CheckOutMyCards.com Blog

Since my last blog post we have reached many milestones. We now have more than 200,000 cards for sale, and I was planning to do one last blog post with my timgetsch account in the #10 spot of the top sellers list. However, today DKShultz took over the #10 spot.

DPietrack also called me today to let me know he hit 1,000 total cards sold. So I dug into it and noticed that 4 sellers have now reached 1,000 cards sold. SteveSC, prestongillespie, and cardshark are the other sellers. My timgetsch account has sold more than 2,000 cards, and my LowPriceCards account holds the lead with more than 10,000 cards sold.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of identifiying the cards in another amazing shipment of cards from EELindy. This pushed EELindy into the #10 spot on our top sellers list, but he won’t be there for long. We already have several more shipments from EELindy in our pipeline, and his cards should excite just about any collector.

Here is a taste of the cards that were just added to his account.

2006 Upper Deck Epic Pairings #RG - Ruth Bat/Gehrig Bat 2/5

2005 Absolute Memorabilia Star Gazing Oversized Prime #17 - Brett Favre 4/10

2006 Upper Deck Epic Triple Materials #RJD - Ruth/Reggie/DiMag 46/99

1967 Topps #200 - Willie Mays

2004-05 Upper Deck All-Star Lineup Prominent Futures Threads #JA - L.James/C.Anthony SP

This week DPietrack became the first consignment seller to sell more than $10,000 BV worth of cards. He only started selling a little over two months ago. He is offering great cards at amazing prices, and they have not been lasting long. If you see something you like, you better grab it soon.

This week we also crossed another milestone. We now have 10 sellers that have more than $10,000 BV worth of cards on the site.

We will be at the Washington Sate Sports Collectors Associate Annual Show tomorrow and Sunday. Steve Hollander will be representing CheckOutMyCards.com. I will swing by for a few hours on Saturday and maybe Sunday.

Please drop by Steve’s table and say hello. There will be a big CheckOutMyCards.com banner. If you would like us to put some of your cards on the site, you can drop them off at the show and avoid the hassle of shipping them to us.

SteveSC is one of our top sellers, and when mentioned that this was the first month where he made more money off sales from CheckOutMyCards.com than he did from the card shows he does on weekends, I decided to see exactly how we were doing…

Wow! The site is definitely back up and working smoothly. This week we have been setting records for number of orders and size of orders. Several people have been placing 100+ card orders.

Yesterday we set another record for most sellers in one purchase. Someone from New South Wales, Australia placed an order for 139 cards from 30 different sellers and only had to pay $20 for shipping to Australia. That is absolutely amazing!

All of the cards were Michael Jordan, Tim Duncan, or David Robinson cards.

Here were the sellers involved with the sale.

We finally tracked down the issue. The web server had a setting from a previous configuration that was no longer valid, and this was causing the web server to periodically send web requests off to never-never-land.

This has been cleaned up, and the server has had no down time since the issue was resolved on Monday evening.

On Tuesday we took the site down for about 30 mintues to install a new firewall. Since then we have had a couple mornings where people have had trouble hitting the website. I appologize for the inconvenience. The site should be back up and fully functional right now, and we are trying to identify the issue. Until then, feel free to send mail to staff@checkoutmycards.com or call 1-800-517-3540 if you encounter any issues connecting to the site.

Email Backlog
I am still way behind on email. I went through several thousand messages this weekend and flagged ones that need a response. I will try to send responses this week. If you are still waiting on a response from us by next weekend, please send us another message.

Incorrectly Identified Cards
I finally got a chance to go through all of the notifications we got over the last month, and I updated all of the cards that had been incorrectly identified. If you still see some cards that you think are wrong, please click the notification hyperlinks.

Hiring Status
Now that we have more space, we have been busy hiring more people and training them in. Hopefully in the next few weeks I will find some time to update the site with profiles of our new employees.

Network Issues
If you tried to visit the site on Friday morning, you may have had trouble getting in. This was due to some faulty network equipment. I love the response we got from one of our Canadian users when the site was back up.

Whew…I was missing my fix of “COMC”. Glad to see things are all good again. I’m spreading the word about the site and hope to send more cards soon.
HabsFan24

This week we will be installing some new network hardware that should help us better manage these issues. We may have to take the site down for about 30 minutes to install the hardware. That will happen either Tuesday morning or late some evening this week.

After two weeks, we are finally settled in enough at our new location for you to start sending us your cards again. Thank you for your patience. The new address has been posted on the site. We are still in Redmond, but now we are in a facility that has room for us to grow much more rapidly.

Once we receive your cards, you will be given a estimate for when we will be done processing your cards. We will give priority to first time sellers and to shipments that are 200 or fewer cards. After that it is pretty much first come, first serve.

Due to the overwhelming demand for our consignment service, we are no longer offering volume discounts. Also, we have slightly adjusted our processing fees. There is now an additional $2 fee per shipment. This makes the shipping fees paid by the buyer and the processing fees paid by the seller the same. That is $2 + $0.20 per card.

You guys have been sending so much traffic to the CheckOutMyCards.com that we ran out of disk space on the drive that stores the web logs. This caused a short period of down time this evening.

Normally I pay more attention to the servers, but with all of the stuff going on with the move, I haven’t had the opportunity.

Quick Status Update
The site is working great now. We will have all the orders shipped tomorrow. We are picking up office furniture and setting up more computers on Tuesday, and by Wednesday we should have all stages of our processing pipeline unblocked. If all goes well, there should be many thousands of new cards on the site this weekend.