I like to consider myself a multi-tool collector. For those of us who were collecting cards before the days of the internet your choices for adding cards to your collection were limited to busting wax, buying singles from your LCS (if you had one), trading with fellow collectors, and mail order. All of those options are still valid, but the internet gives us so many more options. Sites like justcommons.com, sportslots.com, eBay, Listia, and COMC offer all sorts of options to not just buy new cards, but to sell as well.
Like I said I consider myself a multi-tool collector, meaning I will use any means available to further my collection. That being said I noticed a very disturbing trend over on COMC on my last Black Friday shopping spree that was echoed around the card collecting blogosphere. Good deals on COMC are becoming much harder to find and in some instances the pricing is getting absurd.
If you don't know the story, COMC parted ways with Beckett over a year ago and has been trying to rebuild it's card catalog using customer help. What that meant was no longer was a Beckett book price listed with the card. Say what you will about Beckett pricing, but at least it put a ceiling on pricing, usually.
If you've been on COMC lately the offer a SRP - Suggested Retail Price, a SLP - Suggested List Price, and a SWP - Suggested Wholesale Price. And for very common cards that have lots of sales on COMC that works OK, but when you start getting into some of the rarer cards, or cards that there are only one of for sale and there is no SRP or SLP, then it starts to get a little crazy. Sure there's a quarter added onto the price for COMC's handling fee, but some sellers really just throwing out some crazy prices. Maybe they expect you to just come back and counter offer to their insanely high price, but for me I just shake my head and move on.
For me the advantage of shopping on COMC is you can peruse a lot of cards and there's just one flat shipping fee, but if I can find a card cheaper elsewhere, I'm going elsewhere. It also hurts that COMC's overhaul of their site still isn't finished and sellers on their site are getting a little impatient, which probably leads to fewer sellers sending in cards to add to their inventory, which means lower overall selection, variety, and competition.
I was going to put up some examples, but I rather you journey over there and explore the issue for yourself and post your findings in the comments.
I've seen some insane prices over there, but it's mostly pretty reasonable. MOSTLY. I would like the ability to tell certain people they are dreaming, though.
ReplyDeleteYeah I'm not saying everyone is crazy, but I've been waiting to pick up a Robin Yount 2014 Topps High Tek base card and I've picked up a variation for $3 and was planning on just picking up the base card for about the same price, but all of a sudden they all disappeared and some jackhole list 2 for $50 a piece. For the base card! Man I could get an auto for that price. I'm not sure if he just didn't know what he had or what. But I've found other examples all over the site and just have to shake my head. Do these guys think the buyer have no idea what they're buying?
DeleteI'd say half of the sellers on COMC now live in dreamland. It's getting worse monthly. That, and I think some of the larger sellers use it as a showcase.
ReplyDeleteNot only that, but there's shenanigans going on. If I send in a box of 3200 cards (commons) it'll take between 4-6 weeks for them to go live. And yet, some people get the latest release posted on there within 2-3 days of the product going live!
How is that possible? They're certainly not paying the price it would cost to do that, and yet...
Rumours are that the owners of COMC are also a couple of the bigger sellers on there. They of course pay no fees, get their commons and low end crap on there quicker, etc....
in the end... a good thing is fast becoming not as much of a good thing.
That's true. http://www.comc.com/AboutUs.aspx click on the usernames of the COMC team and it'll take you to their listings. Some of those guys have tens of thousands of cards on there. I'm sure they get at least a discounted listing cost, if not free.
DeleteI couldn't agree more. It's getting out of hand. The sad thing is, you have to add money to your COMC account to make an offer. If you're like me, you don't do that because if my offer is rejected, I don't want money just sitting over there. I don't use it enough to justify that. I've pretty much gone away from COMC (other than the order I placed over the weekend).
ReplyDeleteMy number of COMC purchases have dropped three straight years and lately I'm lucky if I purchase 10 cards a month.
ReplyDeleteI'm late to the party, but I'll offer a COMC seller point of view...
ReplyDeleteI recently had a card for sale that was limited enough that I had no idea what to ask for it. COMC didn't have enough data on the card to offer a suggested price and there were no other cards like it on COMC or eBay. I hated to do it, but I started it out at what I thought was an overly high price and then tried to gradually lower the price, under the theory that I can always come down if I overprice, but if I underprice it'll just sell.
I ended up getting a price I'm happy with and hopefully the buyer was also happy, but after reading this post and the comments I feel bad that I contributed to a problem that's more widespread than I'd realized.
I don't think what you're describing is the problem at all. It's not the super rare or low numbered auto cards or whatever that I'm talking about. It the run of the mill stuff that seems to be the problem and sellers think since they have the only 1989 Jim Rice Woolworth's card on the site that it's worth $10. Stuff like that.
DeleteAh, those guys. I know all too well what you mean. I maintain a list of guys like that and I refuse to do business with them (as much as is possible)... I won't accept offers from them and there have been more than one occasion where I was going to buy a cheap card and then took a look at the buyer and said "Oh crap, it's him" and then pulled away from the "Buy" button.
DeleteIf you hover over an image of a card, there's a "Report Error" link that you can click on, and one of the types of "Error" is "Asking Prices is too high". I have no idea of whether this accomplishes anything at all, and I don't know how one does this on a phone or tablet where 'hovering' doesn't work, but I suppose it's something. Most people are not going to bother, I know, but I just wanted to point it out.
Thanks to everybody who commented on this... it concerns me enough that I'm going to voice my concerns to COMC... I'm far from a "big fish" in that pond, but I have been selling for 4 years and the people in charge do seem receptive to input from users, so it's worth a shot.
Thanks Joe. I totally did that and the 3 cards have been delisted. If you've done a blog post about this already I'd love to know, but I'd really like to know what selling on COMC is like. I doubt it's a way I would go, but I did a big posts a while back about selling on ebay and I was hoping I'd hear from guys selling on COMC and Sportslots and what that was all about.
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