Standard orders will take 7-10 days for us to package them, so it will take 10-14 days for them to get delivered in the US.

Bulk orders will take 2-3 weeks for us to package them, so it will take 3-4 weeks for them to be delivered in the US.

The Good News
We have added two new shipping options, Rapid & Registered.

Rapid
Rapid is just like Standard, only we will package it in 1 business day. It only costs $1.99 + $0.10/card extra for this option.

This is a service that we have been testing out for all of our Amazon orders. It has been working very well.

Registered
Registered Mail is now available for very expensive orders. It is sent via USPS Priority Mail with the Registered Mail service. The fee is $12.50 more than our existing Priority Mail option.

We currently have a backlog of about 600,000 items to upload to Amazon, and our current pace is about 15,000 items per hour. We are working day and night to get as many items listed as possible before Thanksgiving.

If you want to have your items included for sale on Amazon, simply go to the “My Profile & Options” page and edit the new “Sell on Amazon.com” option at the bottom.

Expectations
First off, I want to make sure your expectations are set appropriately. Listing single sports cards on Amazon is a relatively new endeavor. They are still working out some kinks and adding new features. Most of the public has not been trained to look for sports cards on Amazon. As a result, the exact same inventory will likely get significantly more sales on CheckOutMyCards.com than it will get on Amazon. I would roughly estimate that listing your inventory on Amazon might increase your sales by about 10%. That said, our couple week testing period only offers limited data. These numbers could sway greatly.

Fees
Because of our unique fee structure, our sellers commonly avoid our 20% cash-out fee by recycling earned store credit to buy other items on the site. In fact, they do it so frequently that we earn less than 8% cash-out fee per sale. This was intentional, it is encouraged, and it is a major factor in our growing success. However, it means that we don’t have high enough profit margins to cover the commission fees that Amazon charges. So… we will be passing along those fees to you if you choose to have your items listed on Amazon.

How it will work
To keep things simple, we are starting with one big option that will post everything you have for sale on Amazon. You will not be charged any fees to turn this option on or off. It will typically take a few hours for the data to initially go live on Amazon, but it might take longer at first because we can only post about 500,000 new listings per day. Once it is up there, your price changes should only be about an hour delayed. All new items that you list will automatically synchronize with Amazon.

Once we get an order from Amazon, we have a special CheckOutMyCards.com user account named “Amazon” that will make a 20% off offer that your account will automatically accept. You will be able to see these entries in your Offer History page. This is how we cover the Amazon commission fees and other monthly fees. We expect that many of you may want to inflate your prices before turning on the option to list your items on Amazon. That is perfectly acceptable. You will still be able to take normal offers on those items. The Auto-Accept Percentage, Minimum Offer Percentage, and Minimum Offer Amount settings only apply to normal offers.

Amazon Shipping
Just like on CheckOutMyCards.com, shipping fees are paid by the buyers, and they have a few options on Amazon. However, we charge a couple bucks more for shipping because Amazon requires that the orders be shipped out within 48 hours of being placed. In order for us to guarantee this, we run standard Amazon orders though our priority & express shipping pipeline. As a result we typically ship all Amazon orders placed by 6AM PST (9AM EST) on the the day they are placed. This is about 1-2 days faster than we typically ship our standard orders.

Back to testing…. More to come soon

A couple weeks ago I felt honored to get a call from Amazon. They are working to beef up their trading card listings and were asking us to start selling some of our inventory on their website. We talked through what was necessary to make it happen and decided to give it a try with just a small portion of our inventory.

On Friday afternoon our account went live, and it took 2 days for them to upload our sampling of 600,000 items.

Here is what happened to Amazon’s Trading Card category over the last 24 hours.

Saturday 7PM, COMC is #3

Sunday 12AM, COMC is #2

Sunday 3PM, COMC is #1

Orders starting to come in
In our first day we already hit a glitch due to David Freese’s recent popularity… Congratulations to the St. Louis Cardinals. One of David’s cards sold on both Amazon and CheckOutMyCards.com at the same time. I had to pay top dollar to buy the last one that was remaining on CheckOutMyCards.com to replace the one that sold on Amazon.

We are currently working out the kinks, and as we get the process more automated, we will opening it up so that CheckOutMyCards sellers have the option to have some or all of their inventory listed on Amazon as well.

Leave a comment on this blog post with your favorite submission # and why you like it.

All Port Sale ads will get the new Send Offer button.

Port Sale offers must be at least 20% of the total asking price or 10% of the total book price. If the buyer does not have enough funds in their account to cover the offer, the seller will recieve a Request For Proposal (RFP) instead of a traditional offer.

New Offer Related Functionality

RFP – This is a Request for Proposal. It could be thought of as an unfunded offer. This allows people to make offers on entire ports without first having the required store credit in their account. When the sellers accepts an RFP, it doesn’t immediately execute the transaction. Instead it goes back to the buyer as a proposal. The buyer will have to acquire the required store credit before the proposal can be accepted and the transaction executed. Just like normal offers, RFPs can be negotiated back and forth. The only difference is that the buyer’s store credit is not locked while the transaction is still open.

Less than 50% offers – When making an offer on a Port Sale, we allow you to offer less than 50% of the total asking price.

Accepting offers with sold items – When an offer has one or more items sold we only allow you to send a counteroffer. However, if you are the buyer and you counteroffer with the seller’s originally proposed price, we will now automatically push the offer through. This is particularly useful when trying to negotiate Port Sale offers or other large offers.

Removed Items – If items sell before a buyer or seller gets a chance to respond to an offer, those sold items must be removed from any counteroffers. In the past we didn’t make it obvious which items had been removed from previous offers. Now if that is the case, we show you a list of any removed items when viewing an offer. This is enable for open offers as well as all historical offers.

Paged Offer Details – We used to always show all items in an offer on the historical offer details pages. Unfortunately this made the Offer Details page useless when an offer had thousands of items. Now we show 10 items per page just like any of the Make Offer or View Offer pages.

Now we’re looking for a new logo that reflects our love of collectibles. We’re putting it out there for your participation. Go to http://www.mycroburst.com/contests/business-logo-comc to see the parameters and requirements. Check out the entries, make comments, and perhaps submit a design of your own?

$888 will be awarded to the winning logo design. Pass this info on to any creative eyes you know.

Contest ends: Tuesday Sept. 20, 2011 at 3:00 pm.

I also added a link at the bottom of the page so that you can toggle between the old style and the new style to see what you like about each version. Let me know what you think.

Why are we doing this?
Many of you have commented that we shouldn’t fix what isn’t broken. Well, there is a significant drawback to the old design. It was optimized for the case when we only had 1 card for sale. This was an excellent assumption for the first few years.

Now we average 3 cards for sale per listing. As a result the old style gave a huge advantage to the cheapest card. This caused people to really fight for that cheapest spot. The data that we see that you guys don’t have access to is that sellers are undercutting prices unnecessarily. Buyers are willing to pay more, but sellers are trying to get that top spot.

Our solution: More than 1 “top spot”. The new page is designed to feature 3 cards above the fold for about 60-80% of our users. The rest of the users that have smaller monitors will only see 2, but that is still a lot better than the 1.

Now our sellers can focus on charging fair prices instead of slashing to get the top spot due to limitations with our old design.

I hope that shines some light on these growing pains.

You guys get to take part in a live usability studio. Let us know what you think of this version.