Here are two great testimonials from buyers and two from sellers that just arrived in the last 24 hours.

“I am very pleased to be utilizing your services and I intend to continue to send cards and sell them through your company. This is too easy.
Thank you very much - you folks do a great job !”
- rfleshin

“I just wanted to say this store is awsome!!! The prices are great and the shipping and handling is cheap and fast! Thank you checkoutmycards for everything!”
- Morgan, Visalia, CA

“Thanks to you and your team for the super speedy service!”
- j17

“The shipment arrived today. Great stuff !”
- Brian, Alberta, Canada

Read the rest of our testimonials.

Get your cards to us ASAP if you want priority processing. We leave for the National Sports Collectors Convention in two weeks. Steve, Mark, and I will be manning our booth (#783).

Check out our updated About Us page. It now has a little snippet on each of our 6 fulltime employees.

We have been cranking through cards at an amazing rate. If you get your cards to us by next week, we will likely get them on the site before the National. I just finished pushing 18 shipments of cards into different sellers’ accounts today. As the sellers set asking prices over the next few days, there should be a lot of fresh inventory on the site.

You can keep an eye on this page to see the most recently added cards.
http://www.checkoutmycards.com/Search.aspx?Sort=Recently+Added

Here are a few cards that should show up very soon.

Over the past couple weeks, you may have noticed the account eaglescards2 crawling up the carts. It finally stopped at #2 with more than $90,000 worth of cards. This collection of cards was received from a local dealer who is helping someone liquidate a large collection. Most of the cards we received were jersey or autographed cards. Here are a few examples.

2006 Topps Chrome Rookie Autographs #223 - Vince Young A BV $250

2002 Fleer Showcase Derek Jeter Legacy Collection Memorabilia #2 - D.Jeter YC Combo Jsy/175 * BV $250

2005-06 Bowman Chrome X-Fractors #155 - Andrew Bogut AU/25 BV $250

2003-04 Fleer Authentix Jersey Authentix Autographs All-Star #AJAAM - Alonzo Mourning/50 BV $200

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

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.

Yesterday we created a page on facebook where you can become a fan of CheckOutMyCards.com. Come now and be one of the first to become a fan!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/CheckOutMyCardscom/32807452112

Steve Hollander will be at the Totem Lake Mall card show this weekend representing CheckOutMyCards.com. This is your last opportunity to drop off cards before the National convention.

Add 100 cards to your account for free!
If you haven’t started using our consignment services, drop off cards at the show and we will process the first 100 cards for free. This is a $22 value.

Local card shows
Here is a schedule of the Seattle area card shows that we will be attending. You are always welcome to swing by our table. We love to chat about the site. If you are in the Seattle area, this is the best way to give us feedback.

DPietrack has decided to list the majority of his $20K+ inventory at 75% off book value. Here is a sampling of DPietrack’s inventory.

Planning to be at the National Sports Collectors Convention in Chicago July 30th - August 3rd?

Come visit us at booth #783!

Bring your cards!
Have cards you would like to sell on the site? Bring them to our booth, and we will ship them to our warehouse near Seattle for you.

If you are not coming to the show and you have cards you want to add to the site, you probably want to send them to us soon. After the National there may be a big backlog of cards waiting to go on the site. Cards received before the end of July will have priority over cards we get at the National.

Whether you are going to be at the National or not, you should start preparing your cards go on the site now so that they are ready to be shipped of dropped off at the show by the end of July.

• Learn more about selling your cards on one of the fastest growing card sites
• See sales stats from our current roster of more than 150 sellers
• Current turnaround time is under 2 weeks for any shipment of 1,000 cards or less

These are some cards that were recently shipped to us. Two of them had to be returned because they look very suspicious.

1949 Bowman

1950 Bowman

Sorry about the website slowness and sporadic down-time this morning. For some reason, Friday likes to give us the most fits. Almost every time we run into any issues it happens on a Friday. Go figure…

Anyhow… In case other web developers run into this issue, here is what happened, and what we did to fix it.

This morning we noticed that w3wp.exe on our web server was using nearly 100% of the CPU and was floating between 3GB and 6GB of memory usage.

Restarting IIS didn’t solve the problem. w3wp.exe would quickly consume all available resources.

Solution: Re-deploy the ASP.Net 2.0 website.

My theory is that the ASP.Net compile state somehow got corrupted. Re-deploying the website simply triggered a full recompile.

The website is back up and running smoothly now.