CheckOutMyCards.com Blog

Item #6000000, submitted by arcaiser

Here is a quote from CheckOutMyDeals who discovered that item #6000000 was live before we did. I guess we have been a little preoccupied with our move.

I think it’s wonderful that not only did you process an additional 1 million cards in record time, but you also improved the site to address at least 2 of the user’s top concerns since card #5000000 was processed.

People wanted an easy port sale feature and they now have it.

People wanted an increased customer base, and you’re now cross-posting cards to Amazon, potentially adding millions of new customers.

Some features I would love to see:

* The ability to tag players with Hall of Fame status, All Star status, major awards won, teams played on, etc.

* The ability to tag sets / cards as autographed or memorabilia cards.

* The ability to filter searches by several factors. For instance Yankees memorabilia cards over $10 book value that are at least 50% off book value.

One feature I would really like to see:

The ability for a seller to subdivide their port into several smaller ports. The port could then be sold as a bulk lot using the port sale feature. It could also be subjected to different auto accept percentages than other cards.

That way, if someone wants to accept 50% offers on basketball cards but only accept 10% offers on baseball cards, they could do so. Or if they would sell their hockey for 10% of book, but only as a bulk lot, they could also do so.

I’m very happy with COMC and all of the positive improvements that you are continually making. Good luck!

Let’s see how many of these feature requests are live by the time item #7000000 hits the site.

Side Note
Over the last few months we knew we were running out of space in our current warehouse, and we chose to spend our energies hunting for a new home instead of giving specials or trying to get more items on the site. As a result it took us 2 days longer to get from item #5000000 to #6000000 (137 days) than it did to get from #4000000 to #5000000 (135 days). This is actually quite amazing when you consider the fact that we ran virtually no processing specials during that time. When we don’t run any specials, people send us cards that are more difficult and time consuming to process. One way to approximate the difficulty of the cards submitted is by looking at the average book value. Generally the more valuable a card is the more rare it is and the harder to identify what it is.

As you can see from this chart, we had been hovering around $5/item for an average book value the past few years. Over the last 6 months as we have been working on the items in the 5,000,000′s you can see that our average book value shot up to just under $6/item. It was quite a feat to get all of those items processed in virtually the same amount of time as the previous million items.

For the next million items we will have room to hire more people and give them enough space to work efficiently. We will see how this translates to our stats.