[bmac56]

Hello all! This thread has a lot of great advice/ideas and as a new seller on COMC, it has been very informative and helpful. That is what I like about this hobby. In general most people are very nice and willing to help one another.

I really enjoy COMC. I’ve found lots of cards for my collection, been able to sell some things, and the site is very user-friendly. I really don’t have any complaints but do have some suggestions on possible improvements.

I have my cards priced pretty low right now (about an 80% discount on everything) mainly because I want to move inventory and buy more cards for my collection. Even with an 80% discount I still get offers to buy for less (I don’t mind necessarily but I’d like to make some money). Recently, someone made an offer on three of my cards with a book value of $30. At an 80% discount, I was only asking $6 but the buyer offered $4 (roughly an 87% discount). I knew these cards would be flipped so I decided to look at their cards and see if there was anything I wanted. My strategy was to find a card or several cards with an equal book value (or close to it) and make an offer of $4. My plan was thwarted however as I found that you cannot make an offer for less than 50% of the asking price.

So I guess my question is this – why the limit on offers? If someone wants my cards at an 87% discount, shouldn’t I be able to at least ask the same? The worst that can happen is that we both reject the offers.

This situation also got me thinking about a trade function on COMC. COMC says on their website that they are exploring the possibility of offering trades on the site. One simple way of doing this would be to add a “Purchase or Trade” button in the “Make Offer” process. When a seller makes an offer on another seller’s cards they can choose to make the offer as purchase only, trade only, or purchase/trade. If the cards are mark as trade only or purchase/trade, the seller with the offer would then have a chance to counter with cards from the offerer’s inventory. Since COMC is dictated mostly by book value, it would be easiest to cap counter trade offers using book value.

Would it just be too much hassle or invite too much trouble to allow messages to be sent with offers/counter offers? I could see it being a big problem but I hate having offers outright rejected.

And finally, I almost prefer base, inserts, parallel and numbered cards to autographs and game used cards. With the exception of base cards, I can find a lot of stuff I need on COMC. I would love to be able to find more of the base cards I need on COMC but the $1 rule keeps the number of base cards available to a minimum (which from and economic point I understand). Without knowing the inner workings of COMC it is difficult to say how to make base cards economically feasible but how about just listing cards with a value of under $1 without a picture with a $0.10 - $0.15 processing fee and flat purchase price?

Am I totally off base with these suggestions or could some of them work?