At the beginning of the day we had about 10,000 cards that were due to be deposited today that hadn’t even been scanned yet. Normally we try to scan the cards at least a week before they are due so that we have time to make sure they get uploaded to the website without having to worry about any hiccups.

The entire team worked together to do what was necessary to deposit every order before it was due and to ship as many cards as possible today. It was quite an amazing feat, and I am so proud of everyone here.

Tomorrow we have 4 new employees starting. They will have our first official new employee orientation. We also have 4 other employees that just started in the last month or so that will be joining them. 7 of these 8 employees will start full-time on our shipping team, and the eighth employee is focusing on our processing team. Our goal is to over staff shipping so that we can offer the fastest service with the highest quality. Any extra resources in our shipping department will help our processing team get ahead.

We still have several job openings available, so please spread the word.
– Order Fulfillment Clerk
– Office Administrator
– Customer Service
– Quality Control Specialist
– Trading Card Identification Specialist
– Coin Identification Specialist
– Software Development Engineer
– Software Test Engineer
– Network Administrator / General IT Person

Our GM is working on the job descriptions. They will be posted here when he finishes them.
Current Job Openings

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.

Standard orders will take 7-10 days for us to package them, so it will take 10-14 days for them to get delivered in the US.

Bulk orders will take 2-3 weeks for us to package them, so it will take 3-4 weeks for them to be delivered in the US.

The Good News
We have added two new shipping options, Rapid & Registered.

Rapid
Rapid is just like Standard, only we will package it in 1 business day. It only costs $1.99 + $0.10/card extra for this option.

This is a service that we have been testing out for all of our Amazon orders. It has been working very well.

Registered
Registered Mail is now available for very expensive orders. It is sent via USPS Priority Mail with the Registered Mail service. The fee is $12.50 more than our existing Priority Mail option.

• Office Administrator
• Software Development Engineer
• Software Test Engineer
• Customer Service Representative
• Quality Control Specialist
• Order Fulfillment Clerk/Shipping Specialist
• Order Fulfillment Clerk/Shipping Specialist
• Order Fulfillment Clerk/Shipping Specialist
• Order Fulfillment Clerk/Shipping Specialist
• Processing Specialist – Opening Packages & Sorting Trading Cards
• Trading Card Identification Specialist
• Coin Identification Specialist

If you are interested in a job, please be sure to fill out an online application. You can find that via our job postings. This will get updated with more openings as we have finished the job descriptions.

If you know anyone in the Seattle area that might be a good worker, please let them know we are hiring!

Today we got your letter regarding one or more cards you were unhappy with. We would love to help resolve your issue, but you didn’t give us any contact information or any information about the item(s) you purchased. We have shipped out more than 100,000 items this month, so we really have no clue which items you are referring to.

Please contact us, and we will gladly resolve your issue.

Thanks you for taking the time to let us know you were unhappy with the order. I hope you have a happy new year, and we would love to be given the opportunity to make you a happy customer.

Tim Getsch
CheckOutMyCards.com Founder & CEO

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.

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” – Seneca

We have spent the last 4+ years growing CheckOutMyCards.com to the point where we are ready to now take a big leap into a 27,000 sqft building. As part of the move & expansion, we needed to buy some additional furniture. Last week we were hunting for a conference table, couch and some other furniture on craigslist when we got “lucky” and discovered a large amount of furniture that was being moved from an skyscraper in downtown Seattle.

Their plan was to move the office furniture to warehouse in Kent where the public could pick through it, and they would liquidate it over the next week. We mentioned that we might be willing to take all of it, and they allowed us to swing by and look through it before they began the move. So, last week we visited the skyscraper and were waiting for the security guard to let us in to the office when we discovered that Zillow had just moved, and we were at their old headquarters. You can take a tour of Zillow’s new HQ. When they moved, they opted to get all new furniture. Ironically, they had taken the same strategy as we have done, and their old furniture was nearly all recycled furniture originally from Microsoft. Walking through their old head quarters, we found ourselves literally following in the footsteps of Zillow.

For a little more than the cost of moving, we have acquired more than enough furniture to furnish our entire building and then some. The total came to about 30 truck loads. We have been joking about launching a new site… CheckOutMyFurniture.com. It is nice to think that we are building for the future on furniture that was originally purchased by the largest Seattle area tech startup (Microsoft) and most recently used by a company that was considered the largest Seattle area startup by Seattle20.com for many years (Zillow). The only reason they are no longer on top of the Seattle Startup Index is that they are no longer considered a startup.

We will do our best to continue the tradition, and use this furniture to launch our company to new heights.

Growing up, my father collected baseball cards. Like most boys from the 1950′s – he would swap cards with his buddies. One of his pals was always trying to “trade up” by offering several smaller cards for a big one. His pal would often try to sweeten the pot by throwing a couple of Bill Henry cards in for the trade. As a child, anytime my siblings and I would try to make unfair trades with each other, my father would often say “Why don’t you throw in a couple of Bill Henry’s?” We never knew what this meant. My father just used this phrase on one of his grandkids – so I heard the story once again, and a light bulb went off: my father needs a Bill Henry card. On a whim, I looked up your sight, and there it was – waiting for me. I ordered it and just received it in the mail. It is in excellent condition, and I can’t wait for my father to open it this Christmas. The best $7 I ever spent. THANK YOU SO MUCH! And Merry Christmas
Pam

This is the reason for what we do. Beyond business, past capitalism, there is a beating heart to this hobby that is capable of connecting people in a very real and profound way. It is a genuine pleasure to do what we do, and an honor to live in a country where a unique business concept like ours is not just possible but embraced.
Thanks for making all this possible.

Merry Christmas from COMC.

If you have followed our site for any time, you probably noticed how rapidly we have been growing. We moved into a 2,000 sqft warehouse just under 4 years ago, took less than two years to outgrow that, and upgraded to a 6,000 sqft warehouse. Again we took less than 2 years to outgrow that. This time we are making a huge leap to a 27,000 sqft building. We just signed the lease yesterday,and we are starting to make plans for orchestrating the move.

Holiday Shipping
In honor of the 27 thousand sqft that we are moving to, we came up with a 27¢ special.
Normally our standard shipping is $3 for the first card and 25¢ for each additional card.

From now until December 27th, we will ship the first 11 cards for only $3.
That comes out to $0.2727272727272…. per card for the first 11 cards.

No account required. No extra fee for international orders. All cards will be shipped in penny sleeves. Normal extra fees apply for toploaders, graded or jumbo cards.
See Shipping Policy for full details.

Thank you to Aerolistphoto.com for giving us the permission to use this photo. They are a great source of aerial photography!

$20 First Time Seller Coupon
The first side of this card is a $20 off coupon for any First Time Seller. This is good for any of our processing services. If you are a first time seller, simply include this coupon with the cards that you send us for processing, and we will discount your processing fees by $20. We are confident that you will enjoy our services, so we want you to try it out, even if that means your first batch is completely free. We offer this with no strings attached.

Referral Program
If you are already a seller on the site or if you have extra coupons you can hand out, please write your user name on the other side of this coupon as if you were endorsing a check and pass it along. Once we get 500 cards for processing from that account, we will put $5 store credit in your account as a thank you for handing out the card.

How to Get More
All orders placed this weekend will include a couple of these coupons. Also, all orders placed on BlowoutCards.com will receive a coupon as well. If you have a card shop, attend card shows, or just know a bunch of people you would like to refer, please contact us, and we can send you a batch of cards. Many of our sellers have already received a package with a couple dozen coupons to hand out, and we even have some eBay sellers including these cards in all outgoing orders.

Why We Want More Sellers
Currently 1 in 20 buyers on the site also sells, but nearly all sellers also buy. Once we get a buyer to also sell, they are hooked. We are no longer just another place where they can buy cards. Instead, we become a place where they are invested in watching their cards sell, and they earn store credit that is best used on COMC. These buyers that become sellers rarely convert store credit into cash, instead they recycle their store credit and help store credit get to the sellers that need cash that much quicker. Even when they do get cash, they most likely just spend it on more cards and help the trading card industry. We want as many people buying and selling as possible. This is good for the health of the entire trading card community.

CheckOutMyCards.com is a “network effect” website. This means that the more active users on the site, the more value it provides for each of the users. Facebook is another example of a network affect website. If facebook had no users, there would be no point in having a facebook account, but now that nearly everyone is on facebook, there is enough value that it has become the second most popular website on the planet.

Similarly, the more active users we have on COMC, the better it is for everyone. It will be that much easier to finish the tough set you started or find that rare card of your favorite player. It will be that much easier for someone to find your extra cards and help you convert them into what you really want… more cards or cash.

Help COMC reach its potential… pass it on!

Happy Thanksgiving!