OuterBanks

Is there a site that I can go to to search auction houses for a single book?

Say I want to find "Amazing Spider Man 301 CGC 9.0 or higher" - it would go out and search eBay, Clink, CC, HA et.c. and just return the results for me?

Feels like this would be trivial to have someone build - and if it's easy it's probably already done and I'm not aware of it

Right now I spend a good bit of time digging thru the auction houses / marketplaces - is there even a generic price searching tool that can scour these sites and return the results? 

On 8/18/2023 at 10:41 AM, Chisililltan said:

I've actually considered turning my own hobby into a business too. It's  tempting to explore the benefits of managing taxes and expenses  differently. Like you, I've wondered about the pros and cons. On the one  hand, it could be a way to save costs and invest back into what you  love. But on the other hand, it might add more responsibilities to  something that was once pure enjoyment.

That is the downside to it - if you want to make a profit you'll have to make tough decisions (i.e. selling books you love).  In my situation - my CPA said based on the amount I was just selling/buying and trading anyway I should go down this path.  If you're selling a lot of books (or in my case - lower volume, higher dollar value) - his opinion was that the IRS would view the hobby as a business so I should just get ahead of it.

I'm glad I did it - CGC expenses, bags/boards, pressing fees, shipping/handling, GPA subscription, collectors insurance are all business expenses now.  My CPA specializes in e-commerce sales and basically - all my comic expenses (new purchases) can also be written off (the stipulation here is that stuff has to be sold at a profit or a loss at sometime).

So far all I have to do in addition to what I did before:

- Update a spreadsheet weekly with any expenses and save all my receipts in a folder

- Fill out a sales tax form on the Virginia state website once per month 

It was a bit of a learning curve but worth it IMO.

I now have comics in the "for business" and "for personal" categories.

Hey - 

Auctions started at .01 and will close tomorrow night:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/334277228064. (ASM 300)

https://www.ebay.com/itm/334277228061 (Marvel Spotlight #5)

https://www.ebay.com/itm/334277228057 (Hulk 340)

Bidding starts at .01 -

https://www.ebay.com/itm/334252876165

Some of these newer marvel comics have wavy covers - nowhere near as obvious as what OP posted and there are complaints that they are coming back as 9.6’s on some facebook forums.  CGC would have to know it’s a manufacturing defect and if it can be fixed with a press - I’d err on the side of fixing it.

On 11/2/2021 at 6:17 PM, ExNihilo said:

Like I mentioned in a follow up comment, I've never looked at Heritage until a week ago so this is all new to me.  I get that most buyers simply factor it into their bid price, but it's jarring as a 1st time user to see a current auction price of $10k and then to see the actual price is currently $12,500.  It's really just a matter of recalibrating my brain to how something works.

I get it - I think a lot of people hate on eBay, Heritage & PayPal but I think they’re all positives for the Hobby.  HA is an absolute pleasure to buy from - nothing has ever been damaged and if you setup a tracking list and alerts it’s easy to follow the auction.  HA also has “collectors” - people who do more than just comics that are now interested in comics as part of their collection.

If you want to check out some sites that might have more affordable auctions - ComicLink (one going on right now), ComicConnect, eBay have them.  

On 11/2/2021 at 1:22 AM, ExNihilo said:

Geez, 20% buyers premium sounds RIDICULOUS.

15-25% buyer’s premium seems to be common among auction houses outside of comics though.   

Why does this bother people so much?  This is a high end auction house with massive costs associated with it - big staff, offices all over the globe, slick marketing budget etc.  That’s not gonna happen for free.  You want 10% and fewer bells and whistles then there are plenty of other options.

Heritage routinely sets records on books and as a collector that helps me with valuation.  They can have a 40% buyer’s premium - if some rich oil tycoons in Texas want to show up at their office and spend $4M on a high grade AF15 that’s great news for me and my crappy 2.5 AF15.

On 10/14/2021 at 4:45 PM, Ceito said:

Hello to all.

In a nutshell, they took away the quick reference check on FMV for lower grades when one wants to check on a book, IMO. That was a very useful tool for a user that just wants to do a quick book check, and isn't a paid user. From the looks of it now it's a paid feature.

If they want certain features to be prime / paid I totally get that.  It costs money to build and maintain a site like GoCollect and I’m fine with pricing.

What they are doing now is just terrible business - we use GoCollect to quickly look up pricing data.  That is no longer intuitive or easy to do like it was before.  

On 10/14/2021 at 1:34 PM, Black Bat said:

exactly this- the dashboard thing, you go there as instructed and its like starting over you don't see what you were expecting to see, and your shown a bunch of unwanted info. It would have been nice if they gave subscribers an email warning, so it wouldn't come as such a shock, especially if we were logging into the site during an actual buy/sell transaction. Maybe a beta site before the the main relaunch?  Something.

Yeah - or better yet, talk to customers and get their feedback on this kind of stuff.  

This is weird - 

The only way to make it useful is to click 'Dashboard' on the upper right hand corner and make Sur eyou're logged in.

Going to the main page I did a search for a comic, it gave me partial results and I had to click over to my 'Dashboard' view to get the full results.  Even though I'm logged in.

Once in dashboard I have a bunch of stuff on the screen I couldn't care less about - concert posters?

If I go into 'Comics I Want'- I can click on Hulk 1 (who doesn't want Hulk 1 amirite??) - there was an option to get alerts on when it's listed or changes in price and I've got those all turned on but when I actually managed to find a box that showed where it was selling it  - it doesn't show up on eBay, Premier Auctions etc.. actually the wrong comics show up there.

Disclaimer:  I like GoCollect and do software development and it's not easy revamping a UI and getting it launched.  I hope they get this stuff ironed out - they are building out some cool new features which I'm going to like.  Just doesn't look like they are all there at a 100% yet.

It's a lot slower to load

On 10/12/2021 at 10:28 AM, lizards2 said:

As a side note, I do love pence copies and seek them out. If they are high enough in grade, they replace the cents copies. Sometimes, I keep the lower-graded pence editions, so that I can compare the two copies side-by-side. Pence are a great piece of history, and I appreciate all the work you do to enlighten us dull-wits on the topic!  

Canadian price variant, jewelers insert, $.35 price variants, newsstand - it's just a matter of time before someone manufactures the hype and demand for the pence variant.  A few spec vids on YouTube and we're good to go

On 10/5/2021 at 2:28 PM, blazingbob said:

Yes,  some of the BSD's do get these things.  However,  how does it make you feel if you don't?  Or if you didn't know you could negotiate them down?  While the world does have the "haves" and "have nots" I prefer not to be lumped into a category.

I'm with you on that - ideally we should have these data points published in the open so collectors can make an informed decision.  

On 10/5/2021 at 9:24 AM, Bird said:

you can do better if you mean sellers fees, heck the BSDs get 0% AND some of the buyers fees from what I hear. I have only had a few consignments but you can do much much better on the seller fee than 7%. It depends on a lot of factors but you can do much better.

So HA is willing to void the seller commission and even reduce their buyer's premium?  I still don't know if that's as good as eBay - overall, less than 10% in fees overall and I can negotiate directly with the seller.   Is HA willing to eliminate all but 7-8% of the total fees?

For big keys - best experience has been on eBay.  I list the keys and can get well over FMV and the commissions are less than 10% if you purchase a store.  Purchasing a store is absolutely worth it.  Heritage sounds great but the lowest they could get the commission was 7.5-8% and I'm pretty confident I can get that and a high price just buy doing BIN w/offer submissions on eBay.  

The other advantage to eBay is about the buyers of big keys will want to do a deal directly and if they stumble across your IG or website - it's almost always because they found me on eBay - in which case I'm now selling with 0% fees to eBay/Heritage etc.

On 9/30/2021 at 2:59 PM, ADAMANTIUM said:

If the signature is on the internal page it can get blue label no problem.

I think it may even be called.out on the label regularly and it definitely doesn't affect grade.

If it's on the cover, then you can still request a blue label, but the sigs WILL affect the grade .

Green labels are for cover sigs that they don't take the signature into effect when grading. But you still have to request a blue label with cover sigs, otherwise they just come back green 💚

Ahhhh - got it.  And there is always CBCS's verified signature as an option.  

On 9/30/2021 at 1:01 PM, comicginger1789 said:

I could submit mine for a yellow green label if they treat my unwitnessed Stan and Gil sigs as such....mmmmmm green and yellow!

Does CGC have an option to not give it the green label?  I just saw an ASM1 with Stan Lee's sig on an internal page and it got the blue label with a callout saying there was writing on the internal page.

He did some thru some official CGC approved signature services about a year ago.  From some folks I chatted with who attended, he plans on doing it again next year.

I hope he does - would love to get his sig on a few slabs.

This book is mid 1960's - so won't make the 1955 cut off.  

On 9/23/2021 at 5:05 PM, rjpb said:

I once cracked a 6.0 book with a similar notation of a small amount of glue on the spine. It was a 1/4" spine split at the bottom which I opened up and scraped the glue off of. I expected a 5.5 on resubmit, which I got, but CGC decided it now had a small amount of color touch on spine (which I couldn't find). 

Makes me wonder if it's best to let CGC do restoration removal - do they remove glue also?

On 9/13/2021 at 2:40 PM, rexinnih said:

Timely conversation for me also. Was looking at my X-Men 3 last evening (2.5 C-1 with small amount of color and glue on spine) and wondering if I should submit for restoration removal. I've had success with removing color before with no loss of grade but haven't done anything with glue. 

I know CGC does restoration removal - do they look at glue and other forms of restoration?

On 9/13/2021 at 6:32 AM, theCapraAegagrus said:

They have before. It's really impossible to predict, though.

I have a X-Men days of future past with a color breaking spine tick that is a 9.8.  I have 9.6's with no discernible flaws.  They're not perfect at grading but it's also hard to second guess and assume everything their doing is wrong.

So basically - nobody knows for sure.  Just press/clean the book and submit.

On 9/9/2021 at 10:40 AM, Obrie2tm said:

Following -

really interested to see what you find out as I have a book with the same issue that I am contemplating sending for removal of the minor glue (C-1)

I haven't gotten the book in the mail - I'm reaching out to folks to see what they think.

7.0