mycomicshop

On 1/29/2022 at 11:26 AM, shadroch said:

Among other items I bought from their prime auction were eight slabbed comics that I consigned back to them.  These became available for pricing last night.  I marked them up between 25-40% over what I paid for them at auction.  Overnite, two sold and I have offers on three more. If my counter-offers are accepted, I'll have recovered 95% of what I paid  for the eight, and have three slabbed books left with a cost of almost zero. 

Will I get rich doing this?  No, but it is a nice supplimental income. 

If anybody wants to do this, either with an item you win in auction, or something purchased from our inventory or a consignor's that you think you can sell for more, this is how to easily do it:

1) When submitting your order on our website, in the order comments box say "please add to my consignments" or something similar. It doesn't have to be that exact phrase but as long as the word "consign" appears in the comments your order will be reviewed to see if this is what you're requesting.
2) Please don't submit a mixed order containing both items you want added to your consignment account and items you want shipped to you. You can use the "save for later" buttons in your shopping cart if you need to temporarily hold back some items out of your order. When we process your order for items going into your consignment account, the shipping cost will be zeroed off (or refunded to you if paid by credit) since we're not shipping anything to you.
3) We support this option for slabbed items or raw items that we graded with a ten point grade. It's not available for items (usually lower value under $15) that we've graded with the letter grades NM, VF, FN, etc.

On 1/17/2022 at 12:43 PM, manetteska said:

MCS is about to get a decent-sized consignment from me of mostly Golden Age stuff. I have consigned to them before, though rarely, and not on GA; we'll see how it goes.

Side question to @mycomicshop: Can your weekly or "premiere" auction wins be paid via credit? Or do those have to be cold, hard cash?

As Ryan said--credit you get by selling to us through our want list system (referred to as "trade credit") cannot be used on auction wins or BIN consignments. But if you have consignment sales and choose to get paid in account credit, that's issued as what we call cash-equivalent credit. That goes into your account and can be spent on anything, no restrictions, or you can withdraw any amount as cash at any later date.

On 1/15/2022 at 12:55 PM, rsouxlja7 said:

For the people who posted that they sold items in the recent auction: will you keep submitting items for the auctions or do you think you get better results through listing as a buy it now format? Just curious for when I start submitting books to sell. 

Here's my perspective on auctions vs BIN:

Is your item a buyer's market item or a seller's market item? It's a buyer's market if there's a lot of comparable copies out there. Similar items currently in MCS inventory, or on eBay. Or, even if there's no items available at this exact moment, does this book come up for auction frequently (at MCS, ebay, HA, CL, CC, etc). 

It's a seller's market if your item is closer to being rare. Not as readily available in the market, doesn't come up for auction frequently, etc.

That's not a clear black and white distinction, it's a spectrum--at one end of the spectrum you have things that are extremely available in the market, and at the other end you have things that are very rare (either the issue itself is rare, or just rare in high grade).

An item that's firmly in the buyer's market end of the spectrum will on average tend to do worse as an auction than as a BIN. Amazing Spider-Man #316 is a great example. Let's look at ASM 316 in CGC 9.6:

There are currently 6 copies of ASM 316 CGC 9.6 consigned with us at prices ranging from $395 to $699. https://www.mycomicshop.com/search?q=Amazing+Spider-Man+316 There are 28 on eBay (not counting our own listings) at prices from $1414 down to $400 (w/ $15 shipping).

Here are some recent sales in CGC 9.6. I'm listing sales either that we did ourselves, or that are tracked in GPA and link back to the source. 

• Jan 13 MCS January Prime Auction winning bid $321, $331 w/ 3% buyer's premium W pages
• Jan 9 HA Auction winning bid $280, $336 w/ 20% buyer's premium OWW pages
• Jan 3 MCS Weekly Auction winning bid $285, $294 w/ 3% buyer's premium W pages
• Jan 2 MCS consignor BIN sale $400, $412 w/ 3% buyer's premium W pages
• Dec 15 CC auction winning bid $267 no BP W pages
• Dec 7 Hakes auction winning bid $275, $324.50 w/ 18.5% buyer's premium OWW pages
• Nov 21 HA Auction winning bid $260, $313 w/ 20% buyer's premium OW pages
• Nov 12 MCS consignor BIN sale $445, $458 w/ 3% buyer's premium OWW pages

The 90 day GPA avg of 42 sales is $384, trending down from earlier in 2021. This data shows you that for a common buyer's market book like ASM #316, auction sales tend to be lower than BIN. Auction sales pull down the GPA average, BIN sales push it up. This should make intuitive sense. If a copy is easily findable in the market at $395 at MCS or $400 on eBay, why should an auction bidder bid more than that? Of course that occasionally still happens, but it's the exception, not the rule.

Most of the auction sellers in the list above could probably have put another $60+ in their pockets by selling their book as a BIN around $380, $390, $400. The nice thing about a common in demand book like that is that if you price it close to market you know it's going to sell quickly.

What I see some sellers do is they are just too aggressive with their BIN pricing, eg those people still asking $500+ for their ASM 316 9.6s when the market pricing is lower than that now. They don't need an auction to get a good price for their comic, they just need to be more realistic about their BIN price. Some people start their BIN pricing too high, then when it doesn't sell they shift directly to auction rather than trying BIN with a more reasonable price.

So, the above analysis covers the buyer's market side. What about the seller's market side? I can't provide a good example with lots of data like ASM 316, because if there were lots of recent data by definition it wouldn't be a rare seller's market item.

For a seller's market item, there are two competing dynamics in the auction vs BIN decision. With auctions, the winning bid is determined by the person who is willing to pay the second most for it. Eg, if bidder A is willing to go all the way to $2000 for a comic, but second place bidder B is only willing to pay $1000 for it, the winning bid is going to be around $1000 plus a bid increment, not $2000. Whereas with a BIN, you only need a single person to meet your asking price. Theoretically, that's a BIN advantage.

But, that ignores human behavior and the excitement of an auction for a rare, seller's market item, as well as the need for price discovery. Is the max somebody might eventually bid in an exciting, competitive auction, the same max that buyer might shell out if they come across the exact same item posted as a BIN? In some cases, yes, but in a lot of cases no. And auctions provide a valuable mechanism for price discovery for rare items like this with little recent comparable data. Without that price discovery mechanism, sellers run the risk of pricing their rare item too low and having it snapped up by somebody who would have paid a lot more, or they price too high and the item sits forever.

Conclusion: if there is enough data that there's already a clearly established market value for your item, then you probably have a buyer's market item, and on average you will do better selling as BIN at around 95-110% of fair market value. You should have no problem selling your item quickly at around 100% of market, vs if you auction it there's a good chance the buyer will get it at some discount below market. But, if you have an item that's more rare or special, or there's just not enough recent data to clearly establish a market value, or you value the convenience of putting it in auction and not worrying about pricing, then auction is a good option.

Payment for auction wins is due 15 days after an auction closes. This period was chosen because it allows a buyer to combine wins from up to 3 consecutive weekly auctions together in one shipment. 

All our decisions are about trying to strike the right balance between sellers and buyers: we can raise requirements/obstacles to bid in order to try to weed out deadbeat bidders, but that has the negative effect of turning away some people that would be legit bidders--fewer bidders means lower results.

We agree that it would be a nice addition to allow auction wins to be paid for separately from them being shipped. You win some stuff, you pay for it, it gets banked, and later a shipment is generated. The only reason we don't do this is we don't have the programming in place for it yet. In order to maintain our speed, efficiency, and accuracy, we have to stick our workflows as designed and supported by our software. Once we start doing things manually outside that system, it starts to take a lot more time and the likelihood of errors and accidents increases significantly. We're fast--we had almost 4000 auction items close last week, and close to 100% of those items should ship within one business day of the buyer submitting their order with payment.

We would eventually like to add support for

A) paying for auction wins immediately but not shipping them yet

B) having your purchases held (auction or otherwise) to ship as a batch later.

We have a more limited version of that already, that requires you have ongoing subscription service shipments coming to you, but that's a very old system and behind the scenes is not ideal. We plan to replace that with a newer way of accomplishing that as soon as we can get to it.

If this is given:
- the 562 books represented in your screenshots are all CGC graded
- the values you're showing are in line with a reasonable middle of the road reading of GPA (eg not cherry picking the top outlier sales from the past 6-12 months)

Not taking into account the ~700 raws and not knowing the list of what you have exactly, I'd probably open with an offer of around $120-125K if we ran your list of slabbed books and came up with an estimated market value close to the number you quoted. Would need the list of slabs and list of raws to go further into it than that.

It's a level playing field with want list notifications, there aren't any special tiers of users who get them sooner than others.

The main thing that should affect want list notification emails is your delivery frequency setting, which you can view and change on your want list page at https://www.mycomicshop.com/wantlist

Quote

Want List Notification Frequency
Choose "Immediate" if you want to be notified as soon as possible when an item on your want list is listed. If multiple items are listed over the course of an hour, you will receive a separate notification for each one.
Choose one of the "Digest" options if you want your notifications to be grouped together and sent less frequently. For example, choosing "1 Hour Digest" means that you will receive at most one want list email per hour, listing all items on your want list that have been listed in the preceding hour.

If you want to get notices as fast as possible and don't care about receiving multiple emails from us if multiple items on your want list come in stock within a short span of time, then use the "Immediate" setting and we'll send you an email whenever a new item is detected no matter how recent the previous email was.

As long as you have your notices set to immediate, then you should be on equal footing with anybody else. The only people that will get to items faster are those who happen to be loading the new listings page right after an item was posted.

On 12/18/2021 at 6:28 PM, BriD. said:

Is there any way to access the notes once a book has been purchased? There were 2 copies available of a book I bought a few days ago. Both have been sold. I can access the listing from my account but the notes are gone. It just says sold. 

You can continue to view all the details about an item, including any grading notes, even after an item has sold. If it's an item you bought, go to your orders https://www.mycomicshop.com/account/orders then click the order, then click the item. You'll end up on a page like this that shows the item details: https://www.mycomicshop.com/search?ItemID=52908699

If that seems not to be the case for something you're looking at, PM me and I'll check on that with you.

You can also view those same item details if you kept track of the item ID before the item sold, then plug that item ID into the URL example I gave above.

To see the item ID:
- When viewing issues of a series, click any of the "View Scans" links for the issue you care about:
- On the following page showing the items of that issue one row per item, you can see the item ID in our listings over to the left, above the cover image.

On 12/17/2021 at 10:14 AM, manetteska said:

Is there a way to get "notes" on some of the lower grade items? I thought I saw notes on some listing but not others.

For instance, browsing some GA comics I see one listed at GD+ which looks better but I have no idea what the exact defects are. They "could" be: spine split, detached cover or centerfold, major tears, water damage, brittleness, etc.

Someone had to grade it a GD+ so why not let the buyers in on the reasoning.

Some items have notes, some don't. We're not like CGC where we have notes written down that we're not showing you. Any grade related notes we recorded are shown.

We're more likely to record notes when:

- item is higher value
- defect is not something that can be easily seen in the cover scans, eg spine splits
- defect is something that people tend to feel strongly about even when it's allowed within the grade, like water damage, mold, or in the case of a PR book detailing why it's poor (if page missing does it affect story, etc)

We generally do not attempt to notate relatively bland defects that are normal for the grade.

The reason we don't provide more notes for all items is that grading + recording notes takes more time than grading alone, and as a business we have to make a decision about how much labor to put into recording each book we handle.

On 11/14/2021 at 12:02 AM, eddly said:

- Can I send books to CGC to be graded… then have CGC send them directly to mycomicshop after grading is completed?This would be popular for Canadians.

- Any restrictions for graded restored books? Do you buy them? They can be consigned?

- Yes, some consignors have books shipped direct to us from CGC. That works fine as long as you communicate well with CGC and with us so it's clear what the books are.

- No restrictions on graded restored books. They can be consigned, and we also will buy them.

RE: your other question about the 12-24 month period for buy it nows--when you submit for consignment you're agreeing to those terms, but we haven't begun strictly applying those limits yet--particularly with corona-related changes in the market over the past year and a half we've wanted to be flexible with our consignors.

If you have multiples of the same book, as long as your copies are continuing to sell through at a reasonable pace, we wouldn't expect you to have to sell ALL the multiples within the listing duration. The duration would effectively reset each time you sold a copy.

When you're submitting books to us you're telling us upfront if you're sending them in to consign with us, or to sell to us. But, if you have something consigned with us that hasn't sold yet, you always have the option later on to ask us to make an offer to buy that book from you. If you accept we'll pay you and remove it from your consignment account.

Some benefits of us having the books in hand:

- we're able to list your items on eBay in addition to being listed on our website, which provides a lot of additional exposure to potential buyers

- you can ship a bunch of books to at once instead of shipping one at a time when they sell

- buyers get their books faster and you get paid faster

On 11/9/2021 at 12:26 PM, Sweet Lou 14 said:

I am honestly not sure there is a single other dealer in the business who would be so transparent.  Really impressed.

Thanks--I thought we made a pretty strong, fair offer on it, which we do for keys like that. If people know we make strong offers for keys that's good for us.

I see now the book sold a few hours after I posted yesterday. https://www.mycomicshop.com/search?ItemID=54847558

On 11/3/2021 at 10:25 AM, Ryan. said:

What did MCS offer?

We bought it for $12K.

The only reason we would not accept a raw silver or gold book for consignment is if the value is too low. Our minimum commission for a raw book is $7, so we don't want people who don't know what they're doing us mailing us a bunch of beat up $5 and $10 comics to consign. 
 

The grade you pick when recording raws for consignment isn't important for anything other than estimating value to determine if it's above the min value to consign. As long as you know what you're doing, we don't care if you want to send in a $20 or $30 raw as a consignment.

You'll be paid within one week of the buyer's order shipping, which is usually within one business day of them ordering unless they chose to pay by check or bank transfer, in which case they have two week to get the payment in. 

On 10/13/2021 at 2:58 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

That's about the best way to determine scarcity - a thorough assessment of copies available / sold through the majority of accessible channels. This argument often comes up when discussing later newsstand copies. There is a fierce critique from some of any attempt to put a figure on the newsstand to direct ratio, but the salient point is that, in many cases, some books are next to impossible to find. That doesn't mean that they do not exist in significant numbers, squirrelled away in collections, just that you may struggle if you decide to try and buy one.

If I may ask, with no snark intended, do you price any in stock books that you have assessed with their comparative scarcity in mind, regardless of perceived desirability?

Yes, for the most part. If we identify an item as scarce we'll price that item higher than if we found it to be more common, all else equal (desirability/demand). But there's definitely a fair divide between "scarce and interesting," and "scarce but nobody particularly cares."

We also began tagging items as "Scarce" in our prime auctions a year or so ago: https://www.mycomicshop.com/auctions?agid=513&isscarce=1 Right now that tagging isn't based specifically on the single scarcity number I mentioned above, but it's applied as a judgment call based on the inputs to that number (census, stock, sales, known listings on ebay, etc)