Ron Churches

4/17 received bulk (no subs) shipped today.

I had a sub with bulk cards that needed two boxes. One of them had these dividers in it, and the slabs paid the price for it with surface issues on a few. The other box had a similar style insert, but made of a different material. Those cards managed the shipment in better condition, and had way less dust on them from the packaging. The new inserts to separate the cards are way better. Still not as good as the foam stuff, but I can imagine that was creating a lot more shipping cost due to the bulk of those.

They centered the number!

I do not think their internal processes are good enough to be intentional with such a thing. I think they created a couple of different work streams to try and combat a moving bottleneck and the result was there were some workstreams that somehow really got set aside, probably erroneously. Maybe the two location thing, maybe not, but the trends are apparent.

Thanks Paul, you're kicking butt this week.

Yes. They've created a system where the customer needs to follow up if things go even a moment beyond 'normal'. Their billing system is able to send email for the invoices. I have no idea why their system wouldn't have the ability to, at minimum, send emails on card declines or billing issues. It would benefit them! It's probably happening all over, as they've been holding high dollar transactions for months that people had to plan around financially. Their accounts receivable department should be begging for some level of automation to make their numbers look better. Almost makes you think they just don't care about it? It's cash flow! Focus!

I've got a couple of these in a 81 card bulk order. Seems hit/miss. I don't think they got wet, I think they are slightly too large for the label slot. This could possibly be related to the switch in the slab style?

This seems like a corner case of a corner case. I suppose you have options for your oddball item, so I guess you're not SOL too bad?

Mine was 3ish weeks after g/e/i and ultimately about a week before it went to QC. It seems to vary, I would presume, based on volume they are processing.

So, it's pretty common to build customer service rules around refunds to do stuff like this as the first pass. Companies are very resistant to refunds, in general, to combat fraudulent requests. But, boy, sometimes you need to have a customer service manager be able to read the room, and this was one of those times. Paul is PRODUCT management, but he's running around here doing the CSM's work. If /I/ had my own grading company, the CSM would be living on these boards. Maybe not responding to it all, but I'd sure as heck understand where my process was breaking down (and this was a major process mishap). It would be so easy for this to be done more effectively, I cannot imagine how they could screw it up.

I don't think so. I don't think mine went to quality control/finalized, it just went to shipped (or maybe it hit that status for a short time that I didn't see).

Paul is about to find 2 dozen mid-February submissions that are on some cart in a back room and make a whole lot people happy.

Yes. If your submission isn't moving in a reasonable time once it hits Grading status, you need to call. 2-3 weeks, maybe.

Once they finally clear whatever happened to February, this will be scooting along pretty well I think. They've obviously done something to processes that are changing the way orders go through the system.

My 3/17 bulk submission went to shipped today. The grades are rough, but the cards are at least on the way!

Paul, there's a clear trend of Feb received orders lagging. It could be sampling, as I'm sure only a fraction of total submissions end up on the forums, but the trend is hard to shake. I suppose if it's not acknowledged, eventually this goes away, as those orders that seem to have fallen out of the process finally get picked up and finished, but I think it would be helpful to understand if whatever was going on with that period of orders has been fixed moving forward?

No subs.

My 3/17 bulk order has moved into grading/QC now, after spending 3-4 weeks in G/E/I. Little nervous about that status, as that's the one things seem to get weird on. Getting close!

Something definitely happened to those mid February submissions. I have a 4/14 bulk move to G/E/I today. My 3/17 bulk has charged, but is still in that same status. It's been about 3 week or so, I believe.

As in, both cards were raw and to be slabbed and got crossed on the label? So he has a cleaner looking card in a slab that has a '1'?

Front line cust service workers aren't clued into edge cases like these, that's all. They were doing their best, I'm sure, but you just got a rough draw on general knowledge. I don't mean that as an excuse, as this is easy to train, but that's what happened.

The character issue when you look at the text on the submission page is related to the fact that their software isn't translating the fonts for those special characters. It has nothing to do with their label generation, which does not suffer from this limitation. They could do themselves a solid by updating the way that stuff is displayed and probably save hundreds of hours of answering this question from people who are confused why they can't translate text accurately on the internet in the year 2021.

3/17 received in the system, still in grading/encapsulating/imaging. They did charge me late last week, so I am hoping it's getting close to QC.

There does seem to be something going on with mid-february submissions, no? Seems those are the ones getting a delay and March/April is passing them.

Sports cards are doing better with HGA than Pokemon, that I've seen, and their volume of Pokemon is relatively small. I'm not going to argue about 'reputation', but there's plenty of pros and cons to read about their methodology online. I wish you luck if you move your submissions that way; seems a little risky for my tastes.