CheckOutMyCards.com Blog

One of the ways that I most enjoy using CheckOutMyCards.com is to flip cards. Many of the consignment sellers on the site are looking to move their inventory very quickly, so they ask extremely low prices.

I really enjoy basketball, so I often find my self watching games, following the news, and buying cards of players that I like. In some cases I am just prospecting that a rookie will do well, but in others I know there is demand for a player and his/her cards are underpriced. I usually stick to buying cards that I wouldn’t mind keeping if they never sell, but I nearly always relist the cards for sale in case someone else wants them.

One of the things that always annoyed me was that I could never remember what I paid for a card, and when the sales came in, I couldn’t tell how much of a profit was made.

Thanks to some crafty engineering, we now track the previous purchase price whenever a card sells. Whenever you flip a card, you can now find the price that you paid for it on the dashboard and in your sales history.

Batch #’s
For those of you that use our consignment service, we have standardized on using our internal batch # for tracking all consignment batches. The website now reflects that new batch number, and that is the same batch number referenced by the bulk price editing tool. When you download your sales history, it will now include this batch number for items you submitted on consignment. You can use this data to better analyze your sales. If you are familiar with Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Access, you should be able to generate reports that show you how much sales you have had from each consignment batch. If you are tracking how much you paid for these batches, this could be very helpful information for making future business decisions.

Thanks to some hard work by Brent Unruh, we have made a significant upgrade to our correction request system. When you click on the Wrong data? or Send Correction Request links, you will now see something that looks like this.

This will help you easily give us more helpful information for tracking down errors, and in turn, this should significantly increase our ability to correct errors on the website more quickly.

A couple months ago we updated our seller stats. One of the suggestions was that we offer similar stats for players. Now you can find a bunch of player stats on the site.

Top 10 Players & Hottest 10 Players

When you click on the Players link at the top of any page, you will now find a list of the Top 10 Players as well as the 10 Hottest Selling Players. See below for more details on how hottest players are defined.

Top 100 Players

You can also drill down to see the Top 100 Players. This list is very similar to the Top Consignors list. You will find the total book value worth of cards we have received for the top 100 players, and we show you the average discount people are asking for each player. You will even find the total book value of the sold cards and the percentage sold based on book value.

Hottest 100 Players Per Sport

On the Players page you can drill in on any sport to see the 100 hottest selling players based on our special “Heat Index”. The heat index is a measure of how fast cards leave our warehouse on average. For the purpose of our hot list, a player is considered hotter if their cards take less time to sell. Some may look at this hot list and think of it as a list of players that are the most under priced on average. It is not a measure of how much money is spent on a player, it is purely how fast those cards move based on how the sellers are setting asking prices.

Here you can see that Bob Uecker is one of the hottest selling players over the past year, but we haven’t seen enough of his cards for him to make the Top Players list.

We hope that you will find these lists to be helpful for determining what you might want to send to us on consignment or for getting ideas on what cards to buy.

We have added several features to the site the last couple weeks, and we have more that we are working on. Keep an eye out for more blog posts highlighting new features that have been added.

In our continuing effort to provide the best service possible for our fellow collectors, we have come up with some new service offerings and changes. None of these are set in stone, so we would like to get your feedback. Please let us know if you have any objections or suggestions.

Potential Changes

New Overnight Processing Service
– $3 per batch + $2 per card (any size cards)
– Added to your account the day after the package arrives
– Must say “Overnight Processing” on the outside of the package

New Bulk Processing Service
– The $50 flat rate special is a beta test of a bulk processing service
– If it goes well, this could be added as a permanent offering

New Premium Seller Accounts
– Costs $100 per month
– Increases free storage from $0.25 to $1.00
– Additional seller options (e.g. adjustable minimum offer percentage & auto-accept offer percentage)
– Monthly coupon for $100 worth of Express or Overnight processing

Graded, Encased & Jumbo Card Changes
– We will begin referring to these as “Special Sized Cards”
– Processing fees will be cut in half for “Special Sized Cards”
– Processing decreased from $1 to $0.50 for Standard
– Processing decreased from $2 to $1 for Priority
– Processing decreased from $3 to $1.50 for Express
– Shipping decreased from $1 extra to $0.75 extra for Standard
– Shipping decreased from $1 extra to $0.50 extra for Bulk
– Coins will start being considered part of “Special Sized Cards”

Game Used & Autographed Card Changes
– We will be adding the ability for the site to easily search for game used and/or autographed cards.
– These cards take a lot longer for us to process, and they require additional care because they are easier to damage. Rather than cutting corners to reduce costs, we want to add a $0.10 surcharge that will cover the additional labor required to properly handle these cards and add the additional metadata required to make them searchable as game used and/or autographed cards.
– The $0.10 processing surcharge per game used or autographed card would affect any cards that are postmarked November 1st or later

Cash-Out Fee Change
– Check fee decreased from $3 to $2 for US checks and from $10 to $9 for international checks.
– Any cash-out request for less than $200 cash will be considered a “small cash-out” and subject to the $1 “small cash-out fee”. This is an increase from the current $20 boundary.
– These changes are to combat the $0.40-$1.00 PayPal fees that we have to pay when sending cash-outs as mass payments to avoid additional fees on your end.

Many of you have noticed that our email notifications where not consistently reliable over the last month or so. It appears that we finally got down to the root cause of the issue, and you should now get emails more reliably.

Now that all the emails are going out and the site is more active than ever before, I decided to improve some of our email processes.

Daily Summary
We have replaced the “Item Sold” and “Congratulations! Some Items sold” emails with a “Daily Summary” email. The email will be sent out between 1:00AM and 2:00AM PST every morning. It will include a list of all the items that sold from your account that day. You will no longer receive all the little “noise” emails about individual sales.

Offer Emails
You should now receive them more reliably, and the subject will be “[UserName] as sent you an offer”. If you have any pending offers when the Daily Summary email goes out, your Daily Summary email will include the list of pending offers.

Status Updates
All email generated by the website or by our internal processes will now be sent from staff@checkoutmycards.com. You used to receive status updates from the Shipping Department or the Processing Department, but now those will all come from staff@checkoutmycards.com. You may still receive manually created emails from our employee accounts, but we have standardized on how the auto-generated emails are created.

Newsletter
We have started trying out a service from Constant Contact for sending out newsletters. Today we sent out our first trial. If you want to receive updates about our services and special promotions via email, make sure you join our newsletter.

In recent weeks, many COMC users have utilized our ‘port sale’ feature. While that has been successful, we’ve decided to enhance this concept with a different approach.

For the first time in the company’s history, we will embark on the silent auction frontier. Basically, the way it will work is that a seller will contact us about his or her desire to sell their entire portfolio.

Then we’ll take all of their cards out of their inventory, and put them into a separate viewable portion on the site. There, potential buyers will be able to view the cards and make an offer.

Over the course of one week, the highest bidder will be the winner. Bidders will be allowed to bid as much as they like. Funds will not be locked at the time of the bid. The highest bidder will be given 2 days to add any additional funds to their account if necessary. If the highest bidder is not able to pay, we will give the second highest bidder an opportunity to purchase the lot. 5% of the final price will be collected for the silent auction service. The remaining 95% store credit will be added to the seller’s account.

Sellers will be allowed to submit a silent bid. This is effectively like setting a reserve price. If the seller has the highest bid, they will be simply charged the 5% fee and the cards will be returned to their account.

Upon completion of the auction, we will announce who the winning bidder was, but we will not announce what the final price was.

Let us know your thoughts about this major announcement, and your interest level in perhaps partaking of this option in the near future.