The troubles with Check out my Cards COMC

 Hey everybody.  Apologies for my absence on the blog, I realize it's been awhile.   But recently I've had something weighing on my mind and while I try to be positive I need to get this off my chest.  

Back in June I noticed a thread show up in the forums on Trading Card Database.  It was called COMC shipping costs way up.  At first I was like, maybe it was the posters user error when they were requesting shipping from the website, but as I read others were sharing the same story.  I'll be honest I only ship my COMC port maybe once or twice a year, it was one of the benefits of the site.  But I decided to see for myself and sure enough $19.99 was the cheapest shipping option and a shipping date months and months out.  This was and still is quite a shock seeing this huge increase is shipping from the normal $5 or so.  

Reading through more of the forum post a lot of people were complaining.  Some had sent emails to COMC expressing their displeasure at this seemingly out of the blue shipping cost increase.  Some pointed out that it was vaguely mentioned in blog posts or interviews, but it certainly wasn't widely broadcast to the users.  

Before I really get into bashing COMC, lets first take a little history trip and explore the website and the service and how it's evolved over the years.  According to the company website COMC was founded just before Christmas in 2005.  I can vaguely remember hearing about this new company and their service, which at the time was unique in that it really filled a void in the hobby.  You could consign your cards to COMC, set your price, and they would do the rest.  On the buyers side you could buy cards and hold them in your portfolio until you wanted to have them shipped to you or you could relist and resell the cards.  I bought my first card on COMC in 2010.  At the time there was no add ons and the price was the price.  When you went to ship the card you got little surprise as the handling charge was added.  Eventually COMC hide the 25 cent handling fee in the price of the cards so it was paid for when you bought something.  Another perk of early COMC was that they partnered with Beckett for pricing information.  I think the idea was you could see how good of deal you were getting, but in reality a lot of us used it to get from Beckett pricing.  That relationship ended quite a while ago.  COMC has also gone through some growing pains as they got more popular the quickly outgrew their facilities, at least twice.  This lead to long processing and shipping times as they moved. Then of course COVID hit and Washington State (where they are based) had some pretty strict quarantine protocols.  So that also exacerbated their processing and shipping times from weeks to months, like 6 months or longer for their base services.  And they also restructured their intake processing pricing.  Everything got more expensive.

First let me say that COMC has always packaged and shipped your cards like a tank.  Seriously I have no problems on that front I've never had a card damaged, they package extremely well.  As they should,  if you ship 100 cards you've already paid at least $25 dollars in handling fees.   You can check out one of my unboxing videos to see for yourself HERE.  

My ire comes as they very quietly, exponentially increased their shipping costs.  COMC has a fee when you submit your cards to the site.  That can vary depending on the service but as of right  now that's 50 cents with a $10 minimum and a processing time of about 4 months!!  So already as a seller you are into the sale of that card for 50 cents minimum.  Next COMC tacks on  minimum of 25 cents to the price of each card for handling (larger cards, graded cards, etc have a higher fee).  They also take 5% of the sales price as their fee.  Now you'll probably ask how some cards are cheaper than 75 cents?  Well those are usually legacy cards that have been on the site and likely sold through a port sale or have just been on the site a really long time.  So when you looking at a for sale price of a card on the website (looking at the card on ebay also adds fees and a higher price)  if the card is newly listed theirs already 75 cents.  And now you are going to pay a very expensive shipping cost to get those cards to you.  

What bother's me the most is that through the years and growing pains as collectors and sellers have put up with the increased processing and shipping times and fees, COMC has decided that the best way to increase their profits in not to look at reducing their costs through better automation and innovation but that it's just better to nickel and dime their customers.  To the point that COMC is not the same experience or bargain it once was.  It also seems they are catering more toward the breakers and flippers than the average collector looking for cards for their collection.  I've also noticed the pricing on COMC has become ridiculous, and that the company should have better pricing tools to help sellers set more realistic prices (or maybe sellers now just greedier) and it would be great if COMC would improve their bulk or port selling feature.  Right now it's a joke to try and sell off your port or a piece of it.  Would be nice if there was an easy way to pick the card you want to bundle to get rid of.  

Ok that's it (I think)  Let me know what you think I'd love to hear your positives and negatives of your experience through the years with COMC.  

CB out   

The Blackest of Fridays 2019 edition

I had a really nice well thought out post, about half written, about my return to blogging, waxing rhapsodic to the state of the hobby and my thoughts on it, but honestly I all I want to do is talk about cards and other stuff.  I most likely will rewrite the post and put it out sometime.  But this post is about the only, well almost only, Black Friday shopping I do.  To be fair I look forward to COMC's Black Friday event every year.  COMC also does a big spring cleaning event in the Spring, but the Black Friday event is by far the biggest, best, and most participated sale on the site.  You'll notice all the images are from COMC's website, it'll still be a few weeks before I get my cards in hand.  COMC shipping estimate was just before Christmas, but I've always received my cards the first or second week of December.  This year COMC's free shipping special only applied if you spend over $100 during the event. Which was the exact same deal for their Spring sale, so I should have seen that coming.  What that means for me going forward is I probably won't wait all year to have my cards shipped to me. I had no intention of spending that much this year, until I did, ahem, don't tell my wife.   For those of you who have never used or bought off of COMC it's fairly simple.  You sign up for an account add some store credit and then go shopping.  Cards bought get put into your portfolio that can be shipped at anytime or not shipped like I do.  I tend to economize my shipping to once or twice a year or when I have a nice stack.  Basic USPS shipping runs $3.99 for the order which isn't too bad.  It did seem like year's ago that deals where much better on the site, but if your patient and look around you can still find some hidden gems on the site. A couple things to keep in mind about the purchase price for the cards.  First, sellers get charged 30 cents to process the card and get it listed on COMC, I'm sure there are deals to be had when submitting cards and sellers that buy portfolios, but that 30 cents in the posted fee on the COMC's website.  Second COMC adds 25 cents to every card price to cover their handling fee.  When COMC first started this fee was added at the time of shipping and if you had a lot of cards there was a big sticker shock at checkout.  So looking at card prices remember the seller is already into the card for 30 cents and COMC has already added another quarter.  Something else to think about and something I keep in mind when deciding to buy a card or not is I factor in what it would cost me to just ship that card off of eBay.  So if I can pick a card up on eBay for $2 or COMC for $3, but it's going to cost me $3-4 to ship to me I'm willing to pick the card up on COMC for a little bit more. 

I ended up staying up late Thanksgiving night and waiting for COMC's sale to go into effect which it did 11pm my time.  I also went back the next morning for round two. In all I shipped over 70 cards to me.  About a third of those cards were pick ups since the last Black Friday.  I still check the site regularly to see if any of the challenges open and pick up a little free store credit that way, I also bought a bunch of cards during the Spring Cleaning sale.  Ahem, enough yapping lets see what I got this year.

Over the past year I've been pretty focused on what I pick off of COMC, it's been mostly Robin Yount cards.  This Black Friday I had a bunch of cards I was watching to see if I could get them at a discount.  I was still pretty focused, but also branched out into some cheap Brewers autos, relics, and parallels. 

After I went through a lot of my want list I also did a bunch of searching to see if I could find some rarer Brewers cards to add to the team collection.  First up is the 97 Pinnacle Ben McDonald Museum Collection card.  I can't wait to get this card in had because I know the scan does not do it justice.  Most people probably remember Ben as an Oriole but he spent the last two years of his career with the Brewers.  Ben cost me a whole dollar.

Speaking of early parallels, I was not a fan of Pacific when it was putting out baseball in the late 90s and early 2000, but they did bring about a ton of innovation to the hobby and for good or bad numbered parallel cards were one of those.  This Geoff Jenkins is part of the 2000 Pacific Revolution - Shadow Series parallel and it's another card I can't wait to see in person.  Number to 99 this one also cost me just about a dollar.

Also from the same set I picked up this Ron Belliard Red parallel

Ron set me back a whole 90 cents.

Another great cheap parallel from 97 Donruss Studio of John Jaha

I also picked up some great cheap autos and relics from some unsuccessful and maginally successful Brewers prospects and players of days gone by.

 I love picking up these old prospect autos of guys I've never heard of, mainly because then I have to go look them up to see what happened in their career.  Cameron was drafted by the Brewers in the second round in 2009 and bounce around the Brewers farm system till 2015 and then a brief stay in the Rockies system in 2016 and then vanished.  Cameron's 2009 Donruss Elite Blue Aspirations card numbered to just 100 set me back a whole dollar and change.

 I picked up this Brian Banks card because I actually had heard of him, and to be honest this is such a nice baseball card.  Plus he has such a nice signature, I'm sure that's changed now that he's a doctor.  Brian played for the Brewers from early to late 90's bouncing up and down in the system.  Went to play in Japan for a year and then came back and played with the Marlins, he even help win a World Series in 2003.  He retired in 2004 and went to Dentistry School and graduated in 2011, he has a practice in Arizona.

 I picked up Cristian Guerreros 2002 Topps autograph.  Again I was really taken with the design and Critian's huge, even if it's note very bumpy, signature.  Cristian is a cousin of Vlad and second cousin to Vlad Jr.  Unfortunately Cristian didn't have the same success never actually making it up to the bigs.  He is featured as a prospect in a couple sets.

 One auto I've had my eye on for a while was this 1996 Leaf Signature Series auto from Aussie Dave Nilsson.  And for a buck and quarter I couldn't pass it up.

I also ended up picking up this Taylor Jungmann auto for only a buck.  Taylor bounced up and down in the Brewers system till 2016.  He plays over in Japan right now.

Here's the collection of relics I picked up cheap, most of these where under $2.

 Lastly this Rickie Weeks patch card is one of the reasons I ended up spending enough to get free shipping.  I had been hemming and hawing about picking this up and a couple others.  It was a little more pricey, around $5, but such a great looking patch from a set I don't remember every opening a pack of.  In the end I added another $40 to my store credit and picked up bunch more stuff.

I also picked up a couple oddball cards from my newest favorite Brewer Keston Huira.

Added one Topps Living to almost complete my team set.  I ended up picking up Sogard's 2018 card for $1.25, way cheaper than even if I had bought in bulk.

I'm not sure if this Yelich was part of the pack promotion Panini had at the National, but this is part of the National set.  For 55 cents it was a no brainer pick-up.

While I focused the majority of my buying on Robin Yount , who's cards are coming up, and Brewers, I did pick up a few cards for a couple of my other PCs

I had never seen this 97 Donruss VXP 1.0 Frank Thomas CD-ROM card and it was cheap so bonus.

I also picked up another 2019 Panini National card this time the Magentic Fur parallel of Brett Favre, number to just 99.

Now onto the Younts!!  Over the year's my collecting habits and priorities have changed.  Now I'd say my first and foremost collecting focus is on Hall of Famer, Mr. Brewer Robin Yount.  As a matter of fact while I've been neglecting this blog I've been keeping up with new releases and posting pretty regularly over at the Yount Collector.  And all of these cards will be featured over there eventually once I get them in-hand.

Robin has had a bunch of new cards this year in flagship Topps and finding and adding all those and their parallels is something that will keep me busy for years to come, but it was nice to pick up the Black parallel of the Faces of the Franchise insert with Yelich and Fingers and for under $2, yes please!

 One of the best thing about COMC is finding cards you didn't realize you needed.  Case and point is this 2005 Donruss Diamond Kings Team Timelines insert card with Lyle Overbay.  I have the relic version of this card, but not the base. 

 2012 was Panini's first year putting out Prizm.  That year there were only a couple parallels, not so much now, but this is the base Prizms parallel. 

 Picked up this nice Black parallel of the 2018 MLB All-Star Logo Manu-patch card, numbered to just 99 it was a little more than I wanted to pay for it, $5, but I figure why not.  I don't have the base to this card and oddly enough neither did COMC.

 I have a few really nice relic cards from 2008 UD Premier, but after looking through my master list realized I did not have Robin's base card.  Rarer than his card in this year's Transcendent these base cards are numbered to just 99.

 Another one that slipped through the cracks was this 2005 Topps Pristine base card.  I have two of the encased refractors, but somehow missed the base from the set, until now.

 Another 2019 Parallel added cheap.

 I also picked up both the base and mini version of Robin's 2019 Allen and Ginter X cards.  Oddly the mini was cheaper than the base.

 I also found a good deal on his 2019 Ginter mini framed relic, so bonus.

 Even more Ginter goodness I found a cheap regular mini and a very reasonably priced no number backed mini.  The no-number backs have a print run of just 50 cards.

 A couple more hole fillers was one of Robin's 2005 Donruss Diamond Kings HOF Heroes base cards.  Robin has two base cards in the set one has a color image the other this black and white, or is it sepia?

 I also found a cheap red framed version of the same card I need for the collection.

 And I found a cheap copy of Robin's 2005 Fleer National Pastime base card numbered to 699.

 I'd been eyeing up these 150th Medal Medallions for a while nice to bring one home this Black Friday.

 I also picked up both parallels of Robin and Christian's Lasting Legacies insert card from 2019 Topps Fire.  Now just to find a copy of the base for cheap.

 I also found good deals on a couple low numbered parallels.  Robin's 2019 Silver Pack gold parallel numbered to 50 and his 2019 Prizm Snake Skin parallel also numbered to 50.

And finally I also picked up his 2019 Topps Update legends variation for $2 and change.  His Series 2 legends variation is also in this shipment, but I picked that up well before Black Friday.

 One last card to feature and by far the most expensive card in the bunch.  I picked this card up during COMC's Spring Cleaning sale, but it's one I've been wanting to add.  Robin's 2016 Topps Transcendent sketch reproduction card.  Robin has a sketch and reproduction card in this year's Transcendent as well, those are numbered to 100, so maybe well see some on COMC in the next year or two.

Whew that's basically it.  I had a blast this year, especially since I had increased my budget a little over last year.  Can't wait to get my Christmas package and get these cards in hand.

Anyone else pick up some time stuff this Black Friday?