What I did on Black Friday

Well we are a week removed from the biggest shopping day of the year.  What did I do?  I took off work and stayed home with my son.  Oh and I did my annual COMC Black Friday order.  I ended up getting my card yesterday.  I was surprised how fast COMC was able to process, complete, and ship my order on what is their biggest promotion of the year.  I also didn't spend a dime of my own money.  I have been completing challanges on the website for months and saving my money up especially for this event.  Well mostly.  All in all I think I amassed about $45 dollars in store credit.

That netted me 26 new cards.  It breaks down to 20 new Robin Yount cards from my collection.  Which I will showcase on the Yount Collector. I also picked up 4 new Rollie Fingers cards, 2 of which helped fill holes in my 70's cards.  Those will be showcased on the Rollie Fingers Collector.

I know what your saying, but CB what the hell are you going to show us then?  Well if your keeping count I still have 2 cards yet unaccounted for.

After I opened my 1996 Leaf Preferred pack I got from Collector Crate I looked to see who else was on the Steel card inserts checklist.

I couldn't resist picking up the two players on the checklist I collect.

I think I spent a whole dollar for both cards and while I prefer my Molitor cards with him in a Brewers uniform, I'll take it. I really like these cards.  That's what I love about a lot of the stuff that came out of the late 90's so much innovation and imagination.  These cards also come with a couple parallels, a gold version and a numbered Power version.

Anybody else have fun on Black Friday?

COMC announces it's Black Friday Promotion

Once again COMC, aka Check out My Cards, is offering a Black Friday promotion.  This is always one of it's biggest promotions of the year and if you've got some store credit or a little extra money burning a  hole in your pocket it's a great time to find some awesome deals.

That being said it's nothing really mind blowing.  They are offering free shipping once again on orders over 10 cards.  This year they are giving away $10,000 worth of shopping sprees.  And if you ship over 100 items you get a $5 store credit.  Plus sellers tend to offer big discounts to move cards this time of year and I always come away with a decent haul.

You can check out the full announcement on their blog HERE.

Need a job?

Want to work close to Bill Gates? Like sorting cards? Like working with computers and 9 pocket pages?

COMC is hiring!  You can check it out here on their blog and then hit the link to apply. 

Just thought I'd try and help out the economy.

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.

Sometimes they get it right...

I realize I bitch a lot on this blog.  It's human nature I suppose to express discourse over things you don't like.  But sometimes I need to celebrate the good things. Especially good things in this hobby.  I remember a few years back when CheckOutMyCards.com just started up.   It was a novel idea in the sports card market place.  We already had places like ebay, justcommons.com and sportlots.com, to pick up and sell cards on, but COMC, as we all like to call it, offered something a little different.  Now CheckOutMyCards.com is becoming COMC.com and starting to venture into comic books, non-sports cards, gaming, and magazines.  The biggest complaint I  and many others had was the shipping and handling costs from buying from COMC.  It was pretty ridiculous at the start.  And it favored buying fewer, higher end cards.  If you were looking to fill a set or even get some cheap player cards COMC was a nice starting point, but buying in bulk on the site ended up getting you a higher shipping cost than you paid for all your cards. Now they've dialed it in, streamlined their operation and you can get your whole order shipped for a flat $3.00 with delivery confirmation. You can always upgrade to faster service, but for me allowing a week to have my order packaged and sent is no big deal.  And to be honest I've never waited a full week until I got my shipping confirmation email from them.  They also have great customer service. The one time I had a problem with an order, I was missing a card from my shipment, I emailed the company and they sent the card out the next day with an apology.

The last couple of years COMC has had some great Black Friday promotions.  This year was by far the best and to be honest a great deal.  If you didn't at least look at the site on Black Friday you missed out.  Not only did you get free shipping if you bought and shipped over 10 cards on BF, they credited your account 10 cents for every card you bought.  (They actually offered friee shipping all weekend through Cyber Monday) And a vast majority of the sellers had discounts.  I think I ended up with over 5 dollars in credit when all was said and done.  I picked up a lot of cheap cards for various base and insert sets I'm working on and a nice stack of new Frank Thomas cards for that PC, and some affordable 1963 Topps cards for the that project as well.

And while I've never tried to sell on COMC, not my cup of tea, but that's another blog post, I will say as a buyer it's gotten so much better.  And that's a great news for card collectors.

cb out.

What'll I be doing on Black Friday???

First off Happy Pre-Thanksgiving everybody. I'm not sure if I'll get around to blogging this weekend.  But I do have a 4 day weekend which is pretty sweet.  My wife on the other hand has to work which is a bummer for her, but a boon for me.  I plan on puttering around the house doing stuff, but I will not be out with the masses.  You can keep your 100 dollar TVs and 4 dollar George Foreman Grills, no thank you. The last place I would want to be on Friday is at a retail store.

I will however be taking advantage of Check Out My Cards black Friday deals.  

While I don't make a lot of purchase from COMC, the deals on the site on Black Friday are always pretty good and this year they are even better. You check out all the details here.  I think the one I'm most excited about is the free shipping!  Plus they are giving you 10 cent for every card bought and shipped on Black Friday.  I think I'm going to have a fun time picking up deals for my set needs and PC's.

Have a fun and safe weekend everybody.

cb out