Many of the Blowout Card members have become CheckOutMyCards members, and at the National last year in Chicago a number of these common members made sure we got a chance to meet a few of the folks from Blowout Cards and to start thinking about potential partnership opportunities. It as been a very busy year for both of our sites, and this year at the National we finally got a chance to discuss making those ideas a reality.
Tom Fish and Tim Getsch @ the 2009 National
I am glad to announce that last week we officially signed a partnership agreement, and we are now starting to implement some updates to our sites and service offerings that will illustrate how the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.
Blowout Cards specializes in selling factory sealed boxes and cases. CheckOutMyCards specializes in making it safe & easy for people to buy & sell singles.
Both sites try to be industry leaders through innovation.
– Blowout Cards was the first seller of boxes & cases to start a highly successful forum. CheckOutMyCards has reaped the benefits of this forum.
– Blowout Cards and CheckOutMyCards have stared using services such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and blogs to reach the community.
– CheckOutMyCards set out to create a consignment service that could be cost effective for any cards that might sell for $1 or more. Many people have even found it to be successful for cards that sell for well under $1.
– CheckOutMyCards has scanned more cards than any other sports card website. More than 1,000,000 cards have been scanned using patent-pending technology.
Now you can use the store credit that you earn from selling cards on CheckOutMyCards.com to buy Blowout Cards gift certificates. You can than buy factory sealed boxes & cases from Blowout Cards, crack them open, keep the cards you want, and send us the rest to earn more funds to buy more product. Of course, you can also use your store credit on CheckOutMyCards.com to buy other singles or to get cash.
This just the beginning. We will continue to find more innovative ways that we can leverage each others services.
In case you haven’t noticed, we have started twittering. The most recent twitters are listed on the right side of the blog.
Be sure to follow us on Twitter. I won’t always have time to put together detailed blog posts about all the news that is happening around CheckOutMyCards.com, but I will try to keep the latest news posted on Twitter. This will include new features, record breaking stats, partnerships, industry news, and other interesting trivia.
Steve, Dave, and I have had a great experience at the National. Today was a lot of fun. We were surprised to meet several of the top sellers on CheckOutMyCards.com. We weren’t sure who we were going to meet.
– baseballcardsetc dropped off a few hundred cards
– mwheeler27 gave us several hundred cards and introduced us to the person at SPORTKINGS who designs their cards
– iluvfish2 dropped off 1,500 cards
– 2_t_2 dropped off several hundred cards yesterday and actually got the t-shirts for us
There were so many people that came by the booth. It was fun to hear the stories about how people found the site and what their experience has been.
One thing that I thought was pretty cool was that our booth was right next to Kruk Cards. When I got back into card collecting in 2003. There were a few card sites that influenced me. Kruk Cards had one of those sites. I bought more than 100 complete sets from them. These were all sets that that came out in the mid 90’s when I was previously into collecting. Even though the prices had dropped so much on these sets, it was really fun to get all of these cards that I had loved while growing up. This really helped me get back into collecting.
This morning I had great chats with Pat, Chris, and Tom from Blowout Cards. We discussed some awesome ways that our sites can really work well together. We will announcing more about the details over the next couple weeks.
The reception at the National has been overwhelmingly positive. I am amazed by how many people have only bought or sold on eBay and have still never heard of us. That is a good sign. That means we still have a vast untapped market. We will continue to try to grow at a manageable pace and keep our service as high quality as possible.
It has been a lot of fun talking with people. Steve Hollander and Dave Elmore have been doing a great job of letting people know how the site works and giving them a taste of their experience as users of the site and as employees. We have also been seeing many users, such as ohiomike, who have been helping spread the word about the site and getting people to start using our service.
I have had opportunities to talk with several influential members of the collecting community.
– Went to dinner with Mike Silvia, owner of SportsCardForum.com
– Met Chris Gilmore, owner of freedomcardboard.com
– Did a recorded interview for The Card Podcast
– Had a long chat with Dean from Dean’s Cards
– Answered more questions about our service for Dr. James Beckett
– Finally got to meet Bill Sutherland from Beckett Media
– Talked again with Ted Golden, president of Card Pricer
– Did an interview with Rich Mueller, managing editor of Sports Collectors Daily
Tomorrow morning I will be meeting with Blowout Cards to discuss ways our sites could help each other.
This year’s National has been a great experience. It was two years ago at the National that we announced our consignment service. Seeing the response at the National gives us a nice yearly opportunity to gauge the progress we have made. I am very pleased with the response that we are seeing.
Here are the promotions that we will be running at the National.
Free T-Shirt
Current buyers and sellers can get a free CheckOutMyCards.com t-shirt for hanging out at our both for an hour and showing people how they use the site. We will have a nice 22″ touch-screen LCD for playing with the site. Swing by booth #1432 early to sign-up for your slot.
You can buy CheckOutMyCards.com t-shirts for $10. The shirts won’t arrive until Friday morning.
$100 Free Express Processing
First time sellers get a coupon for $100 of free Express Processing that will be good through the end of August.
Extra Store Credit
You can pick up a coupon to get $5, $20, or $100 extra store credit when purchasing $100, $250, or $1,000 store credit by sending us a check or money order through the mail. We are only offering a limited number of each coupon (e.g. 8x$100 & 40x$20), so come by our booth early to ensure that you get a coupon. We will also have stamped envelopes you can pick up at the show. The coupons will be good through the end of the month.
$0.20 Priority Processing
You can drop cards off and get $0.20 priority processing with a 3 week guarantee from the drop-off date. There will be no additional $3 batch fee per 500 cards, and it is only $5 to have us ship as many cards as you want to drop off.
Drop-Off for Processing
You can drop cards off at booth #1432, and we will ship them for you. Processing fees are the same as stated on the website except for the $0.20 Priority Processing promo mentioned above. For everything other than Express Processing, there will be an extra shipping fee to have us ship the cards for you. Extra Shipping Fees
– No extra shipping fee if you use Express Processing (1-week guarantee)
– Flat $5 shipping fee for Priority Processing (3-week guarantee)
– Extra shipping fee of $5 per 1,000 cards for Standard Processing (8-week guarantee)
All guaranteed due dates will be based off the drop-off date.
I am currently in Minnesota en-route to Cleveland for the National. This Friday Andy Bird got married. In November of 2006 I was home for Thanksgiving, and Andy was telling me how much he enjoyed web development and how he was looking for “the next garage startup” like google and youtube. That Christmas I decided to start recruiting Andy to move to Seattle to work for my garage startup. Yes, CheckOutMyCards.com was actually operating out of my garage at the time. Back then we weren’t open to the public. We only had my cards (timgetsch, LowPriceCards) and cards from a friend (Serf77).
A few months later Andy was enticed to make the move to Seattle. That summer he got plugged into Overlake Christian Church where he eventually met his future wife Leah. Funny thing is that they are both from Minnesota and both sets of parents even go to the same church, Wooddale Church. They had an amazing, outdoor wedding overlooking a fountain at the Carlson Towers.
OK, funny story… the night before the wedding I was on my way to the Minneapolis airport to pick up another friend from Seattle. As I was trying to figure out if my friend might have checked luggage or not, I thought about the fact that he would be bringing dress clothes for the wedding… and it was at that moment that I realized I had totally forgot to pack for the wedding. I was so busy getting everything else taken care of for this two week long trip that I overlooked that detail. Fortunately I was able to call up my best friend and borrow some dress shoes, socks, a shirt and a tie. I only had to go buy pants and a belt.
While I was at my friends house picking up the clothes we saw a clip on the news about this couple that got married in St. Paul MN just a month earlier. Apparently they had just posted a youtube video of their wedding entrance and it had gotten more than half a million views in the first couple days. Well I just checked, and they now have more than 6 million views in less than a week.
This morning at 5:49AM PST I got a text from one of my employees that the site appeared to be down.
Sure enough our firewall was having issues and needed to be rebooted. Everything is back up and running fine now.
For a while I have been having http://mon.itor.us follow our site to track any down time. Since there haven’t been any issues is a very long time, I never spent the time to configure their setting to actively notify me of any down-time. So I went ahead and configured it so that I would get notified through email and text messaging if the site ever goes down. Normally they charge extra for text messages, but they offer free Twitter messages and Twitter offers free text messages… so that is a nice trick to get free text message of site status.
Now I should get notified pretty quickly if the site ever has connectivity issues, and I can make sure that you have as little down-time as possible.
Congratulations to mocards for becoming the second consignment seller to have more than $100,000 book value worth of cards for sale on CheckOutMyCards.com.
Posted by Tim Getsch 
