mycomicshop

nocutename, I have confirmed that your account information has been cleared as you requested. There's no hard feelings on my part towards nocutename and I wouldn't mind letting the thread die, don't want her to feel bad. As is often the case with these kinds of things, the problem started with a misunderstanding--OP originally thought it was our mistake, but that was not the case, and then from that misunderstanding spun into more of an issue than it would have been otherwise.

My preferred way to handle returns would be: - if a return is due to something outside of the customer's own actions such that the items received aren't as described (our error, damage in transit, etc), then of course no restocking fee - if a return is due to the customer's good faith error (oops I ordered the wrong thing), or even if it's a buyer's remorse situation and they changed their minds but it's an honest mistake and first time, don't sweat it, accept the return with no restocking fee, let them know that although we do have a restocking fee for some returns it's not necessary here. The situation described in this thread sounds like it wasn't our error, but it was a minor oversight by the buyer and not a big deal, and I wouldn't have charged a restocking fee. - but if a buyer has repetitive return requests where we didn't do anything wrong and the buyer made an error or got buyer's remorse, or otherwise is not ordering/returning in good faith, then I have no problem charging a restocking fee. We're not trying to be Wal-Mart or Amazon where anybody can return anything for any reason as many times as they want. There are buyers that would take advantage of it if it were allowed, one example being buyers looking for 9.8 candidates among books listed only as NM, and wanting to return correctly graded books that aren't suitable for 9.8 slabbing. Or ordering a 6.0 FN book and returning it, not because they don't think it's a 6.0, but because they thought it was undergraded when they ordered it, and then after receiving it decided it wasn't undergraded as much as they hoped. We don't want people fishing for stuff like that and then returning what they don't like. We want to take care of our customers, but we expect buyers to meet us half way and treat us fairly too.

Saw it, loved it. Fantastic wrap up and send off for everything they’ve built up over all these films. The emotional moments all landed very well for me, but I’m an easy touch for stuff like that. I’d see it again.

Think it's safe to say adding a best offer capability is our most-requested feature. We are adding it, and it will be entirely optional--consignors don't have to use it if they don't want to. No definite date yet but we are getting there.

The consignor got back to me. The original price was $999 (which became the $1140 on eBay)--he was not intending to sell at that price, he did that in order to flag that book to himself for further action. He had not realized it was color touched, and was considering having it set aside to be returned to him. He has now lowered the price to $99--I don't think he plans to sell it at that price either, but that's less eye catching than the previous price. Sounds like it'll be removed from his account soon if he decides to have it returned. We do not currently provide a mechanism for a consignor to delist an item because the need to do so hasn't been requested much at all before, and normally if you have something consigned we'd prefer that it be listed rather than not. A workaround is to assign it to an auction and then remove it from auction (before the auction starts). That'll put an item back in an unlisted state.

Not sure if that was an accident on the part of the consignor or what, but I emailed him to let him know. He priced it earlier today. We currently do not impose any price controls on items priced by our consignors, and occasionally something odd like this gets attention. I intend to add some guardrails to consignment pricing in a future update. The goal will be to limit unrealistic pricing while still preserving as much consignor freedom and flexibility as we can.

Little over a week away!

Bffnut bought multiple copies of that book--if he can tell me our product label number of the special one, I can, but otherwise I have no way of knowing book is the one you care about. I'll follow up with you via PM regarding any updates we might make to our catalog.

The copies that bffnut purchased came in via two different buys earlier this summer through our online buying system that people can use to sell us comics. And as bffnut already said, our catalog differentiates between 1st and 2nd printings for that issue, but does not differentiate newsstand editions for that particular issue. So both copies were listed just as the 2nd printing with the same generic picture we show for all copies of that issue.

We received the damaged shipment returned by the OP last Friday, and are getting the book off to be recased by CGC and don't see any damage to the comic that would lower the grade. The box did contain the inner slab box that we normally use, it just wasn't pictured in what the OP shared. It's a little hard only being able to see how the box looks now without seeing it originally, but the only thing we can see out of the ordinary now is that the box only contained two of the L-shaped foam corners, when there are supposed to be four. It mainly looks like the box was very roughly handled by UPS.

Hi all, I’m traveling today but will follow up with this gentleman and make sure everything is taken care of, and determine if somebody didn’t pack the book correctly according to our usual procedure.

You could consign with us and do fixed price sale instead of auction. Low commission without the price risk of auction sale. You send one shipment to us and then set prices on your books. We scan them and list them on both MCS and eBay. Commission is 10% on sales up to $300, 8% sales $300-3000, and 6% $3000+, minimum of $5 per book.

My point was that in most cases buyers should accept responsibility for what they find inside a slab once they choose to open it. I'm expressing my personal opinion as a buyer and seller in this hobby, not making some official pronouncement of company policy, but thanks for the "yikes." There are plenty of cases where even though I don't think we the seller would be specifically at fault, I think it's reasonable for us to take care of the buyer anyway and would do so, and have done so in the past. There are other cases where I think its reasonable to expect the buyer to take some responsibility. Take your hypothetical example, and add the further wrinkle that the CGC item that sold for $25,000 was a consignment. So in this example at some point in the past CGC misgraded a book such that the actual book in the slab is worth significantly less than indicated by CGC's label due to a missing page or cut coupon. We receive the book from the consignor. We've never touched or had access to the book inside the slab. Even our consignor never had access to it, it was already slabbed when they got it. Whoever originally slabbed the book is somewhere back multiple transactions and multiple years ago. We sell the book for $25,000. Of that sale we pay the consignor $23,500 and make a commission of $1,500. Three months later the buyer reports they cracked open the slab and discovered whatever flaw CGC originally missed and as you say is only worth $5000. We earned $1,500 on the sale and now the buyer wants a $20,000 refund. Good luck getting money back from the consignor. What do you do? I'm not saying there's an easy answer nor am I saying what we would do if this actually happened, but the seller would not be my first stop in terms of who rightfully bears the most responsibility for the error and resulting difference in value. If the seller truly is the responsible party, it really erodes the value of third party grading and we'd be better off only selling raw books where we can grade and vouch for the book ourselves.

To both of the previous posters--we've been in business over 40 years and have a long time reputation in the comics business for honesty and keeping our word. Not everybody in the world is a crook. So yes, only 400 will ever be sold.

Variants are only available in quantities larger than 400, but we will only be selling 400 and securely disposing of the excess.

Agreed. That's happened to us before--some buyers want access to the potential upside of cracking a slab open to do something with it, but if it doesn't turn out like they hoped, then they want to put it back on the seller even though the seller never graded the book or had access to the comic other than as an already slabbed item. One of the main purposes of third party grading is to remove disagreement over grading from transactions--buyer and seller can both easily determine that the item received by the buyer matches what was described by the seller. Doesn't matter whether the company is PGX or CGC, or if you're talking about a big flaw or a small difference in grade upon resubmission. When you buy a slabbed book you are buying the label and the plastic--the comic inside is along for the ride. The seller offers a slab graded X by company Y, and that's what you receive, a slab graded X by company Y. With a slabbed comic the ability to assess and vouch for the condition of the comic is delegated from the seller of the comic to the company that slabbed the comic, and the degree to which the buyer trusts the grade is up to the buyer's confidence in the quality of the service provided by the grading company. There's a transactional checkpoint when the buyer receives the book and confirms it matches what the seller offered (slab graded X by company Y), and the slab is legit and not tampered with. At that point the seller has met their obligation to deliver what they represented in the listing. The buyer is then welcome to treat their newly acquired property however they see fit. If the buyer wants to open up the slab and take issue with the comic inside, by all means do so, but it should be buyer beware from that point on to accept whatever risks or rewards come from doing so. They're voiding the grading opinion provided by the slab (as valuable or worthless as that might be depending on the grading company), and the item can no longer be returned to the seller in the same state in which it was offered and sold.

Book was offered to us directly and using the same email address used previously.

6 years later update: the same person, Enrique Gomez Sanchez, appears to be trying to pass off a reprint Batman #1 as an unslabbed, unrestored VF original Batman 1. Wants $60K, doesn't want all the money up front because of "taxes" so just an initial payment of $2500, doesn't have a Paypal account so money needs to be wired, etc. Unwilling to ship the book to have it slabbed before purchase. Just fishing for anybody willing to wire a couple thousand dollars hoping to score a deal.

per PM

I agree that one is overpriced and will look at it, but that has more to do with us not getting our pricing parameters right on that book than being part of an intentional strategy. We have hundreds of thousands of issues in stock to price, and sometimes we get things wrong. If the example you provided was representative of most of our inventory, we wouldn't be selling anything. There's also always going to be survivorship bias at play--the books we've gotten the pricing wrong and overpriced are going to be the ones that stick around and you keep seeing in stock. The ones priced reasonably or even underpriced get snapped up and don't last long. Some buyers trawl our new in stock inventory page every single day ready to pounce on books like that.

Yours was the last message in the thread when I started my reply--my reply was more to the thread as a whole than you specifically. And replying to your message gave me a good opportunity to make the point that we do sell at the same grade we reported when buying, since I feel like that's always an important distinction to make at the top whenever this kind of discussion comes up.

I'd first want to know some examples of what items you're talking about, so I can look at those specifically before providing feedback. If you'd like to send me a PM I will review with you there.

Or in our case, grade tightly, and sell at that same grade. Every book that we buy at a particular grade will be sold at the same grade. This has always been the case and can be verified by watching books you sold pop up later on our new in stock page. We recommend that first time sellers send us a smallish sample of books before committing a larger group. So you commit more books in a second transaction only if you're happy with the initial results. If you're not happy with how we graded your books, our system allows you to easily request the return of anything that we graded lower than you did. We would much rather create somebody who's pleased with the offer they got for their comics than somebody who thinks we treated them unfairly and they never sell to us again. We can't please everybody, but we've got tons of happy repeat sellers and we continue to buy over 150,000 comics a month, with a big chunk of that coming through the online want list system being discussed here, so it's working for somebody. I encourage sellers to focus on this: if you didn't know that we graded something lower than you did, and all you had was our total offer for your comics, would you be happy with the offer, and is it a higher offer for less work than you could get for the comics elsewhere? If so, then grading disagreement aside perhaps you'd still consider it a good offer. If you think you'd get more elsewhere, then by all means go for that, whether that means listing them yourself on eBay or going with a different buyer. The transparency of the reported grades when selling to us via our online want list system is both a strength of the system and a source of conflict. It's a strength because it lets you see per-grade offer prices up front, but that same transparency invites disagreement about grading. Would be nice if we could design a new version that keeps the strengths and reduces the opportunities to disagree on grade.

They may not spend much on comics while they're caught up in cosplay and Hall H lines, but you can be sure those hordes of San Diego con-goers are going straight back to classic cars, stamps, and Elvis memorabilia once they get back home. Truly front of mind categories.

We make use of whatever protections are available to us and the benefit of our volume and experience. One of the benefits that comes with consigning with us is that we can largely insulate the consignor from being affected by problem buyers and fraud.