no secrets, there is always someone better, quicker, smarter doing better. I just don’t get why people think that one single person can change whether or not they are successful selling.

[shrevecity]

Originally Posted by alohasports

I find it so funny that many in our hobby are worried about “competition” it’s like do people think no one else in the world is selling on eBay comc sports lots etc?! Tens of thousands of people sell sports cards it’s not like one more seller added to the group is going to stop someone from bring a billionaire selling cards. With all the people on our hobby selling there are no secrets, there is always someone better, quicker, smarter doing better. I just don’t get why people think that one single person can change whether or not they are successful selling.

May or may not be true in some areas but others the more competition you have the worst things gets. I deal in vintage toys electronics and clothing used to be I was the only toy guy and the only clothes guy but as some of the locals picked up on my buying habits more and more are grabbing that stuff at garage sales and such making me have to find other items and such.

[alohasports]

I totally get that and understand that as I think toys and electronics competition can make a big difference in sales. But in sports cards, with tens and tens and tens of thousands of sellers of sports cards, trying to eliminate even a dozen sellers won’t make someone a super star millionaire seller as there are no extremely rare best kept secrets to selling sports cards that thousands of sellers haven’t figured out yet I guess I’m trying to say, one person isn’t going to hold the golden secret or strategy or new concept to selling sports cards that People haven’t already figured out!

[checkoutmydeals]

I once taught an 11 year old kid exactly how I flipped cards on COMC at that time. Within a few weeks, he was sniping all of the best stuff from me and then undercutting my prices when we had the same items.

Eventually, he got bored and went back to doing 11 year old stuff. I'm still happy to help people who want to get involved with the hobby, but it's better if they develop their own style and find their own niche.

[Brady7799]

there's a clear difference between people who "sell" sportscards and people who "flip" sportscards. some only sell cards to clear space, free up capital with their existing collection. maybe they are cards they simply don't want anymore or agonized over letting go but at one point, sellers had a connection with the card in order to add it to their pc in the first place. flippers tend not to have emotional attachments to the cards they are selling. flippers can buy a card, and prioritize the profit, and turn it into a potential successful sale then rinse and repeat. then you have the hybrid hobbyist, both seller and flipper, like me who flips cards and uses the profits to keep flipping and collect at the same time.

you'd be surprised how guarded hobbyists that have a focus on the value of cards are. go into the baseball thread and start a conversation about "who to invest in" and you'll get the same comedic responses and misdirection posts in each one.

i'll chime in on Wander Franco or Jarred Kelenic all day long but my lips are sealed for the more obscure prospects that i've been buying lately. i'm not afraid of competition as much as i'm guarded because i've put in the work to find targets to buy and i'm not just going to share it with essentially a world of strangers on this forum or social media. i'm not alone in this feeling by the looks of it.

it's great you're showing in interest in turning the hobby into a side gig or full time flex. i think a hobbyist can certainly make money buying/selling, flipping, and collecting all at once. i'm one of those collectors.

am i quitting my day job? zero chance. do i fund my pc entirely within the ecosystem that i've built over the years since coming back to the hobby? yessir!

i bought a card during the comc weekend sale for $0.60 and i'm just pumped about eventually mailing it home to my pc. buying a card for 30-something dollars was equally as thrilling this past weekend as i've been eyeing that card for sometime now.

i also get pumped seeing a successful flip on the site and it really doesn't matter if the flip was for 7 cents or 8 bucks. i just like to see the completed flip. i even enjoy the unsuccessful flips and try to glean whatever information i can from my thought process to the eventual sale of the card to prevent that from happening again.

the point is, the actual $ amount really isn't a driving force for how i enjoy my time on comc. it was originally a way to clear out the stacks of unwanted cards i quickly accumulated when i returned to the hobby. i fell into flipping almost by accident but comc is an incredible platform for it.

i'm no guru or billionaire but i've modestly flipped with varying degrees of success over the years to increase my profit to a factor of x7 this year compared to my first year flipping on comc. like i said, i'm not quitting my day job but i'm happy to pick up pc cards with the added profits and i personally believe that these pc cards will retain value or increase if i ever decide to sell them down the road.

sounds like you want to see if you can make some money on comc. you certainly can. here are some tips among the many that i use:

1. learn about the ebb and flow of demand for a sportscard. offseason, buy. in season, sell. it's not black and white but a general rule to follow if you're buying and selling cards actively.

2. set a a budget. love selling cards to buy more? you'll need capital to keep the flip machine humming. unless you want to keep pumping in your own money from time to time, having self control on how much profit you turn into pc cards is key. there are periods where i don't flip a single card and just buy pc cards. there are times when i ignore pc watched cards and focus entirely on flips.

4. do your own work. this takes time, effort, patience and well...hard work but the payoff is greater. i know that i already have an unhealthy love for baseball and that fantasy baseball once went from fun redraft leagues to full blown keeper leagues with a full minor league system. when i returned to the hobby, it was a welcome distraction to add more onto how i enjoy consuming the sport by integrating and applying what i already knew into the hobby.

5. keep records as detailed as you can. this is also an enjoyable part of how i enjoy the hobby. i run a basic spreadsheet telling me what i need to know and it's updated almost daily. i was haphazardly throwing money at cards when i first came back and decided to document every dollar with the idea of controlling the flow of cash going into cards. you'll learn where not to spend money and where your dollars are best served if profits are important to you.

6. this is a comc thread but i'll echo when others have said. if this is your only vehicle to buy and sell cards, then expecting to make a significant amount of money is tremendously difficult to do. i'll often use local classifieds to sell cards but really dislike the electronic bay after getting burned a few times as a buyer and seller. i'll buy cards from anywhere i can so long as it's a deal or under market price: comc, card shows, the bay, local ads, auctions, estate sales, under rocks. some of my best flips were cards i submitted to comc after buying it offsite.

7. sportscards has blown up in 2020. "bubble" is an ugly word but it's something to think about. i've only been actively flipping for a few years and it's been crazy good for me but i'm not quitting my day job. one day, most of the new blood will have moved on to the next fad or moneymaker and selling junkwax might not come as easy as it was this past summer. plan accordingly and have a vision with goals and modify and evolve that vision with goals when needed. i went from flipping cards to pay for my storage fees on comc to paying for the shipping of cards from comc to flipping cards to pay for my new pc additions. if i never progressed from paying for my storage fees with flip profits, i would have still been happy. i just scaled up and turned it into the occasional mailday...have 100+ cards requested currently and it's entirely funded from the profits of flips on comc.

8. enjoy the snot of out the hobby. if you don't love it, then what's the point? i love baseball. i love fantasy baseball and i've fell back in love with the hobby since coming back. i cannot say if the hobby will be healthy for the rest of my life since guys my age have already experienced the junk was era. we've seen rough economic times when things like sportscards takes a backseat to adulting. if i never flip another card again, and have to mail home whatever is left in my comc inventory to my pc, then i'm okay with that. i know that i enjoy this hobby much more than model building, fishing, hunting, golfing, being a gearhead, thrill seeker, world traveler etc. this is my preferred method of distraction from life and it marries perfectly with all the baseball i already consume. nothing beats watching an afternoon game, checking on my fantasy team and flipping cards on comc from the comfort of my couch...well, a few cold ones sitting down the baseline at a the ballpark on a sunny afternoon is pretty awesome too.

9. blowout is the most important tool you can use from your device/laptop/desktop. filter the comedic routines, the debbie downers, the know-it-alls, and you'll find more than your share of incredible hobbyists that contribute to this place. they have incredible knowledge and share valuable information and insights to the hobby that i couldn't possibly learn on my own. i don't think i'd still be in this hobby if it wasn't for this place and what i've been able to learn over the years.

10. find others to enjoy the hobby with. love collecting vintage? love grading? find breaks thrilling? share it. you can find plenty of threads and topics here on blowout or check social media to find like-minded hobbyists. the only person among my friends that collects cards is my brother (actually one more i'll mention soon) but the community i've had the pleasure to have conversations with about the hobby on social media is more than i can handle. i don't tweet, facebook, tiktok etc. and started an instagram account for entirely personal interest (to have a visual record and documentation of my flips) but it's grown to thousands of followers and so many awesome hobbyists that can talk about anything from print runs of cards to fantasy sleepers in the coming draft. i actually recently found out a former co-worker collects basketball cards and he just started an account to share his collection that i follow with great interest.

i don't post here much. i certainly don't produce volumes like this. the recent conversation here just inspired me to speak up and i hope some of this is useful to anyone looking at the money aspect of sportscards.

be safe. be kind. hobby hard.

[checkoutmydeals]

For your specific situation, I think it's important to try to figure out what you are trying to accomplish. If it's simply "make a lot of money", it would probably be easier and more productive to get a job as a plumber.

If you have a bunch of $2 to $10 cards and you want to convert them into COMC credit, and maybe build up that credit by doing some flipping, sticking mostly with cards you wouldn't mind taking physical possession of if they don't sell, and maybe using some of your profits to buy a nice card for your personal collection every once in a while, then COMC is probably ideal for you.

OTOH, if it's Sunday close to midnight and your dog, Fluffy, swallows a sharp piece of plastic, and you need to pay the vet $3,000 right now or Fluffy will be dead in the morning, and your only source of income is flipping cards on COMC, it's going to be a real hard night for Fluffy.

I offered the opinion earlier, and this is not a joke, that if you start with an initial stake of about $250,000 cash and work 8 hours per day, 5 days per week flipping cards on the site, that after about 13 months, you might be able to start withdrawing an amount of money equivalent to the pre-tax income of an entry level McDonald's fry cook.

If you want to cash out thousands of dollars per month in fairly short order, the most efficient way would be to submit cards to them which will sell for thousands of dollars every month. And the easiest way to do obtain those cards is from some other venue. If you're pulling them from your closet, that's another "venue". If you inherited them from your dead uncle, that's also a "venue". If you're buying collections on Craig's List, that's a venue.

Even so, please note that you are not actually "making money" doing this. You are converting items of value into COMC credit, which is also a thing of value, and then converting that credit into cash, which is also a thing of value.

Also, keep in mind, this actually is work, and if your only motivation is to make money, there might be easier ways to do it.

Regarding your question about Acuna cards, I would say that it certainly is possible to specialize in a particular player or maybe several different players / sets. I'd recommend focusing your efforts on cards of a particular price range. It might be "under $2.50" or "$5 to $50" or "$100 and up", or whatever, but cards in different price ranges will act similarly to other cards in that price range, and differently from cards in different ranges.

I would also highly recommend figuring out who is your customer and what your purpose is as a market participant. Are you selling to retail buyers, or to other flippers? Are you selling to an upscale clientele who only wants the best of the best, or to a more casual crowd?

Who are your suppliers? Are you buying from people who desperately need cash? Are you buying from middlemen who are taking a reasonable profit for themselves but are still leaving something on the bone? Are you buying from someone with high quality stuff who knows what it's worth and wants 80% of retail?

What is your time frame? Are you willing to hold an item for 10 years? Do you need to sell it within a month? If an item is unsold after 6 months / a year / 5 years / 10 years, are you willing to sell it for a loss?

What is your risk tolerance? If you make money on 9 items and lose money on 1, are you happy or mad? If you buy 5 items for $10 each, sell 1 for $100, and the other 4 for $1, are you happy or mad?

[jefflasvegas]

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.

Around ten years ago, there were over 200 Danny Ainge cards on the site. Every one of them sold within a month's time. I pilferred through all my common basketball boxes and sent in 50 of them. Almost all of them sat there for several years

So the lesson to me is that because a card or player may appear hot or has a dedicated buyer, it may be possible that one person wiped out the entire inventory and never returned to that player or card.

[MrAnonymous]

Silly question and most likely discussed elsewhere but I just moved to Canada,Vancouver and need some clarity here.

COMC has a mailbox service. I can order cards, have them shipped there for a fee yea yeah. Then I can also purchase cards from COMC sellers.

Now Ive seen some folks in the past mention that the cards are sent from a BC location is that still the case for many cards? How does this work? Can I request this? Timing should be much better from BC rather than the Redmond location.

Please Halp..

Thank you

[alohasports]

Thank you all for your awesome posts! Some very very good thoughts and advice. I was asking about selling full time because I saw sellers on COMC with 70,000 80,0000 100,000 cards listed and I was like dang! They must be making some serious money on COMC! I’m looking to send in some cards mostly in the $2-$20 range. A ton of other cards I was going to send in before reading this thread , I saw had tons of copies listed for .20-30 cents! So forget sending those in! It doesn’t make sense to me to pay .50 per card or even .35 per card to only sell it for the lowest price of .15-.20 cents! That doesn’t sound like good financial sense to me to sell for less than the processing costs! (Even if I make more money on bigger cards) why send in low level cards, instead of just sending in higher prices cards. I’m Going more for quality vs quantity.

[Brady7799]

Originally Posted by MrAnonymous

Silly question and most likely discussed elsewhere but I just moved to Canada,Vancouver and need some clarity here.

COMC has a mailbox service. I can order cards, have them shipped there for a fee yea yeah. Then I can also purchase cards from COMC sellers.

Now Ive seen some folks in the past mention that the cards are sent from a BC location is that still the case for many cards? How does this work? Can I request this? Timing should be much better from BC rather than the Redmond location.

Please Halp..

Thank you

welcome to Canada! by using the mailbox service, i believe that you are okay with sending in your purchases directly to comc for the intent of selling the card(s)? be aware that there is a fee if you don't send in the minimum cards in your submission.

sellers in Canada can send their cards to the BC location where their submission is processed and eventually sent to HQ in Seattle. this is great for us Canuck sellers but i'm not familiar with what level Covid restrictions they are currently at. i'm in Ontario and everything other than essential services are shut down.

i don't find my submissions go any faster in BC and they take several weeks under normal conditions to get to HQ and have the "remotely" label removed. zero complaints. i'm a big fan of the overall service.