mycomicshop

Post-Baltimore Comic Con update: We had a great time two weeks ago at Baltimore Comic Con. We had lots of customers stop by and say hi, bought a bunch of books, and picked up a ton of consignment drop-offs. I enjoyed talking with @jgallo who we were located next to. Spoke with@VintageComics, @joeypost, Al Stoltz, and @AustinReece_GRRC. And always good to see @ttfitz! I know I'm leaving out plenty of other people I hung out with across the retailer summit and the con. Steve Borock had a great time at the show catching up with friends and brought in some great art consignments (we're developing and growing our art section, work in progress with changes to come). Celebrity sightings: I was in the Sheraton, and shared an elevator ride with John Leguizamo. Frank Miller was also in the Sheraton and saw him multiple times at breakfast and in the lobby. We originally planned to drive a 16 foot truck back from the show with our consignment pick-ups, but we wound up having too much for that truck and had to switch to a 26 foot truck to accommodate the weight. We came home with around 6000 slabbed consignments and several long boxes of raw consignments, and a bunch of good art. I estimate total value maybe around $900K. Dan DiDio and Frank Miller speaking at the Diamond Retailer Summit re Frank Miller Presents Steve at our booth with an art consignor, Alex Needleman of Absolute Comics & Statues in the back. Ceza and Alex checking in a consignment drop-off of several boxes of slabs. Long-time customers and superfans James and Heather LePore dropped off this hand-made pillow that Heather made for Buddy. Went out to lunch with them, wonderful people! If you don't know me that's me (Conan) holding the pillow. J.C. Vaughn editor of the Overstreet Price Guide posing with a very sharp copy of the OSPG #1 1st printing that I purchased at the show (not from JC). It came with the original mailer envelope plus some handwritten notes from Bob Overstreet that were mailed at the time to the person that bought it. Our truck close to filling up, prior to one final pick-up on the drive home.

For five figure books we'd usually ship it. Covered 100% by our private collectibles insurance, no insurance purchased through the carrier. Shipped by a next day service like UPS Next Day. For six figure books it'd either be the same, or delivered in-person or picked up in-person by the buyer, worked out with the buyer.

Bad timing for them to be rolling this out now as opposed to 18 months ago. Feels kind of surprising they're going ahead with it anyway.

There are basically two different ways you can accomplish a trade with us: - Use our online want list system to list the books you want to trade, and for each you'll see how much we're paying either in cash, or in trade credit. For stuff where our offer would be above $50, you won't see the offer amount listed on the site, instead you'll need to submit it to us first and we'll check pricing and make you an offer. We pay more in trade credit than we do in cash, but there are some limitations on trade credit: it can't be spent on auction purchases, consignment items, or preorders. If you're primarily buying and selling more expensive older books, that may be too limiting. - Alternatively, you can deal directly with our buying department and sell us anything from a single comic to an entire collection, raw or slabbed or both. We'll make you an offer, and if there's something you know you want from us, instead of paying you for the comics we can apply that offer price to whatever it is you want to buy from us. Buying department contact info: email buying@mycomicshop.com call or text 817-701-0704

We already have fields for noting variants, so that's not really an issue. The main cost/benefit for us is that issues in our database have inventory management parameters associated with them, plus desired stock levels. We try to carry at least 1-2 copies of everything in our catalog excluding certain especially adult books. If we take a run of the mill $3 comic that hasn't been direct/newsstand differentiated, and set it up as two separate listings for direct and newstand, we've now doubled the number of inventory pricing parameters we need to keep up to date, and we're also potentially doubling the number of comics we're storing for that issue. All for a $3 comic where most buyers don't care that much about the direct vs newsstand difference. Multiply that across thousands of potential books (if the goal is to differentiate every possible D/N variation), and it adds up to a lot. For higher value books and keys, it makes sense to do that, but it's different if you're talking about cheap books, and there are a lot more cheap books. Not saying we won't ever change our minds, but that's where we're at currently.

I think the fairest answer is that it both helps and hurts. It helps, because potential buyers who are aware of this feature know they can comparison shop eBay while on MCS. And perhaps do so more efficiently than on eBay itself since our results are already grouped by title and the ones on eBay aren't, and have other stuff mixed in. That's useful, and if it leads to more people checking MCS, that's more people seeing your consignments. But yes, in some circumstances you could say it hurts--I wouldn't say it's a positive for a consignor if you have a book consigned and there's a cheaper one available from eBay, provided the buyer trusts the grade (often not the case for eBay raws) or it's slabbed. I'm a believer in supply and demand making markets more efficient, and if somebody else has a comparable book priced cheaper than I do I'm not particularly bothered that the cheaper one is more likely to sell first. Overall I think it draws more buyer activity to MCS which is good for us and our consignors, and it nudges listings in the direction of being priced to fair market value where they're more likely to sell.

We already do for some books, generally keys or higher demand books where there's clear activity and demand and meaningful price difference. We don't intend to differentiate every single low value issue in our database that exists with direct and newsstand versions. To some degree it'll be a top-down process influenced by what CGC and GPA do.

Andrea has been added to the department to help Este--as we grow we need to add more people to keep up with growth. Anything Steve is helping to bring in doesn't have any special priority over anything else. The only significant priority thing is that consignments generally have priority over our own inventory.

Update: we're still working on changes to speed up processing and keep up with incoming consignment volume. First and biggest of which is updates to allow us to get slabs recorded through much more quickly. A few months ago I posted my goal of having that done by the end of the summer. Well today's Sep 1 and we're still not done with that so I'd say I've missed my own goal, but we've made good progress, are getting closer, and that's the main project I'm focused on until it's done. We've had three trends over the past ~6 months that have contributed to higher processing volumes: 1) Improvements in our buying department so we're bringing in larger collections more frequently 2) Steve Borock joining our team and he's helping to bring in significant collections, both MCS-purchased and consigned 3) In June/July with the asset bubble deflating somewhat along with economy/inflation concerns, I think that contributed to some additional movement to sell collections from some people To a lesser degree, we've had some more sickness among our staff than usual at times this summer. Not as bad as previously in 2020/2021 when more people were out due to covid concerns, but enough to register as an impact. Plan is to get these slab processing changes done first, then look at processing raws. For raws we may be able to come up with ways to speed up our workflow a little, but I think it's mainly a matter of hiring and training more graders to keep pace with increases in volume.

Not aware of any specific recent trends from CGC, no.

Our changes to speed up slab recording are not done yet. The physical changes to the imaging work area were recently completed--moving desks, shelving, and the biggest delay was electrical work to make the lighting much more flexible to help prevent reflections. Now working on the software changes to support a redesigned workflow that'll get slabs through faster.

We've been charging sales tax to most states for quite a while now, I think more than a year. Florida is the one that recently changed status--previously out of state sellers didn't have to charge sales tax, but now they do.

Sorry, I don't, and there are so many sold across that period it's not practical to click through them looking for it.

That should be done now for all of our generic catalog issue images. Still need to make some updates to have something similar apply to actual item scans.

Thanks for making me aware of that. Was a logic error for issues that got recorded in our system that didn't have a publication year recorded yet at the time they got posted to eBay. Fixed it so anything without a known publication date is assumed to be modern era.

We'll be offering more access to our completed sales soon.

Our New Listings page now has an option (visible only if you're logged in) to view the list filtered to only those issues that are on your want list. Additional changes, in which price reductions will be able to send want list notifications, still to come.

We are absolutely responsible for getting items you've purchased to you, from us to your door. However, we can't physically transport the shipments to you ourselves, it's UPS, it's the USPS Postal Service, it's Canada Post, etc. When you're looking at an order where the tracking info never updates with an intake scan and doesn't show anything beyond "label created", it's natural to assume that means we messed up and didn't get the package to the shipper. Although that does occasionally happen, in my experience investigating these kinds of problems, 95%+ of the time they are shipper errors--something that happens after the point we've handed off a pallet full of packages to the UPS truck at our dock. It's still a problem, and it's still our responsibility to investigate and pressure our shipping partners to improve/figure out what's going on, my point is that it's often not something we directly caused ourselves or directly have the power to fix. We don't like losing money paying refunds any more than you like getting a refund instead of the comics you ordered--so I totally agree with you it's a priority for us to address it. I can say that over the past 3-4 months shipments to Canada have had a higher incidence of problems like you're describing than usual, and it's something we've been looking into even prior to your post. It's not a problem affecting all international destinations equally, it's Canada in particular. In talking to our UPS shipping account manager, we understand that stuff we're shipping to Canada is all going through a specific local hub. The fact that Canadian shipments are impacted at a higher rate than other countries leads me to believe that the problem most likely involves UPS operations at that hub, rather than an alternative explanation in which somebody or something on our end is selectively stealing or misdirecting only packages going to Canada--for many reasons I think that's unlikely. Unfortunately I don't have any clear answer or resolution on it yet, other than to say we don't like missing shipments either, and we're doing what we can to monitor, investigate, and follow up with UPS. The Fantastic Four #3 you mentioned is entirely our fault, and I apologize about that. Este let me know about that problem last Friday. It was a dumb error we shouldn't have made, and we've already taken some steps to make it harder for us to make that error in the future. Thanks for your understanding with these shipping problems, and your ongoing purchases and consignment sales with us. We appreciate you!

Add me to the "it's a no brainer" camp. Medium-long term hold like you said? It's a good price. Super quick resale right now for an easy profit? It's a good price. Shortish term hold til later this year? Nobody knows where prices will be in a few months but you say that's not your period anyway. I'm skeptical it would drop enough that you'd regret your purchase.

Kudos to CGC for making the customer-friendly move.

Excellent suggestion. Don't think that should be too hard to set up as a user controllable option, we'll take a look at doing that.

Want list notifications go out under these circumstances: the first time a book is listed for sale, regardless of price when an auction opens for bidding and book(s) in the auction meet your want list criteria Lowering your price by at least 5% below your previous lowest offered price will bump your item to the top of the New Listings page, but does not send a want list notification. Reason being: say the fair market value for a book is $100. Consignor has a book priced unreasonably high at $300. If the consignor cuts the price 5% to $285, it's still unreasonably high. I don't want somebody with that book on their want list getting an email telling them each time the book is lowered to $285, $270, $250, etc, when all those prices are still way above what they'd be interested in paying. The improvement we could make to this is to draw on what we internally think a fair market value is. If the price is within a reasonable range of our FMV estimate (tighter range for books with lots of data, looser range for books with little data), then lowering the price within that range would trigger a want list notification, but lowering the price while still above that range would not send a want list notification.

Our structure already creates decreasing percentages, just not 1% or 0%: The things our service is doing that MySlabs isn't: saving you labor on shipping/fulfillment: make one large shipment or drop-off with us, vs packing and shipping however many individual shipments to buyers. We've recently had drop-offs/convention pickups of several hundred slabs, 1000, 2000 slabs at a time--that's a tremendous amount of labor the consignor is saving not doing hundreds or thousands of individual shipments to buyers. imaging submitting books to CGC for grading/reholdering if desired storing your items until they sell (desired in some circumstances, not in others) putting your book in front of our audience on MCS, and eBay, and most recently StockX (currently for a very small segment of our inventory because they haven't expanded their catalog much yet) making your book accessible to buyers worldwide at pretty reasonable shipping rates, without you having to worry about complications of shipping internationally insulating you from buyer issues including fraud, returns, and misc questions/complaints insulating you from shipping issues: damaged and lost shipments, etc. Our service is more comparable to CL, CC, and HA in terms of what we do for our consignors, and they're charging 10% or more. If we were to expand into also offering a marketplace service in which we're not physically handling books for people, I think we would do that really well. We could offer that platform with lower rates though I don't want to speculate on what we would choose to charge.

Oh and then specifically just from the past two or three months, I think there's significant overhang from some consignors who priced their books during the boom period, and haven't been particularly quick to adjust downward since the market has cooled off a bit. I don't blame anybody for not being in a rush to lower their prices, but it's just acknowledging the ebb and flow of the market. For our own MCS-owned inventory we have mechanisms in place to gradually lower prices every month or so on books that haven't sold, so if our stuff is temporarily overpriced it'll gradually come down.

I think it's a combination of different reasons for different people: - not super motivated, if they get their high price great but they're not in any rush to sell soon - over-committed and not willing to cut their losses: paid too much originally, now they're anchored to their overpayment and not willing to sell for less - speculation in action: their prices are unreasonable today, but they are guessing the book could jump in the future And then beyond that for some people it's some combination of lack of knowledge, lack of time, and lack of effort. We have mechanisms in our consignment terms where we can start putting some downward pressure on unreasonably high prices, but thus far we haven't chosen to activate any of those and have left all pricing completely up to consignors. Particularly with the market moving along over the past couple years of covid, I've been reluctant to be interfering or telling people what we think their books should be selling for when that was changing pretty rapidly. That's still something available to us to exercise. If and when we get more assertive about that I also want to be able to provide consignors better information and better tools to guide them to what we think good pricing is, and make it fast and easy for them to review their unsold items and quickly make those decisions.