mycomicshop

Yes, we offer time payments on orders over $1000. Standard terms are as follows: - purchase must be paid off within six months. Any longer payoff periods must be requested and approved by us. - an initial deposit of 25% of the order total is due within 14 days of order submission to secure the order. This deposit, as well as all subsequent installment payments, are non-refundable. Time payments, once entered into, are not cancelable or refundable. - Payments are considered late, and the order subject to cancellation, if an installment payment is more than 30 days late. - If purchasing a consigned item, we charge a finance fee of 10% of the amount financed. This allows us to go ahead and pay the consignor sooner rather than waiting for the full payoff. If the consignor is willing to wait to be paid by MCS until the item has been fully paid off, then there is no finance fee. For big ticket items, many consignors are okay with waiting which can save you 10%. And for items purchased from MCS inventory, there is no finance fee. Feel free to text me at 512-808-7099 if there's anything else I can answer or help arrange for you on a large purchase like that.

Without making any judgment about whether his prices are fair or too high relative to market, I know what volume this seller sells and it's substantial, so he is finding buyers for plenty of his books. I'm a lot quicker to agree something is overpriced when it's readily available silver age or golden age, and more flexible when there's little on the market. Right now the book in question is the only one on MCS and the only one on eBay, and only a handful of sales have been tracked by GPA over the past year or so. The book in question was first posted October 2022. Under the updated consignment terms we'll be introducing soon, a golden age book like that would have 12 months where the consignor has full flexibility to price however they want, after which we'd begin requiring either automatic monthly 5% reductions, auction, or return to the owner. That's the mechanism that will insure that books that are truly priced too high to find a buyer will eventually reach a price where somebody bites.

First time warning email, second time no longer able to make offers.

Anybody that doesn't pay for auction wins already gets blocked. I don't think we generally have more or fewer deadbeat bidders than eBay or other auction venues--I think it's all about the same. The problem is that the more steps we theoretically could take to make it harder for people to be deadbeat bidders, the more people you turn away who aren't willing to jump through your hoops, and fewer total bidders means worse prices. For example, we could require bidders to make a $100 deposit before they can bid. Fail to pay for your auction wins, lose your deposit. That would be a good incentive to not bid unless you're serious, but plenty of legitimate bidders would pass on participating. Am always open to suggestions for measures that would discourage non-payment without being a turn off to legit bidders.

https://web.archive.org/web/20071009045844/http://comicscorral.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20091227050317/http://comicscorral.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20060715043910/http://comicscorral.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070216095921/http://www.comicscorral.com/forums

We won't, but we've had more than one inquiry about C2E2 so maybe we need to look at adding it to our schedule in the future.

Ebay recently replaced its Global Shipping Program (GSP) with eBay International Shipping (EIS). EIS has some limitations: it doesn't currently support combined orders for more than one item, and it didn't support sales over $500, although apparently that was recently raised to $2500. We've never used GSP, we handle our own international shipping. I've heard mixed to negative reviews in the past from eBay buyers about their experiences with GSP, but that was several years ago. Any eBay buyers here outside the US have recent experience with shipments sent via either GSP or EIS? Do you like it or dislike it when a US seller uses GSP or the newer EIS?

Yes, any items already in the system/already submitted under the old terms, could remain in stock under the existing terms--12 months under $1K market value and 24 months over $1K market value. The start date for that is the date the item was originally filed, so any item that's already past the 12 month or 24 month mark would move into the new system anyway. We always try to create a smooth transition for existing consignments when updating policies.

We had a brief pause recently to open up some additional storage locations for slabs. We have over 50,000 consigned slabs right now, an all time high, so we needed to allocate more space for them. It wasn't that long ago we had fewer than 25,000 consignments total, slabs & raws combined. We're pretty close to rolling out a combination of new price management tools + new consignor policies that are going to create conditions where overpriced slabs can't sit around forever. There's a lot of unrealistically priced inventory that we're effectively just storing for consignors right now, some of it multiple years old. Although our current consignment terms allow for the possibility of charging consignors storage fees for unsold inventory that we've had a long time, we really don't want to use that if we can find alternatives. I'd rather create incentives/requirements that lead to eventual sell through than be charging consignors to store an unsold book. Outline of likely new policies: - Once we have finished recording your book and it's ready for sale, the consignor has to assign it a price or put it in auction within 14 days. If not, the item switches from consignor-managed to MCS-managed. There's a decent quantity of consigned material that's been submitted to us and then just sits there and is never given a price by the consignor. This will eliminate that. - For books 1980 and newer, the consignor has a 6 month runway (from the point of being ready for sale) where they can price however they want. After 6 months, the required options are: book switches to MCS-managed and begins receiving automatic 5% monthly price reductions; goes in auction; or returns to consignor. - For books older than 1980, same as above except it's a 12 month runway where the consignor has full freedom. There will be exceptions and special handling for books where a consignor has multiples in the same grade, and also exceptions for some especially high end material. My impression is that anybody that can't work within those constraints either has an unrealistic idea of what their book is worth, or isn't that serious about selling.

I'll check on Monday to make sure this is taken care of. If you are emailing Este as an individual, I'd recommend instead using consign@mycomicshop.com, which is the group contact point for everything consignment related that is fielded by multiple people, including Este. Este was recently out on a two week vacation and sounds like your request happened to come in during the middle of that.

No staffing issues and we definitely were not closed. That sounds like a delivery/tracking error.

Thanks, Tec-Tac-Toe--I was forwarded your email by our CS and appreciation the confirmation of what you're seeing. One further thing we figured out since yesterday that we're going to look at--our understanding is that in the case of these damaged shipments, the box was taped lengthwise across the mid-seam, but not perpendicularly at either end. One possibility is that one of the people handling the box on its way to you is picking up the box by sticking their fingers between the ends of the box and the top flaps and lifting by just the top flaps--which would definitely put a ton of strain on the tape. For the size/weight boxes where we think this is an issue, we're going to look at where we need to add perpendicular strips of tape at the ends to prevent the boxes from being picked up that way. Don't know for sure that's the problem but this should help.

As previously mentioned to OP I reviewed with our COO and shipping manager today regarding his concerns about the tape not being strong enough and boxes coming open. After we discussed, they went back and reviewed all our info. Here's their report: In conjunction with these two comments from the original post, "Everything was wonderful until it wasn't," and "I had used that form of shipment many times before without incident," it does sound to me like it's more a case of bad luck and extremely severe handling than it is a problem with our tape or boxes. We've added some instructions to the OP's account to help protect his boxes against his brutal package handlers (these instructions had already been added prior to this thread), but I don't see any evidence of a broader problem that requires different supplies or changes to how we pack.

Re why our search results include issues that aren't in stock: - you can add out of stock issues to your want list - you can click the "ebay" tab to see copies of that issue available on ebay even if we don't have any - lots of people use our site for reference - at the top of every set of search results is a set of tabs that filter the search results for you: The default is always "all issues" but one click on "in stock" will show you only what's in stock. We're far from perfect, and we have plenty of stuff that's very long overdue for an update, mobile support being the biggest. But, our site does far more things than most other comic sites.

Yes, as said elsewhere it was a very amicable parting with Steve. We remain on great terms with him personally and professionally and wish him nothing but success working with Josh and the great team at ComicLink.

Similar position from DCBS:

I promised this and we haven't gotten it done yet, but it's still in the works.

Hi, Thanks for the discussion. A few comments: - Regarding tape tearing due to some combination of boxes being overloaded or the tape not being strong enough: I will relay all these comments to our COO and shipping manager to review our materials and packing choices. We do get feedback directly from customers in the form of damage reports and returns, so if the issue was as frequent as it is reported to be in this thread I feel like we would have already observed a clear problem and adjusted. It's certainly not to our benefit to have packages coming open or damaged in transit. I'll DM @Cephusdog for some additional details that will be helpful in our review. - Regarding us not always being able to provide NM replacements for items you received as preorders: Please correct me if I'm overlooking anything anywhere, but to my knowledge we don't state anywhere that preorders are guaranteed to be NM or even use the term NM for preorders. We offer preorders in "new" condition, meaning new, uncirculated, unhandled, as we receive them from the distributor. Unfortunately, the condition of new comics these days is notably worse than it used to be. There are more distributors now than when it was just Diamond, and some publishers have made changes to cover stock and printing processes that make defects much more likely. Some of these changes started during the covid era due to a combination of publisher budget cuts and limits on paper supply and printer capacity, but at least so far things haven't returned to normal/gotten better. Marvel in particular is bad--the cover stock used to be heavier than the interior paper stock. Now it's the same, and that makes it much more likely that brand new comics fresh from the distributor will arrive with little dents and ticks that grade-sensitive collectors will not like. When new comics come in, we go through and grade-check those brand new comics. For preorders, we do our best to see that preorder customers get nice copies, but we can only provide what we get from the distributor. Some will get books that would be NM and some will get books that might be VF. Books that are significantly beat up we can treat as damages and try to get covered by the distributor, but publishers and distributors have a very different standard for what they consider an allowable damage return vs collectors who don't want anything less than a pristine NM book. This worsened condition problem for brand new books from distributors is something we're currently analyzing in house. Our latest estimate is that we would consider about two thirds of new release books that we receive to be NM, and one third are VF or worse. Some publishers and distributors (Marvel via PRH) are even worse than that. Note: the kind of defects I'm talking about here are things that will generally be present across the entire print run going to all retailers. These are printing process/poor paper stock issues, not damages unique to our account due to rough handling in transit. So it's not like when we get a bad batch, the distributor has great NM copies waiting to send us as replacements--they're all the same. If anything, we probably have fewer condition problems than some retailers because we are ordering enough volume that our new comics come in via freight rather than UPS small parcel shipments, so our stuff isn't jostled around as much. The publishers/distributors don't give us a NM condition guarantee, and we in turn can't give our preorder customers a NM condition guarantee. We do our best to give our preorder customers nice copies but have to work with what the distributor provides. And yes in the case of a damaged shipment that needs replacements, that may mean there's no stockpile of NM copies waiting to be given out. For new release books that we sell on actual release day rather than as preorders, those are handled a little differently from preorders. Instead of those being sold as "new", we do grade all those as NM or VF. NMs are sold at cover price and VFs are sold at a discount. This model worked when most of what we got was reliably NM. But it is breaking down and is not tenable when we are getting as many lower grade copies as we do now. We're reviewing this and will probably be making some changes at some point.

Thanks, Richard--yes I'm fine with that being shared here. As I think was mentioned somewhere in the thread a publicly accessible picture archive from CGC would be a welcome improvement if CGC could offer that. Lookup the cert, see the book as it looked at the time it was slabbed. Or at least for books over a given value threshold if you can't do it for every single new 9.8. If done, should be something CGC just does automatically, not something a submitter has to opt in to paying more to make happen. Wouldn't eliminate counterfeit concerns but would help make it harder in many cases.

Contacting our consignment department at consign@mycomicshop.com would be the better way to get support for something like this rather than posting here. We shipped the group that includes your book to CGC March 2 2022 and CGC shows that invoice as received April 5 2022. It's an economy tier group and the current status says Grading/Quality Control. Based on the date received looks like your group should be right on the cusp of finishing and shipping. There are economy groups just before it that are finished, and groups right after it that are not done yet.

It's a combination of two things: One, we use a system from Chase called Positive Pay that's an anti-fraud measure because previously we've had problems with people trying to pass forged checks against our account. With Positive Pay, we report to Chase the details of each check we issue, so only checks we approve can proceed. That by itself isn't a problem, but when we recently ordered a new batch of checks, somebody specified the wrong starting number for the new batch of checks. I'm not clear on the exact details, but that meant some of the new checks we received overlapped/interfered with older check numbers. As a result some of our checks issued between Nov 25 and Dec 22 were blocked by Positive Pay and didn't go through. Anything that was affected we've canceled and issued replacements.

I'm not against that in theory, but there are multiple complications. 1) If the winning bidder doesn't pay, usually at least a couple weeks would have passed since the end of the auction. Consignors already don't like bidders who are slow to get their payment in. Many consignors will not want to wait even longer for the second place bidder to be given the option to take the item, then wait for them to pay (if they even agree to wanting it). 2) Some bidders will react negatively and with suspicion if you offer them a second chance at an item they got outbid on. The winning bidder causes the second place person to get driven up to their max bid and then flakes out--if you now offer the item to the second place person some people will think the seller is shilling or you're trying to cheat them. 3) What's the fairest price that the second place bidder should have to pay? As an example, let's say the third place bidder's max on an auction was $100. The second place bidder and the first place bidder duked it out with the second place bidder ending at a max of $200, and the winning bidder winning at $201 but then failing to pay. Should the second place bidder be offered the item at his max, $200? This is unfair to the second place bidder since he got bid up to the max by somebody who flaked out. Should the second place bidder be offered the item at what the bidding would have ended at if the original winning bidder had not participated? This would be the third place bidder's max plus one bid increment, so maybe $101. This might be appealing to the second place bidder (get something at $101 that he was willing to pay $200 for), but would be upsetting to many sellers. It might be that there were other bidders that would have joined in between $101 and $200, but the activity already got driven up past their range by the second and first place bidders. It's just a thorny issue, and plenty of cases where either the second place bidder or the consignor can be unhappy with what you're doing. It requires a lot of manual communication to find out if both parties are interested in a second chance offer and at what fair price, and often isn't worth the hassle, so in most cases it's simpler and fairer for an unpaid auction to be canceled, and then the seller can relist in a new auction if they wish.

For double covers, the grade assigned to the item is the grade of the inner cover, same way CGC does it. We aren't going to do additional scans of the interior covers but will start noting the grades for both the outer and inner covers. There's not currently any way to search our inventory for double covers. We could add support for that at some point.

Got my finger on the pulse!

For what it's worth--this consignor sells plenty of books like this and knows his market well. He sold another copy a few months ago for $435: Tomb of Terror #16 PR complete interior, full length spine split. The current consigned copy that you're discussing is $690 on eBay, $600 on MCS, and the consignor is accepting offers, so maybe a buyer could end up with it for less than $600. And I like the colors better on this one than the previous one.