Here is an interesting comparison of our top seller board from today vs. two years ago.

Notice that the #10 seller today has more book value than the #1 seller two years ago.

eaglescards and baseballcardsetc are the only accounts that have been able maintain a footing the Top 10 list.

Rookies_n_Jerseys is an account to keep a close eye on. He only started consigning cards with us 6 months ago, and his account is half way to the million dollar mark.

Here is a quote from CheckOutMyDeals who discovered that item #6000000 was live before we did. I guess we have been a little preoccupied with our move.

I think it’s wonderful that not only did you process an additional 1 million cards in record time, but you also improved the site to address at least 2 of the user’s top concerns since card #5000000 was processed.

People wanted an easy port sale feature and they now have it.

People wanted an increased customer base, and you’re now cross-posting cards to Amazon, potentially adding millions of new customers.

Some features I would love to see:

* The ability to tag players with Hall of Fame status, All Star status, major awards won, teams played on, etc.

* The ability to tag sets / cards as autographed or memorabilia cards.

* The ability to filter searches by several factors. For instance Yankees memorabilia cards over $10 book value that are at least 50% off book value.

One feature I would really like to see:

The ability for a seller to subdivide their port into several smaller ports. The port could then be sold as a bulk lot using the port sale feature. It could also be subjected to different auto accept percentages than other cards.

That way, if someone wants to accept 50% offers on basketball cards but only accept 10% offers on baseball cards, they could do so. Or if they would sell their hockey for 10% of book, but only as a bulk lot, they could also do so.

I’m very happy with COMC and all of the positive improvements that you are continually making. Good luck!

Let’s see how many of these feature requests are live by the time item #7000000 hits the site.

Side Note
Over the last few months we knew we were running out of space in our current warehouse, and we chose to spend our energies hunting for a new home instead of giving specials or trying to get more items on the site. As a result it took us 2 days longer to get from item #5000000 to #6000000 (137 days) than it did to get from #4000000 to #5000000 (135 days). This is actually quite amazing when you consider the fact that we ran virtually no processing specials during that time. When we don’t run any specials, people send us cards that are more difficult and time consuming to process. One way to approximate the difficulty of the cards submitted is by looking at the average book value. Generally the more valuable a card is the more rare it is and the harder to identify what it is.

As you can see from this chart, we had been hovering around $5/item for an average book value the past few years. Over the last 6 months as we have been working on the items in the 5,000,000′s you can see that our average book value shot up to just under $6/item. It was quite a feat to get all of those items processed in virtually the same amount of time as the previous million items.

For the next million items we will have room to hire more people and give them enough space to work efficiently. We will see how this translates to our stats.

* 2010 Q3 Cards Sold does not include 11K cards sold in 1,000+ card transactions.
** 2011 Q3 Cards Sold does not include 258K cards sold in 1,000+ card transactions.

There has been a huge spike in large transactions now that we have made port sales so easy.

Trends

Item #100,000 was added on 8/22/2007
– 667 days later…
Item #1,000,000 was added on 6/29/2009
– 290 days later…
Item #2,000,000 was added on 4/15/2010
– 184 days later…
Item #3,000,000 was added on 10/16/2010
– 151 days later…
Item #4,000,000 was added on 3/16/2011
– 135 days later…
Item #5,000,000 was added on 7/29/2011

How many days until item #6,000,000?

Stats
The stats on the right show where the 5 million items are today.
Only 3 million left for sale.
1 million different cards.

New Big Seller
You may notice that user Rookies_n_Jerseys has entered the top 10 sellers list. This is pretty impressive considering he started selling on CheckOutMyCards.com less than 2 months ago.

New Biggest Seller?
You should also take note of SwagCards. He is making a steady climb up the charts. Currently at #3, he has expressed his intent to make #1.

Learn more about using CheckOutMyCards.com to sell your cards

Cards Sold
Since we have made it easier to purchase ports and to do large offers, there has been a big spike in cards sold. Though this is interesting, it dilutes that value of the cards sold stat. So we are now ignoring all transactions that contain more than 1,000 cards to try to get a more accurate representation of how many cards are sold.

Yearly Stats

* The 2010-11 Cards Sold does not include 0.25M cards that sold in transactions that had more than 1,000 cards.

Quarterly Stats

* The 2010-11 Q2 Cards Sold does not include 117K cards that sold in transactions that had more than 1,000 cards.

Today we crossed 3 million total cards for sale.

That means that we have an average of 3 copies of each card for you to choose from. As a result, we are working on some improvements to the Card Details page to optimize for a better experience when choosing between the different copies of the same card. We look forward to pushing out that update in the next few days.

Here is a sneak peak at the new design. It is still rough, but you get the idea where we are going.

I guess we were right. Congrats Mr. Finals MVP!

Thank you for all of your support and encouragement to help make our service a success! We are also excited about all the improvements we are working on to make the site even better for the next million cards.

Note: For those of you counting…. We have actually shipped out 1,347,178 cards that were purchased, and we have 2,922,241 total cards for sale when you count all of the duplicates.

In any case, I was mentioning to him that I checked out some website stats last night and was surprised to find that we set a record on Friday for most revenue in one day. I was puzzled that it seemed like such a random day. We weren’t running any particular specials. It just seemed to be completely out of the blue. Then Andy commented… “So I guess Friday actually is good.” We all got a good chuckle, and I told them that I was going to blog about this one.

Andy doing the Heisman pose with his newborn baby Lucia

In case you aren’t familiar with Christian traditions, the Friday before Easter is called Good Friday.

Hiring

As evidence regarding how we feel about the business, we have 8 open full-time positions.

We will be posting more specifics about exactly what we are looking for, but we have 3 positions open in shipping, 4 in processing of the incoming cards, and 1 in customer service. This should help us keep the time to ship orders as low as possible while increasing our current processing capacity beyond 600K cards per quarter and increasing the quality of our customer service.

If you want to join our team, please email your resume to hr AT checkoutmycards.com
replace the AT with an @