Here is a quick overview of the site’s concept.

ScoreboardEh is designed to highlight the day to day stars of the game and their cards. Each morning I’ll reveal the contents of one pack of cards. I’ll write about the cards I find and the players they feature. I’ll also write about the other cards of the same players that I have available in my ScoreboardEh store at CheckOutMyCards.com.

Here are a few of the cards for sale from ScoreboardEh.

Today there was a perfect example of your site enabling collectors to do what they love… haggling over prices.

GrahamsCards sent a $47.50 offer for 35 cards in my LowPriceCards account. The original asking price was right around $90. I countered by asking just under $70. GrahamsCards countered my proposal by offering $60. I countered again with a $65 proposal, and GrahamsCards accepted my proposal.

Here are a couple of the cards that were included in the transaction.

To my knowledge, CheckOutMyCards.com is the only site that allows buyers to make a single offer on multiple cards and let the buyer and seller haggle back and forth over the price. This was truly a beautify interaction to watch. This is only a small taste of the many innovations that CheckOutMyCards.com will be bringing to the online sports card community in the near future.

Jeff Hagen was a freshman at Hopkins High School in MN when I was a senior.

Kris Humphries also went to Hopkins High School, and I played against him many times at open gyms.

Hiram Fuller played a few games at South Sound Athletics with the Club Seattle pro-am team that I played with for several years.

Doug Christie also played a few games with my Club Seattle team when we played in a league at his al-ammeter Rainier Beach last summer.

Martell Webster played on another team in that same league at Rainier Beach.

Jamal Crawford asked me to play with his team in a tournament at Green Lake after playing against him at the Redmond Athletic Club several times a few summers ago. My Club Seattle team also faced off against Jamal in several other Seattle area tournaments and leagues. Jamal is one of the nicest guys I have ever met!

Will Conroy was also on our team at Green Lake. He had just graduated from the University of Washington at the time.

Brandon Roy was our coach for the tournament. He couldn’t play because he was going to be a senior at the University of Washington.

Nate Robinson dunked on me during that tournament.

Shawn Kemp took my spot in the championship game at Green Lake, and Nate Robinson’s team crushed us. We only lost by 2 points on a last second shot by Nate when we faced them earlier in the tournament.

Kevin Garnett… well almost. He often played noon ball at Northwest Athletic Club in MN during the lock-out of 1998-99. My brother had played against him several times, so he got me into the club during one of my lunch breaks. After a long wait I only had time for one more game, and it would be against Kevin’s team. Unfortunately, there was only one spot left, and it was between my brother and me to shoot for it. I and still annoyed that he didn’t just let me play. The dork out shot me for the last spot, and I never got my chance to play against Kevin. He used to live about 3 miles from where I grew up in Minnesota, but now he is off to Boston where he and Ray Allen are going to win a championship for the Celtics.

Note: All of the images for this post were added by simply copying the HTML code generated by the “grab this card” feature I just added to all the card details pages on CheckOutMyCards.com. You are welcome to do this with any of your blogs or eBay listings.

Over the last week many of his cards have sold, and this got John excited to find more cards to put on our site. So he started searching eBay, and this is what he found.
My Ex-Husbands Cards for sale…

This was his response.

“According to eBay, guys with cards shouldn’t cheat on their wives.”
- John Neumann

SHOW DISCOUNTS
Interested in selling your cards on CHECKOUTMYCARDS.com? Meeting us at a show is an easy and cost effective way to do just that. You will receive the following discounted price:

• $0.20 / Card for 25 or more cards from the exact same set/insert set/parallel set
• $0.30 / Card for 25 or more cards from the same player
• $0.40 / Card for or all other cards (25 card minimum)

(Our standard price for adding cards to the site: $0.50 / Card)

SHOW DATES/TIMES

September 8th, 2007
Saturday: 10am-4pm
Totem Lake Mall
12500 Totem Lake Blvd
Kirkland, WA 98034
Directions to Totem Lake Mall

September 15th, 2007
Saturday: 11am-6pm
Jantzen Beach Supercenter
1405 Jantzen Beach Center
Portland, OR 97217
Directions to Jantzen Beach Supercenter

September 22nd, 2007
Saturday: 10am-3pm
Meridian Park School
175th and Meridian
Shoreline, WA
Directions to Meridian Park School

Show and information courtesy of Twin Oaks Shows .

Let us know if you plan on being at one of the shows. We hope to see you there!
~The CHECKOUTMYCARDS.com Team

Thanks to Upper Deck, we were able to obtain the following:

It’s the CHECKOUTMYCARDS.com team!

In case you’re wondering, John Neumann is my little brother who joined our team for the week. I flew from Seattle to Minneapolis where Johnny lives, picked him up, and together we made the drive to Cleveland! His help was invaluable. If he lived closer we would recruit him!

In fact, while at the convention, he was recruited for and quoted in a Beckett article!

“I just want to collect cards,” said John Neumann. “I don’t care what sport or who the player is. I just want to add relevant cards to my collection, even if the cards are of Barry Bonds.”

As a buyer/seller on our site, you’ll be seeing more of Johnny!

Check out Johnny’s cards for sale

Julia

On Friday we are going live with new features that will enable you (the public) to sell your cards on our site!

All day Saturday and Sunday we are going to be at the card show at the Jantzen Beach Super Center Shopping Mall in Portland, OR.

All you Portland people, come see us!

We look forward to meeting you!

The CheckOutMyCards.com Staff

Julia and I will be there.

Let us know if you are planning to be at the show, and we will keep an eye out for you.

• Last month we more than tripled our traffic.
• We have been averaging 4% growth per day.
• In the first 3 days of July we had more traffic than the entire month of April.

This is great, but it also has a cost. We will likely need to buy more servers soon, and we will have to pay for more bandwidth. In order to offer the best buying and selling experience, we need to keep our costs down so that the overhead for using the system is kept as low as possible.

So, we are experimenting to see how effective ads might be towards offsetting some of our expenses, but we are very concerned with keeping our customers happy. Please let us know what you think about the ads. You can either leave a comment on the blog or send mail to staff@checkoumycards.com.

Currently we only list ads on our search page, but we will likely also put ads on the card details pages and on the home page.

As a child I started collecting baseball cards in 1986. Every time we would memorize a Bible verse, our youth group leader would give us a pack of baseball cards. I remember the first time I saw a price guide and found out that my Lenny Dykstra rookie card was worth $2. As an eight year old, this was really exciting.

1987 was a big year for us in Minnesota. The Twins won the World Series, so now it was time for me to start following major league baseball. The next year, I discovered a new hero, Orel Hershiser. After 59 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings, a gold glove, and a World Series MVP, I had to get his rookie card. That brought me to my first sports card show at the Thunderbird Hotel in Bloomington, MN where I paid $6 for a 1985 Topps Orel Hershiser rookie card.

Being in love with numbers, I studied the stats every week in the newspaper, and I read all of the prices each month when the Beckett came out. The other day I ran across a line graph I had plotted by hand to track the price changes for the Robin Yount and George Brett rookie cards. By the time I was 12 I had my first table at a card show. Seeing how popular someone’s dice game was, I went home and calculated all of the odds so that I could optimize the customer’s expected value without risking too much of a loss for me. (Yes, I eventually became the captain of my high school math team.) The dice game was a big hit at my next card show.

I don’t know if it was my love of numbers that drew me to sports cards, or if it was sports cards that gave me a reason to love numbers. But growing up, my parents thought I spent way too much time and money on sports cards (probably true). So they banned me from collecting sports cards, but we all know how obedient teenagers are. This inspired some childhood “creativity.”

In 1996 I started going to college, and very quickly ran out of extra money. At this point my childhood passion had to be shelved, and the next few years were spent cultivating my interests in numbers and computers. I received my BS in Math and Master’s degree in Computer Science from the U of MN. In 1999, I started working for Microsoft as a Program Manager on Excel. I like to think sports cards played a big part in sparking my interests in math and inspiring me to get through college… so that I could get a job making enough money to afford more cards.

In 2003, after working very long and hard on Microsoft Access 2003, I got a chance to poke my head out at the world. I discovered etopps.com and rediscovered eBay. My sports card interests had laid dormant for 7 years, and the industry had changed a lot. Through eBay, I was able to find all of the cards I was collecting in 1996 for next to nothing.

eBay can be a very time consuming hobby. So I built an Access database to track eBay auctions, and I was able to successfully acquire tons of cards for very low prices. Of course, I got way more cards than I needed, and I wanted to let others pick and choose cards from the big lots that I was winning. So I started to build the site LowPriceCards.com as a fun little hobby.

While talking to a local dealer, he asked where I typically bought cards. When I mentioned that that I got them online, he was curious how I was willing to pay for cards that I couldn’t see. Though the cards I was getting from eBay weren’t always perfect, I was still getting a good enough price to make it worth my while. However, this comment stuck with me. I realized that buying and selling sports cards online was a fairly risky and time consuming venture for most collectors.

Drawbacks of collecting sports cards online

• Almost never get to see what you are actually getting
• Typically high prices if you do get to see what you are getting
• Small transactions are not cost effective (payment charges and shipping charges are a killer, mailing checks or SASEs take too much time)
• Beckett.com, naxcom.com, sportlots.com, and other collector sites force you to pay for shipping from each dealer separately
• Not worth the effort when another dealer or user doesn’t follow through
• Time consuming to keep an eye out for your favorite player, set, or card
• Most sports card websites are very poorly designed
• Poor search functionality
• Limited to no browsing
• Tedious shopping cart experience
• Required user account creation and log-in
• Out of date inventory

Drawbacks of selling cards online

• Little or no tools for managing your inventory
• Time consuming to catalog inventory
• Impossible to find sold inventory
• Tedious packaging and shipping process
• High maintenance costs
• Large seller fees

These are just some of the drawbacks for buying and selling cards online. I am sure many of you have seen more areas that you would like to improve. Many of these issues were addressed by LowPriceCards.com.

LowPriceCards.com Features

• Every card offers a 2x zoom of both the front and back (patent-pending technology)
• Low prices (50% off book on average)
• Friendly and prompt customer service
• RSS feeds to subscribe to your favorite player, set, or card
• Well designed
• Simple and flexible search functionality
• AJAX shopping cart experience
• No log-in required
• Inventory always up to date
• Powerful database for managing our inventory
• Ultra-fast inventory cataloging
• Seconds to find sold inventory
• Optimized packaging and shipping process
• Low maintenance costs

The problem with LowPriceCards.com was that it only helped me and a couple buyers that were interested in my inventory. I kept getting requests from people who wanted to post their inventory on a site like mine. So I decided to open this functionality to fellow collectors.

In 2006, my wife and I formed Julia Getsch Enterprises, LLC, and in early 2007 we launched CheckOutMyCards.com as an effort to become the premier sports card consignment website. We are currently beta testing our consignment functionality with a handful of users, and a month ago we hired a web developer to work on our site full-time. Over the next few months we will be rolling out many new features. Here is a sampling of what is to come.

How you might use CheckOutMyCards.com

• No hassle consignment and purchasing (get rid of the cards you don’t want, and pick up the cards you do)
• Just send us the cards you want to sell or trade
• Pick prices for individual cards or set pricing rules for players or sets
• Receive notification when a card’s book price changes
• Funds automatically added to your account when cards are sold
• No need to contact the buyer, package the inventory, or ship the items, we do that for you
• Buy cards and have them added to your online inventory (avoid shipping fees)
• Use funds in your account to instantly add items to your online inventory (no shopping cart necessary)
• Minimize shipping fees by holding items in your online inventory until you have multiple items to ship
• Enable cost-effective small transactions by using funds in your account

These are just a few of the ways that we are hoping CheckOutMyCards.com will improve your collecting experience. We have many additional innovations that we will be rolling out soon. So keep an eye on this blog, and sign up to be notified as more functionality becomes available.