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Our Recent Experience Selling Comics Through Mycomicshop
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Started by thehumantorch,

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mycomicshop

mycomicshop

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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.

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Ryan.

Ryan.

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On 1/17/2022 at 11:27 AM, mycomicshop said:

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.

Nice. At this point I am pre-ordering books basically to create a monthly shipping structure. 

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mycomicshop

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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. 

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.

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rsouxlja7

rsouxlja7

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On 1/17/2022 at 11:48 AM, mycomicshop said:

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. 

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.

Thank you very much for the detailed response 

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Ryan.

Ryan.

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

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

Depends on the credit itself. Stuff you sell directly to MCS as credit can only be used to buy MCS BIN stock. Credit earned through consignments is treated just like cash. 

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ttfitz

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On 1/17/2022 at 11:27 AM, mycomicshop said:

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.

These would both be very welcome - there are times when I have auction wins that I'm waiting to see if I get something the next couple weeks AND books in your inventory that I'd like to be able to "claim" to go with it.

The 15 day period works well, although these days it's your "prime" auctions that I find more stuff to bid on, and with the week skipped after a prime, there's only the one following auction that falls in the period.

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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.

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Bird

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@mycomicshop could you answer a question please? This happens everywhere not just mcs but I am wondering how you handle it. I have some consigned items and some were sent out to cgc for recasing due to "faulty inner well". Who pays for that? Does cgc eat it because the well is faulty? Is it taken out of consignment cash/item sale price? I have 2 out, one came back today (or so) and I thought I would ask because I don't know. While there are many things I do not know maybe you can help me on this one.

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Ryan.

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On 1/25/2022 at 6:05 PM, Bird said:

@mycomicshop could you answer a question please? This happens everywhere not just mcs but I am wondering how you handle it. I have some consigned items and some were sent out to cgc for recasing due to "faulty inner well". Who pays for that? Does cgc eat it because the well is faulty? Is it taken out of consignment cash/item sale price? I have 2 out, one came back today (or so) and I thought I would ask because I don't know. While there are many things I do not know maybe you can help me on this one.

In my limited experience, MCS covered the cost, though the last time they sent my books out for recasing was a couple of years ago. 

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On 1/25/2022 at 5:05 PM, Bird said:

@mycomicshop could you answer a question please? This happens everywhere not just mcs but I am wondering how you handle it. I have some consigned items and some were sent out to cgc for recasing due to "faulty inner well". Who pays for that? Does cgc eat it because the well is faulty? Is it taken out of consignment cash/item sale price? I have 2 out, one came back today (or so) and I thought I would ask because I don't know. While there are many things I do not know maybe you can help me on this one.

BROKEN/DAMAGED CASE, HAPPENED BEFORE ITEM WAS IN OUR POSSESSION: We'll let the consignor know we're sending the item to CGC for a new case, and charging the consignor for it The expense for stuff like this is deducted out of your future consignment sales, so no charge out of pocket. The cost for recasing used to be $15, in the past year that's gone to $20 w/ CGC price increases. That cost covers the new case plus the shipping to/from CGC. 

BROKEN/DAMAGED CASE, HAPPENED AFTER ITEM WAS IN OUR POSSESSION: We cover the cost.

CGC QUALITY CONTROL ISSUE: Such as an incorrect label or whatever else. We'll send the book in for CGC to fix, no charge to the consignor.

Edited by mycomicshop
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Bird

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On 1/25/2022 at 7:18 PM, mycomicshop said:

BROKEN/DAMAGED CASE, HAPPENED BEFORE ITEM WAS IN OUR POSSESSION: We'll let the consignor know we're sending the item to CGC for a new case, and charging the consignor for it The expense for stuff like this is deducted out of your future consignment sales, so no charge out of pocket. The cost for recasing used to be $15, in the past year that's gone to $20 w/ CGC price increases. That cost covers the new case plus the shipping to/from CGC. 

BROKEN/DAMAGED CASE, HAPPENED BEFORE ITEM WAS IN OUR POSSESSION: We cover the cost.

CGC QUALITY CONTROL ISSUE: Such as an incorrect label or whatever else. We'll send the book in for CGC to fix, no charge to the consignor.

thanks. I assume second bolded part meant before while, but I get the idea.

I wonder what my inner well will come up as, CGC QC or broken/damaged? I wish I could see the Master Comics 36 when it comes back, gonna be purty!

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On 1/27/2022 at 10:23 AM, jimjum12 said:

Question for @mycomicshop

If I send in raws and some of them might benefit from slabbing, would you coordinate the submission to CGC from your end and bill me for the service ? GOD BLESS....

-jimbo(a friend of jesus)(thumbsu

Yes, we submit items to CGC for consignors all the time. If it's a relatively small amount and you're an ongoing consignor, we just log the cost of the grading against your account, and that amount is deducted from your future sales, no need for you to pay us out of pocket.

If it's enough books that the grading expense would be larger and you don't have ongoing consignment sales already in the pipeline that will cover the expense soon, then we might ask you to pay us for the grading expense up front. Or, if you aren't able to put up the grading fees yourself, we can front the grading fees for you in exchange for a higher consignment commission, usually 20%.

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bpc3qh

bpc3qh

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On 9/8/2021 at 1:38 PM, mycomicshop said:

For CGC books, there are no minimum grade requirements. Anything in a CGC slab is automatically eligible for consignment. Are there a few dumb books out there that were a waste of money getting slabbed and are only $5-10 books even slabbed? Sure, but there's not a lot of those and it's not a worry. So any CGC slabs are consignable, and the quickest way to list is enter them here: https://www.mycomicshop.com/webuycomics/consignmentquicksubmit

 

For raw unslabbed books we do have a minimum value target for what is eligible for consignment. The reason for this is we don't want people who don't know what they're doing sending us a bunch of $2 and $5 and $10 items for consignment. Ideally, raw consignments should be at least in the $30-50 range. Lower than that is okay too as long as the consignor is okay with the minimum commission amount, which is $7 for raw books ($5 for slabs). We want to protect sellers unfamiliar with comics from selling a raw book for $10 where our commission is $7.

If you want to consign raw books, you'll use the selling and consigning area of our web site to look up the books that you want to consign. As you look them up it will show you what the minimum grade is that we'll accept for that book, based on our estimate of the retail value in that grade. The grade that we tell you at the front end there, before you submit the books, is usually a little bit higher than the actual lowest grade we'll accept once we've received the book and graded it ourselves. We do that to allow for some wiggle room in cases where we grade a consignment submission lower than the consignor did when first offering it.

When we fill out this form with books listed, do we list the desired prices as well? Or does that come later?

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Black_Adam

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Posted (edited)
On 1/27/2022 at 8:23 AM, jimjum12 said:

Question for @mycomicshop

If I send in raws and some of them might benefit from slabbing, would you coordinate the submission to CGC from your end and bill me for the service ? GOD BLESS....

-jimbo(a friend of jesus)(thumbsu

I see the question has already been answered but this has been my solution to what I think is the most common complaint about consigning raw comics to MCS - under grading.

If I send a raw comic that I think is a VF (8.0) and MCS grades it a 7.5 I list the comic raw assuming most potential buyers will know MCS are tight graders (and set my selling price at FMV for a VF copy).

However, if MCS grades it a 6.0 and I think the grade far too low I then contact MCS and have them send the comic to CGC to be slabbed. Almost always, the comic comes back from grading much closer to my own grade (and sometimes higher), making the extra cost to slab it and thereby increase the potential selling price (than if it was listed as a raw 6.0) worth it IMO. 2c

Note: Most of the comics I send to MCS I would value at $100 or higher.

Edited by Black_Adam
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