My COMC Black Friday Hauliday!!

Just a quick blurb and some math about my Black Friday haul from COMC.

I ended up taking off Black Friday to finish a few things around the house. We recently participated in the statewide energy audit program in Alaska and I had a few things I still needed to do after our final inspection. I ended up sealing my house too well, so I had to put in some combustion air for my furnace and I also needed to put a humidistat in.  So I spent a few hours on Friday adding a Dew Stop switch to my bathroom fan.

And after I finished my first major electrical upgrade to my house I spent a few hours patting myself on the back and surfing COMC for some good deals.

For those who have never bought off of COMC.com I'll explain the concept.  While some sites like ebay or sportslots.com let you sell stuff through their website you keep possession of your stuff till it sells then you ship it.  The COMC model is different in that you send COMC your cards they catalog and scan them to their site, store them,  you get to set your price and if and when your cards sells COMC packages and ships them. Of course as a seller you pay fees for the service.

Last year COMC revamped its shipping and handling process. Now they offer a flat $3 shipping fee.  Which is great.  COMC use to also charge a 25 cent per card handling fee that you would see at checkout.  Now COMC has incorporated that charge into the price of every card.  So if you pay a dollar for a card on the site, a quarter of that is COMC's handling fee.  Psychologically this actually works great because nothing was more off putting than picking out 20 or so well priced cards and getting to the checkout and realizing that shipping and handling was going to be 8 to 10 bucks!

And every year COMC has their big Black Friday event.  Like in years past they offer free shipping with a minimum purchase and other goodies.  This year you had to ship 20 items to get free shipping and you got $5 in store credit for every 50 cards you had shipped.  They were also giving away 100 shopping sprees to the site.  COMC also encouraged all their sellers to run specials and discounts on their cards to entice buyers. Over all I have to say the deals were pretty good this year.

I went to the site with one goal in mind. I was only going to go after cards for my Robin Yount and Rollie Fingers player collections.  I ended up getting a little carried around and spent about $42. Which might not seem like a lot to some of you, but it was a little more than I planned on spending. Over all I think I did alright. I ended up added about 35 new Younts and 17 new Rollie Fingers to my Player Collections. That's  52 total cards, so I also got $5 in store credit.  When it was all said and done I got all the cards for about 80 cents a piece.  I'll be featuring those cards on my player blogs.

But I did the quick math and realized that while I spent $42 on 52 card, most numbered parallels and inserts and that I got all those great cards for about 80 cents with free shipping COMC still made $13 off of me.  52 times .25 is $13.  Yikes.  This is why I'm glad that COMC adds the quarter to the price of the card. This is also probably why I only end up buying like this at COMC on Black Friday.  I still think I got some great deals and I did. Most sellers had great discounts and I'm glad I didn't have to pay an extra $3 shipping.

I still love to window shop on COMC and if you're only going to buy a few higher end cards on the site the $3.00 shipping and quarter per card handling fee isn't so bad.  And while COMC probably will never be the site to fill large holes in your sets like justcommons.com or sportlots.com they do have a great selection of just about everything now.  Plus I also like that they scan an image of every card for sale, front and back.  And the card in the image you pick is the card you get.

Sorry I'm starting to ramble.  My point is that I like COMC. I like that they add something different to the sport card buying landscape. I also like their customer service. The one time I've had an issue with an order all I had to do was email my problem to them and it was taken care of.

Anybody score anything really good on Black Friday?

And I'm sorry this post didn't feature any pictures of baseball cards so here you go.

Edit:

Here is a picture of my haul!

cb out.