Thepit.com

[ksemmel]

Not sure if this is the place to put this but I saw other mentions of the pit on this forum so here's my expierence:

For those of you that do not know, thepit.com attempts to be a card stock market, by buying, trading and selling cards like Wall Street (aka a "flashy" mix of eBay and comc)

I looked on thepit.com this morning just searching through cards. They have very limited mid-high End and 95% of the time what they do have is very over-priced, however I still check the site every once and a while.

Around 9a.m. I noticed they had a Bowman Chrome Mike Trout gem for sale for $2,900. I transferred $2,900 into my thepit.com account and tried to purchase the card, which resulted in a "rejected" message. I tried a second time, and received the same message.

I called their customer support number and explained the situation that the error message was coming up when trying to complete the purchase. The employee, grilled me with questions about my money even stating, "Your account hasn't been active in over a year, you know this is a $2,900 purchase right? Don't you think you are swinging for the fences a little bit here?" After explains I deal in higher end cards, I just don't use their site for transactions he responded saying their system usually takes a few hours to transfer the money to an individual's account (however my PayPal account had already completed the transaction). The transaction also came up on PayPal as being sent to the PayPal name "Mark Humphries", which I thought was pretty strange, and probably why the money didn't go immediately into my account. The employee however, told me he would look into my account/the issue and get back to me.

About three hours later I received a call from the owner, Mark Humphries, who explained the card was being sold by someone else through the site, and there must have been a system glitch in the pricing. At this time, the price on the site was changed to $3,999 BIN, then to $3650, and currently at $5,000. After questioning him a bit, he changed his story saying he bought a Trout at $2,800 hours before, so there was no way he would sell it to me for $2,900. After a long talk, and him admitting the card was his, he "attempted" to make the issue right by offering to sell it to me for $2,900 with the caviate that I would then have to keep it for sale on his site. With this, I would also have to buy any BC trout that was offered me to through his site for 85% my asking price. Also, I would not be able to cash out my sold Trout until at least the end of the year (which also comes with a 10% cash out fee).

While this isn't as important, still adds to the "experience"; the card I tried to purchase was a min gem 9 edges, and while talking to them they stated the photo was a stock photo, and that I would have received a min gem 9 centering (which is obviously a big difference in pricing). This information was not posted anywhere on the page.

Upon telling him that I didn't want my money/card tied up in his site, and that I planned on writing a review on my expierence online, he offered me $100 admitting, "Our system is flawed, but I'm not going to hand you a Trout at $2,900 to let you run away with free money and not return to the site for a year."

I would highly recommend avoiding thepit.com. Between stock photos of cards you may or may not get, the owner lying, money going to an individual's PayPal and offering an ultimatum to Fix a wrong, this site is far more harm than good.






Cliff notes:
I tried to buy a card off of thepit.com. Added money to my account which did not go through. This resulted in my purchase being rejected. Called thepit to ask what was going on. They rose the price on me $1,000 following the call. Spoke to owner, who lied about the card and did not honor his original price. Offered a caviat (that benefits his site) to remedy the issue.

[Peties Army]

Next time stick to cliff notes.

[hairysasquatch]

Sounds like a winning m.o.

[ksemmel]

Originally Posted by Peties Army

Next time stick to cliff notes.

Haha, I summarized it, but if I didn't put the whole thread, people would ask for details

[msterling21]

I used them about 10 years ago. I don't know if ownership changed hands since then, but it was decent for trading graded low end rookie cards. However, my last and final experience with them left a bad taste in my mouth as well. I had bought a PSA 9 Chrome Kobe Bryant RC and redeemed the card. When I received it, it had major sun damage.. the card discolored. They let me return it... anyway I've avoided them since because I think it's where sellers dump their #@#@#@#@ cards, the ones you don't want people to see when you're selling.

[ksemmel]

Originally Posted by msterling21

I used them about 10 years ago. I don't know if ownership changed hands since then, but it was decent for trading graded low end rookie cards. However, my last and final experience with them left a bad taste in my mouth as well. I had bought a PSA 9 Chrome Kobe Bryant RC and redeemed the card. When I received it, it had major sun damage.. the card discolored. They let me return it... anyway I've avoided them since because I think it's where sellers dump their #@#@#@#@ cards, the ones you don't want people to see when you're selling.

New owner, the guy I spoke to today bought it 6 years ago. But it seems like customer satisfaction has gotten worse

[jppicks]

I had the same exact thing happen to me on a KB Gem chrome rc a couple months ago. I clicked the BIN and it just never went through. I think the site has honestly turned to #@#@#@#@. 15 yrs ago it used to be a decent reputable site.

[patchgenie]

should be called thedump

[ksemmel]

Originally Posted by jppicks

I had the same exact thing happen to me on a KB Gem chrome rc a couple months ago. I clicked the BIN and it just never went through. I think the site has honestly turned to #@#@#@#@. 15 yrs ago it used to be a decent reputable site.

Pretty disappointing. On the phone he kept advertising his company as a place to buy, sell and trade without having to have to worry about the bs that happens on eBay. Yet he pulls the prototypical eBay d**che move -_-

[hairysasquatch]

The (arm)Pit?

[Kards]

This pit.com is an absolute joke. The current owner overpaid for the rights to the website name and won't take advice from collectors and thinks he knows everything. It's very high priced and the owner tries to steer buyers from eBay to his site when he over prices a card. It's called shady, immoral, and unethical. Avoid...

[ksemmel]

Originally Posted by Kards

This pit.com is an absolute joke. The current owner overpaid for the rights to the website name and won't take advice from collectors and thinks he knows everything. It's very high priced and the owner tries to steer buyers from eBay to his site when he over prices a card. It's called shady, immoral, and unethical. Avoid...

Agreed. Really turns me away when I call about a problem on their site, they notice the card i want is underpriced, and hike up the card from under me.

Also don't like the fact they use a stock photo and don't promise the subs on the photo. On something like trout, that's a few hundred dollar difference

[mredsox89]

It's best used to sell chrome cards and stuff under $20. Too much of a pain to do anything else. But it's great and often overlooked to snag guys that are selling higher elsewhere

[whitesoxfan3579]

After reading this thread I will avoid the pits. Thank you OP for taking the time to share your experience.

[ksemmel]

Originally Posted by mredsox89

It's best used to sell chrome cards and stuff under $20. Too much of a pain to do anything else. But it's great and often overlooked to snag guys that are selling higher elsewhere

Agreed. It's only half-decent for $1 cards

[bradical]

So, let me see if I have this right. ThePit.com will pay me $1900 for my PSA 10 Chrome Trout Auto, or $2250 for my PSA 9 Chrome Trout Auto? Seems like a great deal. For them.

[ksemmel]

Originally Posted by bradical

So, let me see if I have this right. ThePit.com will pay me $1900 for my PSA 10 Chrome Trout Auto, or $2250 for my PSA 9 Chrome Trout Auto? Seems like a great deal. For them.

The owner prides himself on being "the stock market of cards", yet the very limited "stock" available is insanely overpriced

[smapdi]

This story sounds like you found a good deal on the site and they don't want to hold up their end of the bargain. That's just bad business. Assuming it's true, this story is just terrible. They listed a card for sale, someone wanted to buy it, and they don't want to sell it because of a "glitch?" Uh huh.

[ksemmel]

Originally Posted by smapdi

This story sounds like you found a good deal on the site and they don't want to hold up their end of the bargain. That's just bad business. Assuming it's true, this story is just terrible. They listed a card for sale, someone wanted to buy it, and they don't want to sell it because of a "glitch?" Uh huh.

Exactly what happened. And this comment really bothered me, "Our system is flawed, but I'm not going to hand you a Trout at $2,900 to let you run away with free money and not return to the site for a year."

That's essentially telling me I'd rather make a few hundred bucks than hold up my end of the deal. Definitely not a good way to get a repeat customer.

And I assure you, had he of honored his price, I would have posted on here talking about a great experience I had which would have driven some potential customers his way. Instead, he'd rather make the few extra couple hundred dollars (based on me finding that deal and thepit changing the price), and get a back review

[distressedcards]

I've used this site a bunch of times and have had no issues.. I've purchased a decent amount of higher end.. Tom Brady UD graded, Lebron James Topps Chrome refractor rc to name a few... even had them shipped to me within a few weeks of buying..

[ksemmel]

Originally Posted by distressedcards

I've used this site a bunch of times and have had no issues.. I've purchased a decent amount of higher end.. Tom Brady UD graded, Lebron James Topps Chrome refractor rc to name a few... even had them shipped to me within a few weeks of buying..

I would HIGHLY recommend never calling them about a problem you are experiencing on their site. Next thing you know, whatever card you wanted will be 1k higher

[mooshoo9795]

For some reason, I had followed them on twitter a few years ago. I recently logged in and saw a post from them. They tweeted that some PSA 10 was available to buy for $100 on their site, best ebay price $150 - or something like that. I looked for the card on the bay and saw that there were some auctions for like $60 and sold listings had gone for about $80.

I messaged thepit guy saying it was misleading and he said he only compares to current BIN values as it is the price to purchase it immediately. He continued to post the same things but now sometimes puts best BIN price, which is more fair. I just stopped following and decided never to use them as their business practices seem too shady

[ksemmel]

Originally Posted by mooshoo9795

For some reason, I had followed them on twitter a few years ago. I recently logged in and saw a post from them. They tweeted that some PSA 10 was available to buy for $100 on their site, best ebay price $150 - or something like that. I looked for the card on the bay and saw that there were some auctions for like $60 and sold listings had gone for about $80.

I messaged thepit guy saying it was misleading and he said he only compares to current BIN values as it is the price to purchase it immediately. He continued to post the same things but now sometimes puts best BIN price, which is more fair. I just stopped following and decided never to use them as their business practices seem too shady

That's about right. The whole time I was on the phone with him he was trying to convince me to use his site and why it's so much better than eBay... he buys at 70% of eBay, sells at 125%+ of eBay and has limited inventory on the site... hmm

[thePit]

There are two sides to every story. Here’s ours. We’ll start with the Executive Summary and then, for those interested, we will address item-by-item some of the false statements and logical inconsistencies in customer's May 24th post.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
A potential buyer (customer) who has never purchased from us sees on our website a Mike Trout Chrome Auto 9.5/10 offered at a bargain price by a motivated seller. Before we have a chance to review his 6:35am PayPal transfer, and before he has placed a funded bid according to Pit rules, the seller cancels the original order and completes the sale separately at a different price, at 7:49am, before standard (PT) business hours. Therefore, the card is no longer available at the bargain price. ThePit’s General Manager calls Mr. customer to explain the situation. Mr. customer believes he is entitled to the card. In the interests of customer goodwill, the GM offers customer a generous compromise, which customer refuses. customer writes a complaint about thePit on the Blowout Cards Forum. ThePit responds to customer’s complaint here, by demonstrating his false statements and misunderstandings.

Moving on to address quotes from Mr. customer’s original post:

“ThePit.com attempts to be a card stock market” Actually we *have* been “trading sports cards like stocks” for 17 years, completing over $46 million in transactions during that time. We have thousands of satisfied customers. Our platform is the most sophisticated in the collectibles world, and it is built on a foundation created by Marc Lore, who recently sold Jet.com to Wal-Mart for $3.3 billion in August of last year. (Note: Mr. Lore has *no* current connection with thePit.)

“A flashy mix of eBay and comc” This is the first time we’ve been called “flashy”, so I’m trying to decide whether we should take this as a compliment or an insult. We have considerable respect for COMC, which in our view has been the only innovator in recent years to challenge the eBay monopoly in the secondary market for trading cards. I guess I’m not sure what you mean by “flashy”, customer -- would you like to elaborate? Is it the new look and improved graphics on our website, which was re-launched in October?

“They have very limited mid-high End” We seek to offer a competitive Bid/Ask marketplace for the most popular rookie cards in the hobby. This means ungraded Bowman and Bowman Chrome in quantity on the low end, and BGS 9.5/10 Chrome Auto on the high end, for most every major star in baseball (plus the comparable high-interest brands in the other major sports). We don’t trade every card, nor do we want to; we focus on the cards with sufficient population and interest to allow a liquid trading market to develop. Not every card we list is in stock all the time, obviously, but for our “Not Available” items we attempt to bid aggressively (see our “Sell Now” prices) to re-stock those cards.

“95% of the time what they do have is very over-priced” This is a ridiculous statement, easily proven false by a quick check of our Twitter feed (@thePitCards), which every day advertises multiple popular cards for which our “Buy Now” price beats eBay’s, often by a wide margin. In those cases where our price is *not* competitive, it generally means that we do not currently own any of that card, and a non-market price is being asked by one of our Pit members. customer, where is your study (or even your back-of-the-envelope analysis) by which you derived your 95% figure?

“I transferred $2,900 into my thePit.com account” Actually, what customer did, at 6:35 AM our time, was send us money that was pending our standard checks on high-dollar transactions. When the funds weren’t immediately available in his account, Mr. customer woke my Operations Manager before our business hours to follow up. Which is fine, but he can’t then complain when, at 7:49, the card is sold in a separate transaction. One thing customer didn’t note in his post (but did tell me in our phone conversation) is that he considered using his credit card (which might have given him immediate funding to his account) but didn’t trust our website so used PayPal instead. This is more than a little ironic, since Mr. customer expected *us* to immediately trust *his* payment while not trusting our credit card payment processing.

“The employee, grilled me with questions about my money” And I’m glad he did, since this is completely appropriate for a customer who has *never* purchased a card from us, and whose entire Pit history involved $24.18 worth of sales by him of ungraded cards, with the last transaction occurring more than a year earlier (5/5/16). In that context, an out-of-the-blue early-morning interest in purchasing a card for more than 100 times the value of his combined total transaction history was suspicious and worthy of investigation, given our experience with e-commerce fraud. Despite being a member of thePit since 12/7/2015, customer had not yet registered a credit card with us, or contacted us to express his interest in high-end cards, or established his hobby references with us. Instead, he expected us to immediately credit his account before standard business hours, no questions asked. That’s not how we do business, and any business that does is vulnerable to scams.

“After explains [sic] I deal in higher end cards, I just don’t use their site for transactions” So we should just take customer's word that he’s good for the $2,900, because no astute internet scammer would *ever* use the strategy of saying he’s legit, and then file a bogus PayPal claim afterwards. I would note here that Mr. customer displays little trust for our business, despite the facts that we have been in continuous operation since 2000, have a spotless eBay reputation with over 3,800 feedback, have exhibited at the National Sports Collectors Convention and have 3,000+ followers on Twitter. He doesn’t really trust us -- but he expects us to trust him, no questions asked.

“The PayPal name “Mark Humphries”, which I thought was pretty strange” Well, customer, a quick internet search would provide you with the LinkedIn profile for Mark Humphries, showing you that he is the General Manager of thePit, has graduate degrees from Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania, had a 10-year career with major banks plus a stint reporting to the CEO of Collectors Universe (PSA parent company), and over 300 links to other established professionals in the collectibles, banking and technology industries. Since you’re also a member of LinkedIn, this shouldn’t be too tough for you. You can then trust or not trust sending money to that individual, but you can’t legitimately claim that such individual is not clearly an officer of the company with which you seek to deal.

“He changed his story” FALSE. I never “changed my story”, and note that customer never provides the “story” version from which I supposedly changed. I was always clear with Mr. customer that he didn’t purchase the card because his account was not yet credited with the funds (pending our standard review, as elaborated previously) when it was instead sold in a separate transaction.

“Admitting the card was his” The word “admitting” relates to customer’s “story change” fantasy, which I have challenged and debunked above.

“Offering to sell it to me for $2,900” TRUE. In the interest of acquiring a potentially valuable customer, and consistent with my belief that many negative situations can be turned around for mutual benefit, I gave customer a golden opportunity to buy and flip the card on thePit, at his price, within our new MarketMaker Program. As it turns out, if Mr. customer had taken me up on the offer and relisted his card for sale at $3,695, he would have made a quick $795 profit in less than 12 hours. Instead, he turned me down, deciding instead to use his time to defame my company and me on this Forum. I presented the Program to Mr. customer in detail during our two-hour conversation, but he showed no interest due to his short-sighted conviction that thePit does not have sufficient traffic to market his card. That conviction was proven wrong a few hours later when a new Pit customer (a young employee of Google, btw) snatched up the card for $3,695, which was $800 cheaper than the best eBay BIN price for the card.

“I would not be able to cash out my sold Trout until at least the end of the year” FALSE ThePit’s MarketMaker Program that I presented to customer included no restrictions on his use of Pit Trade Credits arising from the potential sale of the Trout. Yes, thePit does have a 10% CashOut fee (which, I would note, is less than the total fee exacted by eBay), but this can be avoided entirely by using Trade Credits to purchase other items on thePit. A number of dealers, investors and speculators have made use of our unique Fee-Free Trading Model to build valuable portfolios on thePit since we introduced this new business model at the end of October 2016.

“They stated the photo was a stock photo” The fact that we use stock photos is hardly a secret; it is the way we have done business for all seventeen years of our existence. The use of “fungible, interchangeable sports cards” is clearly stated in Item 6 (“Cards as Commodities”) of our Account Agreement, which customer acknowledged when he registered for thePit. More importantly, it should be obvious to any thoughtful person that stock photos are a requisite feature of an exchange such as ours. Because we centralize trading of each card on a single Bid/Ask quote board, our cards must be traded as commodities rather than specific serial numbers and subgrade combinations. Because we may have several transactions in a single card on any given day, because Pit members may sell their in-hand cards to thePit at any time, and because many Pit members hold cards in their accounts for weeks, months or years before requesting delivery, there is no way to tie specific images to purchases or holdings on our site. If that feature is critical for a customer, we suggest they try COMC, which images every card. If low prices, tight bid/ask spreads, low fees and ease of use are most important, thePit.com offers the most attractive set of features for widely-traded cards.

“This information was not posted anywhere on the [Item] page” TRUE. We should probably add some indication of the use of stock photos, for new customers, to complement the notices to that effect elsewhere on the site. We appreciate the suggestion.

“The owner lying” So Mr. customer comes to the end of his defamatory tirade, realizes his case is weak, and decides to throw out the vague, obligatory claim that I lied to him. About what did I lie, Kyle? As I have laid out in painstaking detail above, I stand behind every statement I made to you on our phone call and in this defense of our practices at thePit.com. The fact that you, customer, a graduate of Susquehanna University and a government employee with the General Services Administration (GSA), should make such a false and unsubstantiated claim is very disturbing.

Mark Humphries
General Manager
ThePit.com

* * * *

[fungi2510]

Petty much?