mycomicshop

I recently worked on exactly this question--producing a number loosely reflecting scarcity. I'm currently using a sum of census + our current stock + our previous sales + known previous listings/sales on ebay. The point of the number isn't to accurately model how many copies exist, but to give a general idea of how frequently an issue has appeared within the larger market.

We've done that a few times but not regularly. I'd be interested in doing more of that.

And The Invisibles

Hi @intlnews Did you call, email, or submit it on our web site? If you emailed, can you forward me a copy of one of the emails to conan@mycomicshop.com? Or if you called what was the name of the person you spoke to? I would like to follow up and give you a better answer, but so far I haven't been able to find any records on our end of an offer being made recently for an ASM #2 CGC 7.0. Looking at it myself, I'd offer $6500 for an ASM #2 CGC 7.0. Or if you want to consign, just enter it here: https://www.mycomicshop.com/webuycomics/consignmentquicksubmit

You ignore those completely. Irrelevant for items you intend to consign.

I hadn't seen that til you brought it up, but that was a price error by the consignor. The book sold at the consignor's asking price and shipped 10+ days ago, so somebody got a really good deal. Had the consignor noticed the error himself, he could have immediately changed his price, or if we were made aware of it before the book shipped we would have canceled the order, for an error involving that much money. To be clear on our policy: if a book is a $10 book, but then there's a media rumor of some kind at it goes to $100 and our stock at gets bought up at $10--we never would cancel an order under those circumstances in order to price the book higher. The only orders that get canceled when something like that happens is when there's a crush of purchases due to the sudden surge in demand, and we receive more orders than we can actually fill, because the orders come in too fast for our software to keep inventory in sync (since we sell on our site and eBay). But, in a case like this, where due to either technical error or human error something is mispriced and off by thousands of dollars, we'd usually cancel the order and let the item be corrected. For pricing our own books, we have safeguards against this--if you try to price something lower than the system thinks it should be, it'll alert you and you have to confirm "yeah I really want to set that price" before it'll allow what appears to be a too low price to be entered. Looks like we need to extend that protection to consignors setting their prices as well.

We're currently at 9,000-12,000 incoming consignment items a month, average of 400-550 per working day (closed on weekends). That's in addition to our own inventory, which is graded by the same people and systems handling consignments. We've sold 99K consignment items over the previous 12 months to today, up from 72K this time a year ago (up 37%). They definitely have a lot to keep up with. and we're focused on preventing our processing times from slipping, as they unfortunately did to some degree last year when covid was a much more active concern. Our current turnaround on getting slabbed items filed can be 5-10 business days. We're working on getting that down to 2-3 business days with additional hiring. Not there yet but working on it.

It's also possible it was a mistake or oversight on our part. You're welcome to PM me if you ever get an offer you think is way off the mark on something and I can double check it for you. We have two departments involved with buying comics. One is our want list buying department that handles sales made via our online want list. This is best suited for sellers with large numbers of modern era comics to sell. Buyer uses our site to record the comics they own that they want to sell While recording, our site shows you which ones are currently on our want list. If they are on our want list, the site shows you how much we'll pay in various grades, up to a cutoff of $50. Above $50, the site will say "best offer", and we'll review your list when you submit them, and decide how much we want to offer. You still know our offer prices for all your comics individually, at the grades you've specified, before shipping anything to us. Once we receive your comics, if we grade the comics the same grade you assigned, you get the original offer amount. If we grade higher than you did, you get a higher offer price corresponding to that grade. If we grade lower than you did, you have the option of having the comic returned to you, or continuing with the sale at a lower offer amount corresponding to that lower grade. Whatever grade we report to you when buying the comic from you is the grade the comic will be listed for sale at--we don't push the grade lower when buying from you and then turn around bump the grade up when we post it for sale. The other department that handles comic buys is our collection buying department. They handle more free form submissions--usually the seller gives us a list of what they're selling but is not recording items individually on our website. Generally, if you have lots of modern era comics to sell, the online want list is the best way to do that. It's more work for you to list, but it allows you to sell us only the comics we need, so we're paying you better prices than we pay if we're just buying a bulk modern collection where a large percentage of the issues will be ones we're already well stocked on. If you're selling higher values books, including slabs, or golden age or silver age, both departments can handle that, but in general I'd recommend going through the collection buying department for higher end sales.

Our shipments to Australia will temporarily be using an alternate carrier (not USPS) so should continue to reach Australia customers without problem.

Correct--multiples are fine. We've had people consign 30+ copies of the same book before.

Yes--once a buyer has paid for an item and we've shipped it, the consignor gets paid and if anything happens with the buyer after the fact, that's our responsibility. Consignors are never bothered by buyer complaints, returns, etc. That is a significant source of value we provide to our consignors. Similarly for buyers making time payments on high end books--once the buyer pays the deposit, we pay the consignor in full. The consignor doesn't have to wait for the book to get paid off for them to get paid, or worry about late payments or the buyer bailing on the purchase. The only exception to this is if the buyer wants to make time payments but not pay the time payment fee (10%)--in that case the only way that will work is if the consignor is willing to forgo receiving their payment until the buyer has paid off the book.

Yes. No cost per check, though if it’s especially frequent like close to weekly, it would make more sense to receive a weekly check through our normal payments instead of paying out to account credit and manually requesting checks out of that.

For CGC books, there are no minimum grade requirements. Anything in a CGC slab is automatically eligible for consignment. Are there a few dumb books out there that were a waste of money getting slabbed and are only $5-10 books even slabbed? Sure, but there's not a lot of those and it's not a worry. So any CGC slabs are consignable, and the quickest way to list is enter them here: https://www.mycomicshop.com/webuycomics/consignmentquicksubmit For raw unslabbed books we do have a minimum value target for what is eligible for consignment. The reason for this is we don't want people who don't know what they're doing sending us a bunch of $2 and $5 and $10 items for consignment. Ideally, raw consignments should be at least in the $30-50 range. Lower than that is okay too as long as the consignor is okay with the minimum commission amount, which is $7 for raw books ($5 for slabs). We want to protect sellers unfamiliar with comics from selling a raw book for $10 where our commission is $7. If you want to consign raw books, you'll use the selling and consigning area of our web site to look up the books that you want to consign. As you look them up it will show you what the minimum grade is that we'll accept for that book, based on our estimate of the retail value in that grade. The grade that we tell you at the front end there, before you submit the books, is usually a little bit higher than the actual lowest grade we'll accept once we've received the book and graded it ourselves. We do that to allow for some wiggle room in cases where we grade a consignment submission lower than the consignor did when first offering it.

We do not currently take Venmo but I agree that would be a great option to add. We'll look into that.

Others have answered this, but as they said--when posting buy it now consignment listings to eBay, we bump the price up a bit. Enough to cover the eBay fees when the item sells. The result is that the consignor is paid the same amount (their asking price minus our commission), regardless of whether the sale takes place on the MyComicShop web site or on eBay.

Any payment of any amount made by check, wire transfer, or Zelle, waives the buyer's premium. Our checkout will offer the option to pay by check or bank transfer if your order total is $200 or more, and the option to pay by Zelle (online bank payment) if your order total is $100 or more. Those are defaults, and we can lower those to $0 on request for the small number of people that prefer to pay for all orders via check.

Strange. Glad to hear it's working now, but if you have any issues in the future not receiving a notification you expected to receive, please PM me and let me know your email and the details, and I'll check on it.

As @shadroch said, we can mail you a check, and we can send PayPal payments (not sent as friends and family, so you'll incur Paypal fees if you choose that. I can't specifically speak to Canadian tax issues and income. That's something you'll have to decide how to handle on your own, but I can say we have plenty of high volume Canadian consignors.

In my experience pricing our own stuff, books that are in demand and priced in the range of 100% to 105% of fair market value can sell extremely fast, like in less than an hour sometimes, and very frequently in less than a week. If there is less demand for what you're listing and the market is thinner, it could be weeks or months depending on how you're pricing. The number one reason why books sit unsold is the consignor is just pricing them a little too optimistically. That's also why some people get the impression that consignments at MCS are overpriced--it's because the ones that are priced well sell very quickly and disappear, and what remains and accumulates is the books that are priced too high to sell quickly. Regarding this: "as opposed to ebay, where there's a decent chance the software's algorithm will get pictures of your books in front of buyers of similar items"--all buy it now consignment listings with us are also posted to eBay. So any benefits that eBay provides to visibility for your item, you should be getting those same benefits with a consignment with us, because your book will be on eBay too.

I'm biased of course, but I would take issue with this, at least partially. If you're selling a rare, high end GA book, I agree you're unlikely to have any post-sale seller's remorse going with Heritage because that's what everybody has done for 20 years and HA produces good results, no disagreement. You can feel confident you're achieving a strong competitive price from a Heritage auction. Could you have done that well selling it as a buy it now sale through us at a price of your choosing, and factoring in that our total fees are so much lower than HA's? I'd argue you often could, but don't blame people for feeling comfortable with HA. It's the same idea as "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." Fees with us are 8-10% seller's commission, and the 3% buyer's is usually waived to 0% for anything expensive because buyers are paying by check or bank transfer. And for anything around $12.5K or above our $1000 cap kicks in, pushing the effective percentage lower and lower the higher the sale price. Versus Heritage is what, 15% seller and 20% buyer? It's possible to negotiate lower rates with HA, but even if your stuff is so amazing that they'll waive the seller's commission completely and offer to pay you part of the buyer's premium, a seller at HA is still receiving a smaller percentage of what the buyer is paying out than the same seller at MCS. The auction format is great for books that come to market very rarely, so that there's no clear GPA market data pointing you to what the current market value "should" be. So when you have a sought after rare golden age book, you put it in auction and the auction ends up at a much higher price than the long-ago last comparable sale. Price discovery has happened and the seller's probably really happy. But auctions have less usefulness for price discovery for stuff that already has plenty of recent comparable sales. The BIN sales format works great for those books. If I was selling a high demand key, I'd confidently sell it as a BIN or auction with us rather than an auction with Heritage. High demand keys are high demand everywhere and easy to sell everywhere with a reasonably high baseline of visibility. IMO Heritage doesn't have any secret sauce that gets better prices for high demand keys than you can get with us, and definitely not enough to make up for the higher fees.

The only time you won't be notified by email when an offer is placed is if somebody makes an offer that is below your auto-reject amount. All offers that are above your auto-reject amount will send you an email. If you don't get one, something is wrong with the email sending or receiving, but there's nothing on our end that is choosing not to send them. Checking your "Review Offers I've Received" page daily is a good thing to do as a backup because email is sometimes unreliable, but the act of checking that page has no effect on whether we send you offer emails or not. I don't know if this is relevant, but a few weeks ago we had a problem with the process that sends our want list notification emails (different activity, unrelated to offers). That bug caused us to send a bunch of duplicate want list notices to some customers over a span of about 2 hours, with some people receiving 50+ duplicate emails before we were alerted and paused the process and then fixed the issue. It's possible that event caused a spike in some people flagging those duplicate emails as spam, and potentially that interfered with our offer emails reaching you for a while. I don't know for sure. Anyway, glad to hear you've been receiving your email notices reliably again since that initial gap period. Thank you very much for posting such a thorough and informative review of us! I'm available in this thread or by PM if anybody has questions for me.

Thank you everyone. It's been gratifying to see the outpouring of warmth from all our friends in the comics community. Buddy's working hard on physical therapy and rehab and making good progress, and we're keeping things running smoothly here at MyComicShop. - Conan

I haven't watched the whole video, but as of the 10 minute mark he's drawing incorrect conclusions about WATA and Heritage. There was nothing nefarious about WATA listing places like HA or Halperin as advisors, or about HA stating that they would be a marketplace for WATA games before WATA was running full steam. Somebody who's doing a good job of getting a startup business going would be doing lots of outreach to their industry and establishing relationships with important partners. WATA did this. HA met with them, we met with them, plenty of others met/talked with them. The guys from WATA educated us about the state of video game grading and the graded video game market since it was such an unknown entity at the time to most people, and made the case for what was lacking with the incumbent grader VGA, and why WATA would be better. They made a good case and I had a lot of confidence in them to build a successful grading company, be better than VGA, and accomplish what they wanted to do. We haven't really pursued video games to this point (still too much we're focused on in comics), but we had the opportunity to be involved early in WATA's start similar to HA. Others did too, HA is just the biggest target and the ripest for conspiracy theories. I can't speak to the rest of the video I haven't watched, but after the first 10 minutes this guy is way off base with his claims.

Anybody contemplating consigning with us who has any questions is welcome to PM me here or text/call me at 512-808-7099. -Conan

Of the 12 issues Action #212-223 @Hudson reviewed, as you said the only one we don't currently have in stock is #216. We've sold two copies of #216 in the past year, one in May and one last October. So even the issues we don't have in stock at any specific time, if it's on your want list there's a good chance it'll come through sooner or later if you're patient. We've sold multiple copies of all 12 issues you mentioned in the past year, so not only do we have them in stock, we're also managing to sell them. And then the hard part for every comic dealer--replacing sold inventory.