Finalized Fee Structure

November 10, 2008

We simplified and finalized the new fee structure.

It includes several tweaks that were suggested by some current sellers.

  • No storage fees for buyers
  • No storage fees for cards with asking prices of $0.25 or less
  • First 90 days for of storage are free for the original owner

We announced the finalized fees at the local WSSCA Winter Convention, and we chatted over the phone with a few of the most consistent sellers. The reception is overwhelmingly positive. With the new tweaks (especially the free storage for $0.25 cards and the option to donate cards to charity), people are now ready to start sending us nearly all of their excess cards. This is the affect we were going for.

With the $0.10 initial processing fee, people can send us twice as many cards as they could with our old $0.20 processing fee. In turn, they will start earning store credit twice as fast, and they will then be able to send their next batch of twice as many cards even sooner. This should help us continue to exponentially grow the selection of cards available.

Our current capacity is nearly 5,000 cards per day. We hope to max that out by the end of the year and need to start hiring and expanding our capacity in January.

I would love to create a bunch of new jobs for sports card fanatics. Help us make that a reality by continuing to spread the word about CheckOutMyCards.com!

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Posted by Tim Getsch

1¢/month… What do you think?

November 3, 2008

First off I want to thank everyone who gave us feedback and who is helping this site become even better. We are always open to hearing about new and better ways to do things.

Invitation

How many of you had the opportunity to help eBay define their fee structure when they were first starting? I would like to give each of you an opportunity to voice your opinion and help shape a service that is only in its infancy. In fact, it was a year ago on Halloween that I left Microsoft to pursue this full-time. The company was still operating out of my garage, and we had no employees. Now we have a warehouse and 10 employees. We are all still on the ground floor. Where do you see us being in the next 2-5 years?

Please help us define our direction and shape the service into what you want and need it to be.

Goals

These are our high level goals for our new fee structure.

Cost-effective
Sellers need to be able to make as much profit as possible so that they will send us even more cards. We would love to be averaging 5,000 new cards per day by the end of the year.

Sustainable
The fees need to cover our expenses as we grow to having millions of cards. We need to balance the cost-effective goal with paying our bills, hiring more employees, and expanding our warehouse.

Understandable
People need to be able to see or hear our fees and easily remember them. We want this to grow by word of mouth.

Reaching Our Goals

In order to go after the first goal, we decided to drop the upfront processing fee to 10¢/card. We do have a state of the art system for scanning and inventorying every single card, but it is not quite that good. This is effectively a loss leader. We are subsidizing the cost of processing the cards with the belief that we will earn back the difference when we help your cards sell.

Now to balance the first goal, we need to protect our initial investment in processing your cards. If your cards sell quickly, that is great! You are happy, and we earn back our loss. If your cards just sit there forever, we lost money up front, and we continue to lose money each month as we have to pay for insurance, warehouse rent, website hosting, Beckett data licensing, and many other expenses.

Our first stab at addressing this issue and keeping our fees easily understandable was to introduce a 1¢/month storage fee. This would encourage people to set fair asking prices so that the cards will sell more quickly. If they don’t, we will eventually recoup our losses and cover our expenses through the storage fee. Millions and millions of cards are listed on eBay each month for least 3¢/month, so we felt that 1¢/month should be more than fair.

Helping You Sell Cards
Our ultimate goal is to actually help you sell your cards, not to just sit on them forever. I hope that the new fee structure of 10¢ upfront and 1¢/month will bring in significantly less revenue per card than the original 20¢ fee because cards will be selling that fast.

A large number of our seller are already seeing this kind of success, and in order to help even more sellers be successful, we are building many new inventory management features. We would even love to increase our advertising budget.

Your Feedback
We have already received many helpful suggestions, and I want to encourage more of you to pipe in. What do you think of the updated fees?
* Is 10¢ upfront + 1¢/month fair?
* Should we give more than one month free storage when initially listing cards?
* Should people get a month or more of free storage when they attempt to flip cards?
* Should buyers get a few months of free storage when they are waiting to make their shipment request?
* Should we give people the option of paying a larger upfront fee instead of the storage fee?
* Should have a tiered storage fee that decreases for people that have a large number of cards?
* Should we give you a discount on future processing fees based on what you are paying for storage?
* Does someone want to just donate a ton of money so that we don’t have to charge fees anymore?

We are open to all feedback, but remember, we need to keep the fees understandable and sustainable.

Feel free to leave comments on this blog post or send feedback directly to us.

16 Comments | new features | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Tim Getsch

Graded Cards & Lower Processing Fees

November 1, 2008

We have two huge announcements.

  1. We are slashing our processing fee in half!
  2. You can now send us graded cards!

Graded Card Support
We are glad to announce that we are now officially accepting graded, encased, and jumbo cards.

Updated Fees
In order to support graded cards, we had to revisit our fee structure. In doing so we took a close look at how the business is generating revenue and what we we can do to help the site grow.

Over the last couple months we have offered some great promotions and discounts to new and existing sellers. This has generated a spike in the number of cards added to the site, but due to all of the promotions our total revenue due to processing fees was actually down. In spite of that, our overall revenue was significantly up because of the tremendous growth we have seen in sales. Even though the economy around the world is way down, we are still seeing sales on our site skyrocket. Check out our blog about growth in a down economy.

It looks like the #1 indicator for growth is the number of new cards we can add to the site. So we are introducing a new, lower processing fee that should make it easier for people to flood us with more cards. Our team can currently process about 5,000 cards a day, and I would love it if we needed to hire more people or invest in better infrastructure to keep up with the demand.

November Growth Goal
Our goal is to add 100,000 new cards to the site during the month of November. This should give people a nice selection for the holidays. Last year our sales tripled in December. Let’s see what happens this year.

For those of you that are taking the time to read this post, here is a sneak peek at some data that we will be adding to the site to help you know what cards to send us.
Hottest players, decades, years, sets, cards, sellers

Standard Processing
As of 6:30 PM PST November 1st, our standard processing fee has been dropped from 20¢ per card to 10¢ per card. This service is basically identical to our previous processing service. It should take 2-4 weeks for the first 1,000 cards and 1-2 more weeks for each additional 1,000 cards.
More about our processing service

Express Processing
Based on popular demand, we have also introduced a new express processing service. This is only slightly more expensive than our previous processing service, but with this service you can have up to 5,000 cards added to your account in 1 week. It will take 1 more week for each additional 5,000 cards. The fee for this service is only 25¢ per card.

Storage Fee
Now that we expect people to send in a lot more cards without doing as much weeding out of the junk, we are not going to be able to let cards sit in our warehouse forever. In order to encourage people to set fair asking prices and to help subsidize the cost of insurance, warehouse rent, website hosting, and other expenses, we are introducing a nominal 1¢ per card storage fee that is charged to your account at 12:01 AM on the first day of each month.
More about our storage policy

  • All cards mailed to us prior to November 1st, 2008 are exempt from the storage fee until January 1st, 2011. That is 14 months of free storage.
  • Cards that are added to the site will be exempt from the storage fee for the first 90 days they are in the original owner’s account.
  • Cards purchased on the site are exempt from storage fees unless they are put back up for sale.
  • Cards with an asking price of $0.25 or less are exempt from storage fees.

Updated on November 10th, 2008 based on user recommended improvements.

Inventory Management Features
Here are some of the features we are planning to add over the next few months to help people manage their inventory more easily.

  • Inventory Analysis
    • You will be able to see what are the hottest & coldest cards, players, years, sets in your inventory
  • Improved Inventory Searching
    • Search your inventory for cards that have been on the site a long time and that aren’t selling
  • Bulk Price changes
    • Set some or all of your inventory to a certain percentage of book value
    • Drop your prices on some or all of your inventory by a certain percentage
  • Automatically Decreasing Prices
    • Set a percentage that you would like a card’s asking price to automatically decrease by each week.
  • Bulk Add to Shipment
    • Easily add large portions of your inventory into a big shipment ($25 max shipping fee) so they can be removed from your account.
  • Donate to charity
    • If you don’t want the cards back, we will also be adding the ability for you to donate your cards to charity.
    • We will be providing detailed receipts so that you can maximize the tax write-off as well.

Our goal is that these tools will help you keep your storage fee at an acceptable level. This may be significantly lower than the full $0.20 we had been previously charging.

Shipping Fee
I am impressed that we were able to last so long with our original shipping fee. I came up with that fee structure more than a year ago when we were running the business out of my garage and when we had no employees. Now we have a warehouse with more than 10 employees. Over the last couple weeks we did a thorough analysis of our shipping expenses, and I feel very good that we can continue to maintain very high quality service with our new rates. They are also more easy to remember. $3 for the first card and 25¢ for each additional card. Graded, encased, and jumbo cards are $1 extra per card. Once shipping reaches $25, all additional items are shipped for free.

As many people are learning, the beauty of our site is that you can create a free account and receive combined shipping from all of our sellers over any time period. There is no rush to place an order. You can build up as many cards in our account as you want, and then request a shipment whenever you like.
More about our shipping policy

Cashing-Out
Nothing changes when requesting a PayPal deposit, however we are adding a $3 fee when requesting a check mailed inside the US and a $10 fee for a check mailed outside the US.
More about our cashing-out

Feedback
Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or comments about our new fees. We love to hear what our customers think. Customer satisfaction is our #1 priority.

20 Comments | new features | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Tim Getsch

Does a BV under $1 mean anything?

October 28, 2008

We have had several sellers point out that Beckett prices for cards worth less than a dollar are not very relevant when buying cards on the web. When I was chatting with someone at Beckett about this issue, they mentioned that eBay now forces people to start listings no lower than $0.99, and Beckett Marketplace also has a minimum price of $0.50.

We are seeing that either people want the card or they don’t. Whether you charge $0.05 or $0.50 for a card with a book value of $0.25 doesn’t really matter. It generally only sells to people that are interested in that card, and those people often don’t blink at paying full book or more for these cheap cards that they want.

So… What if we simply display “Under $1″ for the book value when a card has a book value that is less than $1?

We would not display a discount percentage for these cards, and if you ask us to set your prices based on a percentage of book value we will assume that the book value is $1 for these cards. For example, if you send us a card with a book value of $0.30 and ask us to set your prices to 50% off, the card would be set to $0.50 and the discount percentage would be N/A.

Is this a good idea? Bad idea? Should we display “$1 or less” instead of “Under $1″? Should we use a number other than $1? Let us know what you think.

11 Comments | new features | Permalink
Posted by Tim Getsch

Supporting graded and encased cards

September 27, 2008

I am currently adapting our system to start supporting graded cards and other encased cards. These cards are going to take longer for us to process, they will use significantly more storage space, they will cost more to insure, and they will cost more to ship.

We are planning to charge $1 for the processing fee and $1 for shipping. Normal raw cards will stay $0.20 for processing and $0.20 for shipping, but we will also bump the maximum shipping fee from $20 up to $30.

Let me know what you think about these proposed fees.

4 Comments | new features | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Tim Getsch

Download your sales & purchase history

September 15, 2008

Quick new feature added to the site…

On the My Sales and My Purchases pages we added Download Sales History and Download Purchase History links.

Thanks to WunderkindCards for the feature suggestion.

Leave a Comment » | new features | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Tim Getsch

Huge data update

September 5, 2008

If you have been watching the site closely the last few weeks, you may have noticed that we haven’t been adding new cards as rapidly as we normally do. In fact we haven’t put any new cards on the site in nearly two weeks. The reason for this is that we have been doing a major data migration in to sync up with our price guide data provider.

In case you didn’t already know, the book prices we list on our website come from Beckett. If you have visited the Beckett.com website in the past month you must have noticed that their website has been completely re-written. This was an enormous project that they have been working on for the past couple years. As part of that project they have also been re-architecting their systems to support their new website. Once their new site went live last month we had to begin the migration from their old database to a completely new database.

One of the major challanges was importing all of the new data and merging it with the old data, but an even bigger challenge was making sure all of our existing URLs still worked even after all the data changed.

To keep a long story short, I am pleased to announce that after two very long weeks and many late nights the data and the website updates are finally live. Here are a few of the improvements that you may notice.

  • More Sports:
  • More friendly URLs
    • When searching by player, seller, or set, the URLs always stay friendly and readable.
    • When paging, sorting or switching views the URLs only become minimally longer.
    • This updates should help improve search engine optimization. This is great news for both buyers and sellers. More people should be able to easily find our site when searching for specific cards in Google or other search engines.
  • Existing URLs automatically redirect to the new URL format.

2 Comments | new features, website status | Permalink
Posted by Tim Getsch

Save your favorite searches

August 29, 2008

Most people who use Internet Explorer or Firefox as their browser for viewing the internet don’t know about a cool feature that works quite well with our site: the RSS feed button.

This nifty little button allows you to do a couple of things. It allows you to be updated automatically when we add a blog post or when your favorite cards get posted to the site.

  1. To Subscribe to the CheckOutMyCards.com blog:

    The simplest way to do this is to go to http://blog.checkoutmycards.com/feed/ and click on “Subscribe to this feed.” The orange feed button (discussed earlier) in the top right of the window does the same thing.

    Selecting this brings up a simple pop-up to allow you to create a feed the same way you would create a “Favorite” in your browser. Similar to viewing your favorites, click on the star emblem at the top left of the screen to open your favorites; then click on “Feeds” to view your subscribed feeds.

     

  2. To subscribe to a search:

    Using the RSS button after doing a search allows you to only have to search the site once for that item. For an example, I’ll use one of my personal favorite players: Nolan Ryan. So, I want to find his 1968 Topps Rookie Card. When I enter “1968 Nolan Ryan” in the search area, as pictured below, you can see that two cards came up, but obviously not the actual 1968 Topps card I wanted.

    However, since I have that groovy little RSS button (see the orange arrow pointing at it in the above image), I can use that to subscribe to a feed for that search option.

    Now, whenever a new card matching the description I’ve entered gets put onto the site, it updates the Feed in your favorites area.

 

 

Thanks to Mark for putting this post together.

2 Comments | new features | Permalink
Posted by Tim Getsch

Check out your store credit history

August 22, 2008

Minor new feature added to the site this afternoon… This last week I had three sellers ask about details of their store credit. So, I added a page where you can check your store credit history.

The following new link has been added to your dashboard.
New "Store credit history" link

I even added an Export Transaction History button that will generate a CSV file so you can analyze your sales in Excel.
Sample Store Credit History

2 Comments | new features | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Tim Getsch

New site improvements

July 13, 2008

I finally set aside some time to make improvements to the site. Here are some of the things I was able to get done this weekend.

Performance Improvements
Now that we have been getting a lot more data, there have been some noticeable slowdowns on certain parts of the site. Here are some areas where we improved performance this weekend.

  • Home page average render time was about 3 seconds, now the average is 0.03 seconds
    • This 100x performance improvement was achieved by using a technique called Partial-Page Output Caching. We couldn’t use the simple output caching because we display the number of items in your shopping cart, and this always needs to be calculated.
  • Search page render time was commonly 3-10 seconds, now it is almost always less than 1 second

Quantity Manufactured now displayed in the search results
You no longer need to dig into the card details page to see if a card is serial numbered. The quantity manufactured is now tacked on to the end of the description. Also, you can choose to sort the search results by the quantity manufactured.

Sort by Quantity Manufactured

Sort by Quantity Manufactured

More Meaningful Sorting by High Book Value
Cards that are listed in Beckett but do not have a book price are now mixed in with the rest of the cards when sorting by highest book value.

We have been getting more and more cards that have very low serial numbers and do not have a price listed in Beckett. The previous default sort order would put all of these at the top, and this kept burying the legitimately high priced cards further and further down. Now we try to weave in the un-priced cards approximately where they might be if they had a book value.

2 Comments | new features, web development | Permalink
Posted by Tim Getsch

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