CheckOutMyCards.com Blog

By popular demand we have created a new Port Sale offer system. The old system had some limitations for dealing with large offers. Now it is pretty slick and completely automated. So feel free to start posting Port Sale ads again.

All Port Sale ads will get the new Send Offer button.

Port Sale offers must be at least 20% of the total asking price or 10% of the total book price. If the buyer does not have enough funds in their account to cover the offer, the seller will recieve a Request For Proposal (RFP) instead of a traditional offer.

New Offer Related Functionality

RFP – This is a Request for Proposal. It could be thought of as an unfunded offer. This allows people to make offers on entire ports without first having the required store credit in their account. When the sellers accepts an RFP, it doesn’t immediately execute the transaction. Instead it goes back to the buyer as a proposal. The buyer will have to acquire the required store credit before the proposal can be accepted and the transaction executed. Just like normal offers, RFPs can be negotiated back and forth. The only difference is that the buyer’s store credit is not locked while the transaction is still open.

Less than 50% offers – When making an offer on a Port Sale, we allow you to offer less than 50% of the total asking price.

Accepting offers with sold items – When an offer has one or more items sold we only allow you to send a counteroffer. However, if you are the buyer and you counteroffer with the seller’s originally proposed price, we will now automatically push the offer through. This is particularly useful when trying to negotiate Port Sale offers or other large offers.

Removed Items – If items sell before a buyer or seller gets a chance to respond to an offer, those sold items must be removed from any counteroffers. In the past we didn’t make it obvious which items had been removed from previous offers. Now if that is the case, we show you a list of any removed items when viewing an offer. This is enable for open offers as well as all historical offers.

Paged Offer Details – We used to always show all items in an offer on the historical offer details pages. Unfortunately this made the Offer Details page useless when an offer had thousands of items. Now we show 10 items per page just like any of the Make Offer or View Offer pages.

For a long time CheckOutMyCards has been referred to as COMC. We have also been getting more and more requests to expand beyond just cards (e.g. coins, comics, memorabilia…). To prepare for this we acquired the domain www.comc.com.

Now we’re looking for a new logo that reflects our love of collectibles. We’re putting it out there for your participation. Go to http://www.mycroburst.com/contests/business-logo-comc to see the parameters and requirements. Check out the entries, make comments, and perhaps submit a design of your own?

$888 will be awarded to the winning logo design. Pass this info on to any creative eyes you know.

Contest ends: Tuesday Sept. 20, 2011 at 3:00 pm.

Lots of additional feedback incorporated. Give this version a whirl.

I also added a link at the bottom of the page so that you can toggle between the old style and the new style to see what you like about each version. Let me know what you think.

Why are we doing this?
Many of you have commented that we shouldn’t fix what isn’t broken. Well, there is a significant drawback to the old design. It was optimized for the case when we only had 1 card for sale. This was an excellent assumption for the first few years.

Now we average 3 cards for sale per listing. As a result the old style gave a huge advantage to the cheapest card. This caused people to really fight for that cheapest spot. The data that we see that you guys don’t have access to is that sellers are undercutting prices unnecessarily. Buyers are willing to pay more, but sellers are trying to get that top spot.

Our solution: More than 1 “top spot”. The new page is designed to feature 3 cards above the fold for about 60-80% of our users. The rest of the users that have smaller monitors will only see 2, but that is still a lot better than the 1.

Now our sellers can focus on charging fair prices instead of slashing to get the top spot due to limitations with our old design.

I hope that shines some light on these growing pains.

Thanks for the feedback on Card Details Beta 2. A bunch of improvements have been incorporated. Keep the feedback coming.