CheckOutMyCards.com Blog

On Tuesday we took the site down for about 30 mintues to install a new firewall. Since then we have had a couple mornings where people have had trouble hitting the website. I appologize for the inconvenience. The site should be back up and fully functional right now, and we are trying to identify the issue. Until then, feel free to send mail to staff@checkoutmycards.com or call 1-800-517-3540 if you encounter any issues connecting to the site.

Email Backlog
I am still way behind on email. I went through several thousand messages this weekend and flagged ones that need a response. I will try to send responses this week. If you are still waiting on a response from us by next weekend, please send us another message.

Incorrectly Identified Cards
I finally got a chance to go through all of the notifications we got over the last month, and I updated all of the cards that had been incorrectly identified. If you still see some cards that you think are wrong, please click the notification hyperlinks.

Hiring Status
Now that we have more space, we have been busy hiring more people and training them in. Hopefully in the next few weeks I will find some time to update the site with profiles of our new employees.

Network Issues
If you tried to visit the site on Friday morning, you may have had trouble getting in. This was due to some faulty network equipment. I love the response we got from one of our Canadian users when the site was back up.

Whew…I was missing my fix of “COMC”. Glad to see things are all good again. I’m spreading the word about the site and hope to send more cards soon.
HabsFan24

This week we will be installing some new network hardware that should help us better manage these issues. We may have to take the site down for about 30 minutes to install the hardware. That will happen either Tuesday morning or late some evening this week.

After two weeks, we are finally settled in enough at our new location for you to start sending us your cards again. Thank you for your patience. The new address has been posted on the site. We are still in Redmond, but now we are in a facility that has room for us to grow much more rapidly.

Once we receive your cards, you will be given a estimate for when we will be done processing your cards. We will give priority to first time sellers and to shipments that are 200 or fewer cards. After that it is pretty much first come, first serve.

Due to the overwhelming demand for our consignment service, we are no longer offering volume discounts. Also, we have slightly adjusted our processing fees. There is now an additional $2 fee per shipment. This makes the shipping fees paid by the buyer and the processing fees paid by the seller the same. That is $2 + $0.20 per card.

You guys have been sending so much traffic to the CheckOutMyCards.com that we ran out of disk space on the drive that stores the web logs. This caused a short period of down time this evening.

Normally I pay more attention to the servers, but with all of the stuff going on with the move, I haven’t had the opportunity.

Quick Status Update
The site is working great now. We will have all the orders shipped tomorrow. We are picking up office furniture and setting up more computers on Tuesday, and by Wednesday we should have all stages of our processing pipeline unblocked. If all goes well, there should be many thousands of new cards on the site this weekend.

This month we jumped up 5 spots on the Seattle Startup Index that is published by the Seattle 2.0 Blog.

• We debuted in the January 2008 index at #74.
• In the February index we jumped 8 spots to #66.
• Now, for the March index we jumped 5 spots to #61.

I noticed that no site that was ranked below us jumped above us. That is cool. We are growing faster than our nearest peers.

Thank you for visiting our site and helping us to become the fastest growing sports card website on the internet!

Engineering a move is always fun… for those that like to dance with the unknown and predict the unexpected. I, on the other hand, am very glad that we are almost done. Due to the recent spike in demand for our consignment service, we had to move much faster than I would have liked, but I am super excited about our new facility and our new ability to grow much more rapidly.

Last Friday we signed the lease, and on Sunday we started moving in. The inventory was successfully moved without skipping a beat. The new location has allowed us to easily have teams of people processing cards. Almost everything was going more smoothly and quickly than expected… until we started to configure the network in our new office.

We were hoping to have the internet hooked up on Tuesday, but Murphy’s Law intervened. Now the latest estimate is that the internet will be hooked up on Friday. At least it isn’t like the old days where it often took 3-6 months to get a decent internet connection. Unfortunately, almost all of our staff will be out of town this weekend, so we may not be able to commence filling orders until Monday.

The office space should be fully furnished and everything should be back to the regular swing of things by the end of next week. Deliveries of office furniture and computers are expect to arrive in the middle of next week.

Status Update for Buyers

• Order Status: Assume that your orders won’t be shipped until Monday April 14.

Status Update for Sellers

• Current Shipments: For those of you that have received an estimate for when your cards will be done being processed, the move has pushed us an extra two weeks behind on processing cards.
• Recent Shipments: For those of you that recently sent us shipments of cards, I hope to send the “Shipment Arrived Notification” emails this weekend.
• Future Shipments: For those of you patiently waiting to send us more cards, we expect to start listing our new shipping location next week.

No April fool’s joke today. We are very excited to make this announcement. It is a great thing for everyone following CheckOutMyCards.com.

The excitement and demand for our consignment service has blown us away. In order to provide the best and most timely service, we need a new location where we can hire several more people. We have decided to move to a much larger facility that will allow us plenty of room to grow. We will be staying in the Seattle area and have started lease negotiations. We hope to move in the next few weeks.

If you are looking to sell cards…
This is really good news because we will soon have the team and the location that can support your demand. While we are in transition, please wait to send more cards until we update the site with further instructions. This will likely be somewhere towards the end of April or early part of May.

If you are looking to buy cards…
This is awesome news because our selection will grow much more rapidly. All of the competition will also help ensure that you continue to get fair prices. During the move we anticipate very minimal disruption to our shipping schedule. All orders should still be shipped within two business days.

If you are looking to join an exciting new startup…
You are in luck! We need honest, dependable, careful people that can help us with many different aspects of our system. We are particularly interested in those of you that can help identify all of the cards that people are sending in. Formal job postings will be added to the site in the next few weeks. If you want to be ahead of the game, feel free to send your resume and desired pay range to recruiting@checkoutmycards.com

Last night I got a request from Jane at Forbes.com for some high-resolution images of a handful of players.

With our large arsenal of high-resolution scans, it was fairly easy to pull together the request. Late last night I sent the images, and this afternoon the article was posted.

The Biggest Draft Flops Of The Past 25 Years

Here are the images from CheckOutMyCards.com.

Brien Taylor

B. J. Wallace

Brian Lawton

Neil Brady

For the past year or so, I have been doing all of the work to identify the cards that people send us. Now that we are getting more cards than I can possibly identify on my own, we have started hiring more people to help us with that step.

While people are coming up to speed with our system and all of the different kinds of cards, there will be some mistakes. Though I review the data before it goes live on the site, I may miss some of the errors, but you can help us!

How to let us know about listing errors
I added a couple easy links for you to inform us of any errors on the site.
If you see anything that you think might be an error, you can simply click on the “Something is wrong with this listing” link from any card details page.

If you are a seller, you can click on the “Wrong data?” link when you are managing your inventory.

This kid is amazing. I have never seen a player hit so many tough buzzer beaters, and he is only a freshman in college.

Last Second Left-hander Lifts Minnesota Over Indiana - Watch the play on ESPN.com

I believe this is Blake Hoffarber’s second play of the night on SportsCenter. His first appearance won him an ESPY as the play of the year when he was a sophomore in high school.