Our Recent Experience Selling Comics Through Mycomicshop 23 23

[thehumantorch]

On 9/7/2021 at 5:06 AM, Domo Arigato said:

This is correct.  Their prices are higher for each book on eBay.

Yes.  So I'm asking $375 for my New Mutants 87 and they have it on ebay for $430.

If you ever decide to buy something they list on ebay go their site to find it cheaper.

[thehumantorch]

On 9/7/2021 at 6:30 AM, Black_Adam said:

You sent 6 raw comics. How did the MCS grades compare to the grades you had assigned these comics?

Grades were similar or slightly tighter than our grades.

[thehumantorch]

On 9/7/2021 at 10:00 AM, Axelrod said:

Same question as above person.  I'm curious if you found that their grades for your raw books came in lower than you thought they would/should have been, given the reputation they have.  Regardless of whether you got the price you wanted for the books in the end.  

I guess this didn't happen, but would/could you ask them to just send it back to you if you don't like the grade they give it?  Do you pay that extra shipping?

Oh, also, what % would you say sold for your list price as opposed to your accepting an offer for less?

Thanks for the information!

They will send anything back at your request as long as it isn't in an auction and "Your account will charged return shipping cost plus $2 per item for CGC and CBCS graded comics and $4 per item for raw comics and non-comic items."

A few sold at my asking price and most sold to an offer.  I ignored any offer that I considered a lowball and accepted or countered any offer I considered legitimate.  While I don't feel any pressure to sell I didn't want these books to sit there for a long time and I'm happy to let them go.  I'm not looking to set new GPA records here.  There's certainly the opportunity to list anything at very high prices and hope the exposure on their site and ebay will sell it.

[thehumantorch]

On 9/7/2021 at 3:48 PM, DWL said:

I don't have any specific questions so please, don't crucify me   

Just wanted to let you know I appreciate you taking the time to report on your experience.  It is good to know My Comic Shop is a viable selling option for Canadians. 

 

[ttfitz]

On 9/6/2021 at 10:18 PM, Point Five said:

If your books aren't being searched for *and* don't sell within a few hours of being listed, they will sink into the inventory and it can take lots of price drops/relistings to finally move them.

It's been a while since I sold there, but at the time if you dropped your asking price by a certain amount (I think 10%) it would show up as part of the "new in stock" listings. Or is that what you were referring to?

[Point Five]

On 9/7/2021 at 10:45 PM, ttfitz said:

It's been a while since I sold there, but at the time if you dropped your asking price by a certain amount (I think 10%) it would show up as part of the "new in stock" listings. Or is that what you were referring to?

Yep! That's what I'm referring to.

 

[JLA Brad]

Hi Dave,

No questions from me either.   Just wanted to comment that I've also used My Comic Shop in the past to sell some books and have had absolutely no complaints on their service.  I would (and will) use them again soon.

 

Brad.

[Artboy99]

On 9/6/2021 at 8:08 PM, thehumantorch said:

@Artboy99

so far the Mycomicshop experience has been fantastic!

Edited September 8, 2021 by Artboy99

[mycomicshop]

On 9/6/2021 at 8:30 PM, thehumantorch said:

The only problem I've had is with their offer notifications.  Shortly after listing I got an email offer notification on the Thor 337 which I accepted and then I didn't get another offer for weeks.  I went to their site and dropped my offer auto-reject from 30% to 80% on all my books and still didn't get any offers.  Then I noticed a link to "Review Offers I've received" and found 50 offers that I'd never received notifications for in any of my email folders.  I contacted mycomicshop and they told me to check my "Review Offers I've Received" every day and I've received email notices of all offers since then.

The only time you won't be notified by email when an offer is placed is if somebody makes an offer that is below your auto-reject amount.

All offers that are above your auto-reject amount will send you an email. If you don't get one, something is wrong with the email sending or receiving, but there's nothing on our end that is choosing not to send them. Checking your "Review Offers I've Received" page daily is a good thing to do as a backup because email is sometimes unreliable, but the act of checking that page has no effect on whether we send you offer emails or not.

I don't know if this is relevant, but a few weeks ago we had a problem with the process that sends our want list notification emails (different activity, unrelated to offers). That bug caused us to send a bunch of duplicate want list notices to some customers over a span of about 2 hours, with some people receiving 50+ duplicate emails before we were alerted and paused the process and then fixed the issue. It's possible that event caused a spike in some people flagging those duplicate emails as spam, and potentially that interfered with our offer emails reaching you for a while. I don't know for sure.

Anyway, glad to hear you've been receiving your email notices reliably again since that initial gap period.

 

Thank you very much for posting such a thorough and informative review of us! I'm available in this thread or by PM if anybody has questions for me.

[mycomicshop]

On 9/6/2021 at 8:30 PM, thehumantorch said:

If I was selling a high demand key or a rare GA book that might benefit from a high visibility, competitive auction I might opt for a auction house like Heritage but for a lot of books I think mycomicshop is a very good venue.  

I'm biased of course, but I would take issue with this, at least partially.

If you're selling a rare, high end GA book, I agree you're unlikely to have any post-sale seller's remorse going with Heritage because that's what everybody has done for 20 years and HA produces good results, no disagreement. You can feel confident you're achieving a strong competitive price from a Heritage auction. Could you have done that well selling it as a buy it now sale through us at a price of your choosing, and factoring in that our total fees are so much lower than HA's? I'd argue you often could, but don't blame people for feeling comfortable with HA. It's the same idea as "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

Fees with us are 8-10% seller's commission, and the 3% buyer's is usually waived to 0% for anything expensive because buyers are paying by check or bank transfer. And for anything around $12.5K or above our $1000 cap kicks in, pushing the effective percentage lower and lower the higher the sale price. Versus Heritage is what, 15% seller and 20% buyer? It's possible to negotiate lower rates with HA, but even if your stuff is so amazing that they'll waive the seller's commission completely and offer to pay you part of the buyer's premium, a seller at HA is still receiving a smaller percentage of what the buyer is paying out than the same seller at MCS.

The auction format is great for books that come to market very rarely, so that there's no clear GPA market data pointing you to what the current market value "should" be. So when you have a sought after rare golden age book, you put it in auction and the auction ends up at a much higher price than the long-ago last comparable sale. Price discovery has happened and the seller's probably really happy. But auctions have less usefulness for price discovery for stuff that already has plenty of recent comparable sales. The BIN sales format works great for those books.

If I was selling a high demand key, I'd confidently sell it as a BIN or auction with us rather than an auction with Heritage. High demand keys are high demand everywhere and easy to sell everywhere with a reasonably high baseline of visibility. IMO Heritage doesn't have any secret sauce that gets better prices for high demand keys than you can get with us, and definitely not enough to make up for the higher fees.

 

[mycomicshop]

On 9/6/2021 at 9:18 PM, Point Five said:

Great review! I sold regularly for a couple of years through MCS and was well pleased with them. The site is easy to use and they were a genuine pleasure to work with.

The main reason I stopped using them is kind of alluded to in your review -- the books you send them typically need to be 'hot' books (keys, classic covers) such that buyers would logically be running searches for them (as opposed to ebay, where there's a decent chance the software's algorithm will get pictures of your books in front of buyers of similar items). If your books aren't being searched for *and* don't sell within a few hours of being listed, they will sink into the inventory and it can take lots of price drops/relistings to finally move them.

 

In my experience pricing our own stuff, books that are in demand and priced in the range of 100% to 105% of fair market value can sell extremely fast, like in less than an hour sometimes, and very frequently in less than a week. If there is less demand for what you're listing and the market is thinner, it could be weeks or months depending on how you're pricing. The number one reason why books sit unsold is the consignor is just pricing them a little too optimistically. That's also why some people get the impression that consignments at MCS are overpriced--it's because the ones that are priced well sell very quickly and disappear, and what remains and accumulates is the books that are priced too high to sell quickly.

Regarding this: "as opposed to ebay, where there's a decent chance the software's algorithm will get pictures of your books in front of buyers of similar items"--all buy it now consignment listings with us are also posted to eBay. So any benefits that eBay provides to visibility for your item, you should be getting those same benefits with a consignment with us, because your book will be on eBay too.

[thehumantorch]

On 9/8/2021 at 10:07 AM, mycomicshop said:

The only time you won't be notified by email when an offer is placed is if somebody makes an offer that is below your auto-reject amount.

All offers that are above your auto-reject amount will send you an email. If you don't get one, something is wrong with the email sending or receiving, but there's nothing on our end that is choosing not to send them. Checking your "Review Offers I've Received" page daily is a good thing to do as a backup because email is sometimes unreliable, but the act of checking that page has no effect on whether we send you offer emails or not.

I don't know if this is relevant, but a few weeks ago we had a problem with the process that sends our want list notification emails (different activity, unrelated to offers). That bug caused us to send a bunch of duplicate want list notices to some customers over a span of about 2 hours, with some people receiving 50+ duplicate emails before we were alerted and paused the process and then fixed the issue. It's possible that event caused a spike in some people flagging those duplicate emails as spam, and potentially that interfered with our offer emails reaching you for a while. I don't know for sure.

Anyway, glad to hear you've been receiving your email notices reliably again since that initial gap period.

 

Thank you very much for posting such a thorough and informative review of us! I'm available in this thread or by PM if anybody has questions for me.

I initially had a 30% auto decline.  I had offers that were within that 30% window but I never received those in my email other than an offer on my Thor 337 cnd 9.6.  For instance Amazing Spider-man 569c 9.4 I had listed at $375 and received an offer of $350 July 1 and the offers page shows "The buyer's offer expired waiting for your response".  I never received a notification in any of my email folders.  There are quite a few other offers that were within that 30% window.

After a few weeks of not receiving offers I changed my auto decline window to 80% and still did not receive any offers and that's when I noticed the offers I've received link.  I called mycomicshop and then the offers started showing up in my email.

[mycomicshop]

On 9/7/2021 at 12:07 AM, alwaysbronze said:

how do they send you your money? by cheque? e-transfer? i’m in canada too and wondering how you receive the funds? what if it’s a large amt? won’t a large deposit to your bank acct flag the ccra? are they gonna want to call it income and come after you for taxes?

As @shadroch said, we can mail you a check, and we can send PayPal payments (not sent as friends and family, so you'll incur Paypal fees if you choose that.

I can't specifically speak to Canadian tax issues and income. That's something you'll have to decide how to handle on your own, but I can say we have plenty of high volume Canadian consignors.

[thehumantorch]

On 9/8/2021 at 10:47 AM, mycomicshop said:

I'm biased of course, but I would take issue with this, at least partially.

If you're selling a rare, high end GA book, I agree you're unlikely to have any post-sale seller's remorse going with Heritage because that's what everybody has done for 20 years and HA produces good results, no disagreement. You can feel confident you're achieving a strong competitive price from a Heritage auction. Could you have done that well selling it as a buy it now sale through us at a price of your choosing, and factoring in that our total fees are so much lower than HA's? I'd argue you often could, but don't blame people for feeling comfortable with HA. It's the same idea as "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

Fees with us are 8-10% seller's commission, and the 3% buyer's is usually waived to 0% for anything expensive because buyers are paying by check or bank transfer. And for anything around $12.5K or above our $1000 cap kicks in, pushing the effective percentage lower and lower the higher the sale price. Versus Heritage is what, 15% seller and 20% buyer? It's possible to negotiate lower rates with HA, but even if your stuff is so amazing that they'll waive the seller's commission completely and offer to pay you part of the buyer's premium, a seller at HA is still receiving a smaller percentage of what the buyer is paying out than the same seller at MCS.

The auction format is great for books that come to market very rarely, so that there's no clear GPA market data pointing you to what the current market value "should" be. So when you have a sought after rare golden age book, you put it in auction and the auction ends up at a much higher price than the long-ago last comparable sale. Price discovery has happened and the seller's probably really happy. But auctions have less usefulness for price discovery for stuff that already has plenty of recent comparable sales. The BIN sales format works great for those books.

If I was selling a high demand key, I'd confidently sell it as a BIN or auction with us rather than an auction with Heritage. High demand keys are high demand everywhere and easy to sell everywhere with a reasonably high baseline of visibility. IMO Heritage doesn't have any secret sauce that gets better prices for high demand keys than you can get with us, and definitely not enough to make up for the higher fees.

 

Certainly your site allows consigners to put high prices on books and push the market and your site has a lot of viewers/buyers so you may be correct.  I haven't tried selling via your auctions and none of the books I sent you were rare or in my opinion ultra desirable.  Perhaps we'll try sending in better stuff.

[inovrmihd]

What is considered "expensive" to waive the 3% buyers fee if payment is made by check/wire transfer?

[mycomicshop]

On 9/8/2021 at 11:59 AM, thehumantorch said:

I initially had a 30% auto decline.  I had offers that were within that 30% window but I never received those in my email other than an offer on my Thor 337 cnd 9.6.  For instance Amazing Spider-man 569c 9.4 I had listed at $375 and received an offer of $350 July 1 and the offers page shows "The buyer's offer expired waiting for your response".  I never received a notification in any of my email folders.  There are quite a few other offers that were within that 30% window.

After a few weeks of not receiving offers I changed my auto decline window to 80% and still did not receive any offers and that's when I noticed the offers I've received link.  I called mycomicshop and then the offers started showing up in my email.

Strange. Glad to hear it's working now, but if you have any issues in the future not receiving a notification you expected to receive, please PM me and let me know your email and the details, and I'll check on it.

[mycomicshop]

On 9/8/2021 at 12:08 PM, inovrmihd said:

What is considered "expensive" to waive the 3% buyers fee if payment is made by check/wire transfer?

Any payment of any amount made by check, wire transfer, or Zelle, waives the buyer's premium.

Our checkout will offer the option to pay by check or bank transfer if your order total is $200 or more, and the option to pay by Zelle (online bank payment) if your order total is $100 or more. Those are defaults, and we can lower those to $0 on request for the small number of people that prefer to pay for all orders via check.

[musicmeta]

On 9/8/2021 at 12:22 PM, mycomicshop said:

Any payment of any amount made by check, wire transfer, or Zelle, waives the buyer's premium.

Our checkout will offer the option to pay by check or bank transfer if your order total is $200 or more, and the option to pay by Zelle (online bank payment) if your order total is $100 or more. Those are defaults, and we can lower those to $0 on request for the small number of people that prefer to pay for all orders via check.

Thanks for chiming in this thread.  All your information is helping us a lot.  Say do you take Venmo?..or have you thought about taking Venmo?  

[Ride the Tiger]

You mentioned that MCS will take any CGC book as long as it meets their minimum grade requirements. Do you have to sign up and try to consign each book to find out that minimum grade or can you find out ahead of time?

[mycomicshop]

On 9/7/2021 at 4:51 AM, KPR Comics said:

How do they make money if they charge 8% but sell on eBay?

Others have answered this, but as they said--when posting buy it now consignment listings to eBay, we bump the price up a bit. Enough to cover the eBay fees when the item sells. The result is that the consignor is paid the same amount (their asking price minus our commission), regardless of whether the sale takes place on the MyComicShop web site or on eBay.