Many of you are familiar with the Blowout Cards website and forum. It was a year and a half ago that wunderkindcards (a.k.a. BeaverSportsCards) started a thread in the Blowout Cards forum titled “Checkoutmycards.com“. This has since become the most popular thread the Blowout Cards forum has ever seen. There are more than 3,500 posts on this one thread.

Many of the Blowout Card members have become CheckOutMyCards members, and at the National last year in Chicago a number of these common members made sure we got a chance to meet a few of the folks from Blowout Cards and to start thinking about potential partnership opportunities. It as been a very busy year for both of our sites, and this year at the National we finally got a chance to discuss making those ideas a reality.

Tom Fish and Tim Getsch @ the 2009 National

I am glad to announce that last week we officially signed a partnership agreement, and we are now starting to implement some updates to our sites and service offerings that will illustrate how the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.

Blowout Cards specializes in selling factory sealed boxes and cases. CheckOutMyCards specializes in making it safe & easy for people to buy & sell singles.

Both sites try to be industry leaders through innovation.
– Blowout Cards was the first seller of boxes & cases to start a highly successful forum. CheckOutMyCards has reaped the benefits of this forum.
– Blowout Cards and CheckOutMyCards have stared using services such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and blogs to reach the community.
– CheckOutMyCards set out to create a consignment service that could be cost effective for any cards that might sell for $1 or more. Many people have even found it to be successful for cards that sell for well under $1.
– CheckOutMyCards has scanned more cards than any other sports card website. More than 1,000,000 cards have been scanned using patent-pending technology.

Now you can use the store credit that you earn from selling cards on CheckOutMyCards.com to buy Blowout Cards gift certificates. You can than buy factory sealed boxes & cases from Blowout Cards, crack them open, keep the cards you want, and send us the rest to earn more funds to buy more product. Of course, you can also use your store credit on CheckOutMyCards.com to buy other singles or to get cash.

This just the beginning. We will continue to find more innovative ways that we can leverage each others services.

I just installed Internet Explorer 8 on my Windows XP laptop. From playing with CheckOutMyCards.com for even just a few minutes I have noticed that the website is noticably faster.

Not sure if this makes a difference, but I turned off the compatibility mode option. CheckOutMyCards.com appears to work fine without compatibility mode enabled, but other sites might have issues with this.

I just had to give a quick plug for IE 8. Every impressed with the significantly improved performance.

I have been wanting to add this ability for a long time, and I am very happy to announce the first beta version of the CheckOutMyCards Price Editing tool.

This tool can be used to easily make thousands of price changes at a time, and it should help hundreds of our sellers save many hours or even days worth for time.

This tool leverages a lot of different client and server technologies, and we had to do a number of architectural, database improvements to be able to handle the volume of price changes that this tool can now generate.

While we are beta testing the tool, the tool can be used for free, but it won’t work on the 1st day the month. We are still working out the details of how we plan to charge for the the use of the tool.

Download Tool (login required)

System Requirements
– Windows XP or later
– Microsoft Office Access 2007 or the Access 2007 Runtime (Free Download)

How to Install
– If you do not have Access 2007 or are not sure if you do, download and install the Access 2007 runtime from Microsoft
– Download and install the CheckOutMyCards Price Editing tool (login required)

How to Use
– From the start menu or the desktop, click on the CheckOutMyCards Price Editing shortcut

– This will bring up a login form for logging into your account on CheckOutMyCards.com
– It will then start downloading the items from your inventory

– You can then search your inventory for groups of cards that you would like to perform bulk operations upon

When I get more time I plan to make this more powerful and easier to use, but this is a functional start.
– Once you have selected the group of items you would like to perform a bulk price change to, you can select the type of bulk operation to perform

– Now you can review the pending price changes.
– You can click in the orange cells to manually edit any of the pending price changes.
– Finally, you can submit your price changes to the website.

Enjoy! Let us know if you hit any bugs or have any feature requests.

I have to give a big thanks to the Blowout Cards forum for helping us iron out the details of the changes we are making to our shipping and processing services.

The proposed changes that we mentioned in the last bog post were simply too complicated and they didn’t address some of the concerns of many buyers and sellers. We have listened to the feedback, and we have used the Blowout Cards forum to vet the updated proposal. Here is the plan we expect to go live with on March 31st.

Processing Changes

Processing Status
Starting March 31st, we will add a new section to your dashboard. This section will list the status of any of your shipments that we are currently processing. This will display what stage number in our processing pipeline your transaction is in. This will give you some idea about how close your cards are to making it onto the site. This will also show the due date and how much of your funds are being reserved to cover the processing fees. We will not assign a guaranteed due date until your account has enough funds to cover the processing fees. Once the processing is done and the cards have been added to your account, we will charge your account the exact processing fee.

Budget Processing
The budget processing service which offered no guaranteed due dates is being suspended because our backlog is approaching 4 months, and we can’t afford to hire enough people to satisfy the exponentially growing demand at only $0.10/card.

Standard Processing
This is a new service level. There are no restrictions on the number of cards you send at a time or what kind of cards you send. We simply guarantee 8 weeks or you will only be charged $0.10/card.
* $0.15/card
* 8 weeks guaranteed or it is $0.10/card

Priority Processing
* $0.25/card
* 3 weeks guaranteed or it is $0.15/card

Express Processing
* $0.50/card
* 1 week guaranteed or it is $.25/card

Shipping Changes

Standard Shipping
- Takes 3-5 business days to package orders
- Packages shipped via USPS 1st class
- $3 for first card
- $0.25 for each of the next 99 cards
- $0.15 for each card after 100 cards
- $1 extra for graded, encased, or jumbo cards
- No extra fee for international orders
- Sellers Only: $25 max shipping fee for cards being returned

Priority Shipping
- Takes 2 business days to package orders
- Packages shipped via USPS Priority Mail
- $8 for first card
- $0.35 for each additional card
- $1.50 extra for graded, encased, or jumbo cards
- $10 extra for international orders

Express Shipping
- Orders are packaged the next business day
- Packages shipped via USPS Express Mail
- $25 for first card
- $0.50 for each additional card
- $2 extra for graded, encased, or jumbo cards
- $10 extra for international orders

Wow! I am completely blown away by the increasing demand for our service.

It was only a few months ago that we had less than a 1 week backlog of cards to put on the site. We now are approaching a 2 month backlog of cards waiting to use our service.

We realize that this is not reasonable in many cases. So we are introducing a new priority processing service. This service will cost $0.20 per card. We guarantee that your cards will be posted into your account within three weeks of when they arrive or the processing fee will only be $0.10.

Contact us if you would like to upgrade any of your current shipments to our priority service.

We will continue to offer the 1 week express processing service. It costs $0.50 per card. The budget processing service will continue to cost $0.10 per card.

We have also reduced out batch size from 1,000 cards per batch to 500 cards. This will help large shipments of cards get onto the site more quickly.

Check out the details on our updated fees page.

These changes take effect immediately. Any express processing shipments that are postmarked February 11 or earlier will be processed at the old rate.

On January 1st, we had our first run of charging storage fees. The only cards currently subject to the $0.01/month storage fee are the cards that are being flipped.
Full details on storage fees

If you would like to see which of your cards will be charged the $0.01 storage fee on the 1st day of the next month, you can simply select the “Only show cards subject to storage fees” in the filter dropdown on the Manage Inventory page.

Or you can follow this hyperlink to go straight there.
https://www.checkoutmycards.com/Manage/Inventory.aspx?filter=notexempt

You can always review your Store Credit History to see any recent transaction that affected your store credit. This now includes any storage fees.

With the holiday season upon us there has been a steep rise in the need for some additional shipping options. So I spent the last few days revamping our systems so that we can efficiently expedite orders and so that we can print gift receipts complete with personalized gift messages.

When you check the Gift Receipt checkbox, we will print an invoice that does not include any of the purchase prices, tax, or shipping information. We will also give you the option to include a Gift Message.

We normally package orders within 2 business days and ship them via First-Class Mail® from the USPS. The packages are coming from the Seattle area, and depending on where you live, it may take a week or more for your package to arrive. If that is not fast enough for you, we have added two additional options.

With Priority Shipping we will package your orders first thing every morning and make sure they get shipped that day with the 2-day Priority Mail® service from the USPS. The package should arrive within 3-4 business days. This option is only available when shipping within the United Sates.

With Overnight Shipping we will package your orders first thing every morning and last thing at the end of every business day. We will then make special trips to the post office just to make sure that your package gets shipped with the Express Mail® service from the USPS. The package should arrive within 1-2 business days. This option is only available when shipping within the United Sates.

Now that more and more people have large inventories of cards for sale, the Manage Inventory page has been getting slower and slower.

So, I fixed it.

The page should be much faster now.

I also made the following changes for changing asking prices.

• The “Set Price” button got renamed “Save Price”.
• I hooked up the “Save Price” button so that you can simply hit the Enter key after typing in the asking price.
• I added an error message if the asking price is not more than 5% of the book value.

We have had a couple people accidentally price cards very low because the decimal point was in the wrong place.

I also added a Go to page text box to help people with large inventories jump right to a page deep in their inventory.

I also made the card description hyperlink launch the card details page in a new window so that you don’t lose the context of the card for which you are setting the price while you review similar cards for sale.

This has been a feature request for quite some time. I finally made some time to get it done.

There are now links on the Offer History page that will take you to a new Offer Details page.

From the Offer Details page you can see all of the items in the offer and what happened with the offer.

If you were the buyer, you can even add the items to a new offer if the old offer had expired or was rejected.

I hope you enjoy the new feature.

We are starting to get more an more complaints about people sending extremely low offers.

To try and combat this issue we are thinking of enforcing a new policy.

Offers must be at least 50% of the total asking price.

This policy would have two effects. It would make sure that people can’t give unreasonably low offers, and it would encourage sellers to ask fair asking prices.

What do you think of this policy?

========== 11/27/2008 UPDATE ============
Wow, I am amazed with the response! I rolled out the simplest stage of the feature. We now restrict the offers to at least 50% of the asking price. It is a lot more work to make it configurable, but I am open to doing it if it is the right thing. For now, if you are willing to take offers that are less than 50% of you asking prices, maybe you can consider lowering your asking price.