TheOldCollector

I just don't get it? I don't understand the business model. I just went on there this morning just to see what the current volume ASM back issues were listed for so I could fill some holes in my collection and they are through the roof I got 30 issues from Midtown today for $80 they would have been over $1000 or more over at Mile High's site. Surely nobody is actually buying books from their site? What is the purpose of their website if not to sell books? Everything I look up on it is way over priced and not by a little but by a ton.

Am I missing something here? On CLink's auction tonight there are Nintendo Switch games going for like $900 that you can still buy new in the store for $44? Like Zelda Breath of the Wild.

14 minutes ago, Point Five said:

Cheers all! Everyone who posted so far is in. Still a few slots left.

I'll post the first round at 10:30 EST.

 

I'm in!!

4 minutes ago, Randall Ries said:

That's true for a lot of us. It's what happens when a middle man like CGC gets involved or we as collectors involve them. They replaced OPS as value setters. TOLD us what our grade is. And even move the criteria around. They make money providing a service I bet many collectors do without. But in turn, sellers sell their books and include the grading process expense in their selling price. Then that buyer - when HE sells the exact same book - includes the grading cost in HIS selling price. Maybe even a little more. It isn't that the BOOK is more valuable. It's the piece of plastic its buried in. The sales figures and asking prices we see simply are not ACCURATE. There's a whole lot of dubious going on in the buying and selling of a comic book.

I still want to collect. But say I have a choice between paying $300 for a 9.0 graded book and $95 for the book in the same grade raw, I'll take the raw book, thanks. I want the book. I don't want to pay for peoples choice to get grade. Seriously: How many times have we all looked at a graded book and concluded "THAT grade was a gift" or No WAY that's an 8.0. That's a 9.2 EASY."

If a computer or scanner were grading the books and they were accurate and fell into a programmed grade, I ould see it. But humans are capable of mistakes. And bad moods. Or GOOD moods! "I feel so good today, I'll give this GL #76 with spine hatchet marks up and down the spine a 9.4!"

Thanks anyway. My prediction is a lot of collectors will begin to see this and start slamming raw books into their collections.

That's my thoughts as a collector as well. Don't get me wrong I have a good amount of CGC slabs in my collection. But when looking for CGC slabs I tend to focus on 9.6 unless I happen on a 9.8 for a good price just for the simple fact that there are humans grading these and we all know they make mistakes and some 9.8's shouldn't be 9.8's and some 9.6's should have been 9.8's. So I can't knowingly pay three times the price for a 9.8 compared to a 9.6 that .2 in a human's eye is laughable at best. Maybe like Randall said if it was a computer grading then maybe but when a human is doing it that is pretty much a lot of extra bread I could spend on other books for a .2 that may not even be .2 better. Thankfully I am a collector and don't have to worry about the whole tax thing yet but when I get to the point and when it's time to sell I'm probably going to be leaning on the Cash side of things because as a collector like someone mentioned before this is my hobby not my job so I don't want to have to deal with trying to figure out how to write off bagging boarding, storing, moving and keep receipts for every purchase and all of that nonsense. I look at it this way the taxes on my collection have been paid ten fold   I'm not going to feel bad if Uncle Sam doesn't get to collect on them selling for the 10th time in that book's life.

8 minutes ago, gregwynn said:

I live in Va...sold a half dozen things on ebay last year for around 4500....got a surprise 1099 this year....about 40% went to taxes

40% Seriously? How did 40% of your sells earnings go to taxes?

With the market as crazy as it is I think you'll have more people selling local for cash. At least the ones worried about the 1099. In this market you could be selling books in the middle of a hurricane and there will still be buyers  They won't have that hard of a time selling locally for cash even if they sell it for a little less then what it goes for on E-Bay they are still making more money than they would if they sold it online. No Ebay fees, shipping or Paypal fees. So unless they live in an area not close to a mid size or major city they aren't going to stop they are just going to change their tactics. To be honest as a collector I wish more people were already doing this. There are some that have been doing this already. You'll see them on Craigslist with links to their E-Bay page offering a 10%-20% discount if bought locally. Of course I am talking about books priced below say 3k. If they were selling books of higher value already then they should already be used to 1099's.

Makes sense now. I wish these sites would knock it off and just let them both use the sales price data if anything it drives more business to them for current auctions. GPA and Go Collect both have great ideas but for collectors I guess we have to keep doing what we are already doing and track all the current auctions on books that we want and make our own list to determine how much we should expect to pay.

3 minutes ago, miraclemet said:

Dont think you can scrape data like that and sell it for profit. Especially if you previously attempted enter into a data sharing agreement that was rejected.

I don't know how it would be illegal if it's public information though. You may be right and this may be the reason they don't just monitor the major auction sites and enter the sold for prices into their systems themselves. But if anyone can see the sold price at auctions I don't think that's illegal to tell someone else on your site?

16 minutes ago, LordRahl said:

Can't tell if joking but ummmm.... how many books do you think CL auctions off in a month?

Enough that most of us pay attention to all of their auctions... I mean I hop on there even when I'm not planning on bidding on anything in that specific auction just to see where prices are. If you run a business solely on gather sells data on CGC book sells you would think that you would want to gather as much data as possible not just rely on data sent to you. Let's say it was 2k books a week on CLink there are people who's whole job is nothing but data entry and I guarantee they enter more data than that in a single day. We are talking auctions here not direct sells.

The only time I tried to order from Mile High the website said the book was in stock and I placed and paid for the order only for them to never place it. I emailed them after a while to ask about my order and they said they no longer had the book. I thought it was weird that I had to reach out to them about the order. If it was out of stock I would've thought they would've contacted me first. Never tried ordering since. Every time I do look them up their prices seem way above FMV.

On 7/6/2021 at 7:44 PM, VintageComics said:

People don't use pen and paper anymore. Well, not sites like GPA.

They take data submissions through an interface, electronically. Some dealers submit every few weeks or once a month.

With eBay and Heritage (the two primary sources for GPA) they scrape it electronically.

Go Collect does cite Clink sales so I'm not sure how they get the info specifically but we're far beyond the realm of manual labor anymore when it come to recording stuff of the internet.

These days even high school kids can write a ---script that does all the work for them from their laptops of phones.

I know that, but that's what I'm saying they need to actually run the best business they can and rather than sit around and only use what's easy data. How about going out and collecting some?

You would think rather than waiting for Clink  and the other smaller auctions sites to share their sales data they would just have someone watch the auctions and write down the sold prices and update their database that way. There are not that many books per auction they could literally have one employee just for that and they wouldn't even be full time  That goes for GoCollect and GPA. I mean they are both basically telling us we didn't add it to our database because they won't send us a spreadsheet with all of their sells.

That ASM 262 drives me crazy I hate that I even own it

I love me some Comiclink........ My bank account on the other hand hates them....

2 hours ago, Beige said:

Great Run of DC Graphic Novel - about 80 of them for $170 USD

Dang you got all of those for $170? If so Nice score!

How am I supposed to lurk the boards if they're down!? CGC had me over here googling "CGC Forums Down" trying to figure out what in the hell was going on. 

4 hours ago, kav said:

my 2002 celica has 76,000 mi

I have a 2003 350Z convertible with only 50,000 mi. I baby it.

2 hours ago, lou_fine said:

Well, that's rather simple as this current craze that's taking place with the readily available books are on only key issues and first appearances and not much else after that, esecially in terms of your run of the mill mid run issues.  

To further my point. Look at Miles Morales's 2nd appearance since this craze hit. 2019 9.8 avg was $110 the the 90-day avg for it right now is $1,374 with the last sell at $2,400. Deadpool's 2nd appearance 9.8 avg $53 in 2019 and it's 90 day today at $113. If it's going off of speculation both characters are popular both have multiple comics series but one has 2 live action movies with a 3rd coming soon and the other has a cgi/animated movie LOL. That's why I say this market doesn't make sense whatsoever. 

But this markets craze isn't just key issues and first appearances it's pretty much everything.

The parts of this market right now that confuse me the most is why some books and not others. Look at how much New Mutants #98 has shot up and then look at Deadpool's second appearance price. There are way less X-Force #2 CGC copies and the comic itself raw can still be picked up for a couple of bucks easily. If the New Mutants 98 is shooting up from diehard Deadpool fans willing to pay large stacks for his first appearance then why hasn't XF#2 gone up hardly at all? Hell I can pick up a copy of it cheaper than pretty much any current store exclusive variant on their release day. 

You can google CGC and get the FMV pretty easily. But the 2.5 average is in the 3.2k range and the 6.0 in the 6k range. There is only a few of them showing up being sold so that's going to be hard to figure out though.

I would also suggest not just researching what safes can do to comics but google how easy it is to open most safes that are sold in box stores and on Amazon. They are pretty pointless.

Go to this section on the forums and zone out on ideas for a month

Or when the seller posts "Not CGC" or "Not 9.8" drives me crazy.

20 minutes ago, MatterEaterLad said:

Then I sent a purple book in for a signing and voila, it came back blue.

Shouldn't it have came back a yellow?