Our Recent Experience Selling Comics Through Mycomicshop 23 23

[thehumantorch]

On 3/19/2024 at 3:42 PM, GACollectibles said:

Instead of scanning, maybe hire an in house artist to paint an image each book?

Or one of those court artists?

[Darwination]

On 3/19/2024 at 4:39 PM, mycomicshop said:

I agree that HA has fantastic images. They have very talented, very experienced in-house photography capability and it shows. We capture many more comic images than HA does, and at a lower average price point, so the context isn't identical, but we are working on moving our process closer to HA's. It ends up being a fine line between making the book look as good as possible without going so far that a buyer feels the book is misrepresented.

 

I'm a huge fan of MCS's images, for what it's worth. 

You could possibly argue that HA does a better job with color (even though color should really just mimic the comic in hand), but the resolution and detail on MCS images is far superior.

I praise both companies for making available high resolution images of their books (and in Heritage's case hosting them long after the item has sold).

Edited March 20 by Darwination

[mintcomics1]

I have had nothing but positive experiences buying and selling with MCS.

Professional communication, timely payment, cheap shipping, great packaging and quality books from every era or genre.

Is there a time limit on consignments before you incur fees with them?

I have a few books that are approaching the 300-day mark.

Edited March 20 by mintcomics1

[Badlands]

I have used MCS for years, only for buying though. Recently I decided to consign a few higher end keys; two of them sold in less than a couple months! Very happy indeed!

[mycomicshop]

On 3/19/2024 at 9:49 PM, mintcomics1 said:

I have had nothing but positive experiences buying and selling with MCS.

Professional communication, timely payment, cheap shipping, great packaging and quality books from every era or genre.

Is there a time limit on consignments before you incur fees with them?

I have a few books that are approaching the 300-day mark.

Our terms say that after 12-24 months we may require either periodic price reductions, moving the item to auction, or else will begin charging storage fees. However, we haven't actually begun charging anyone storage fees and are working toward a different model that would still accomplish our goal of not allowing indefinite storage of overpriced consignments.

[MyNameIsLegion]

On 3/19/2024 at 7:10 PM, Darwination said:

I'm a huge fan of MCS's images, for what it's worth. 

You could possibly argue that HA does a better job with color (even though color should really just mimic the comic in hand), but the resolution and detail on MCS images is far superior.

I praise both companies for making available high resolution images of their books (and in Heritage's case hosting them long after the item has sold).

See that blurry spot in the lower left? This has been across hundreds of consignments of original art on HA for months, and previews of art that is coming up in the near future. It appears to be concentrated on large consignments from a few consignors or estates where the intern they hired scanned hundreds of pages at once with no QC or oversight.  If these were comic lots there would be howls of indignation on the boards. 

  (dig the new emoji I gave Mike to add to the arsenal on the boards, can you spot the other 3 new ones?) 

[thehumantorch]

On 3/19/2024 at 8:49 PM, mintcomics1 said:

I have had nothing but positive experiences buying and selling with MCS.

Professional communication, timely payment, cheap shipping, great packaging and quality books from every era or genre.

Is there a time limit on consignments before you incur fees with them?

I have a few books that are approaching the 300-day mark.

I have a few books left from a consignment, about 2 years old, and in the My Consignment page the listings turned red.  I took that as a hint and dropped my prices.

[buttock]

On 3/21/2024 at 3:03 AM, MyNameIsLegion said:

See that blurry spot in the lower left? This has been across hundreds of consignments of original art on HA for months, and previews of art that is coming up in the near future. It appears to be concentrated on large consignments from a few consignors or estates where the intern they hired scanned hundreds of pages at once with no QC or oversight.  If these were comic lots there would be howls of indignation on the boards. 

  (dig the new emoji I gave Mike to add to the arsenal on the boards, can you spot the other 3 new ones?) 

There's a booger on the camera lens. 

[RobAnybody]

Just wanted to share the end(?) of my experience with MCS Consignments (spoiler alert: it was awesome).  About 8 months ago I sent in a little fewer than 100 CGC graded comics on consignment to be listed on MCS.  Had no idea what I was doing, had never sold a single comic online before (had bought many, of course).

The staff was extremely helpful in letting me know what to do, how to send things in, what to include, etc.  It took a little longer than I had hoped (about two weeks) from when they showed as "received" to when I could set the prices for them, but I admit I was over-anxious to get started & that's really not a big deal in hindsight.  I made some rookie mistakes, like not immediately noticing super-obvious helpful features like being able to see recent sales, when my book would get listed for Auction if I went that way.  Just dumb stuff on my part (so, maybe, in hindsight, a "Rookie Seller FAQ" link on the page where you can see your comics might be a suggestion? ).

I wound up using a spreadsheet to track them & went through recent sales on ebay to get an idea of where I should start my prices (all BIN at first).  I had a wide range of grades but most were at least "keys" or "semi-keys", stuff like ASM 194 in various grades, ASM 300 5.0 , Iron Fist 14 5.5, New Mutants 98 9.6, X-Men 4 (Omega Red) 7.0 & 8.5, Flash 92 (1st Impulse) 8.5 - so you can see, quite a wide range of "desirability", but no real drek IMO.  This all started off great with a bunch of books selling quickly & suggests I maybe should have even added a premium to all my initial prices (that could go in the FAQ - it's better to start off a little on the high side & then gradually decrease prices, which brings me to...). 

Every couple weeks, I would decease prices on all the remaining books by 5% (doing so gets your book listed in the "New Releases" on MCS, so more publicity).  After that initial large rush of sales, this tactic worked really well over the next several months & resulted steady, but lower volume/week, sales..

As mentioned, my books were a wide range of grades, so some were easy to move & high value, while others were... less so.  As these lesser value books kept sitting (not all did - a lot would sell when I eventually hit the ~$40-$50 range, which might take several 5% drops to get there), once they were about to dip into to the <$40-ish range using my "-5% every couple weeks" method, I eventually started using the Auction feature.  Just a few at a time.  That was fun - just watching them.  Some, maybe overall 25% of my Auctions, actually went for above where I had given up on BIN even!  Maybe another 25% were right around my last BIN or within 10% (keep in mind these are already at ~$40, so we're still talking high $30's).  About half went for less than I had hoped, but not like super cheap numbers - maybe the high $20's/low $30's, so meh, no big deal - these were mostly ones from my own collection I had sent in to CGC & came back with slightly lower grades than I was hoping for, so no real surprise there. 

I eventually got down to about 15 books.  I decided to just let them sit for about a month & a half.  Roughly half of them slowly sold over that time, then I put all the rest into Auction, & a few weeks later was done!

It was immensely enjoyable (& profitable) experience - I highly recommend using MCS consignment, at least for CGC graded comics (which admittedly is all I can speak to). 

[evilskip]

I had a Marvel Masterworks sell at auction with MCS on 3/4. And wouldn't you know it, I get an email today advising me that the buyer isn't going to pay. Now I have to relist it and the next auction I can list it in is 4/22. So in effect I will be losing almost 7 weeks on this book. I wish I had just traded it for trade credit and saved myself the trouble. Can't win them all.

[thehumantorch]

On 3/25/2024 at 4:45 PM, RobAnybody said:

Just wanted to share the end(?) of my experience with MCS Consignments (spoiler alert: it was awesome).  About 8 months ago I sent in a little fewer than 100 CGC graded comics on consignment to be listed on MCS.  Had no idea what I was doing, had never sold a single comic online before (had bought many, of course).

The staff was extremely helpful in letting me know what to do, how to send things in, what to include, etc.  It took a little longer than I had hoped (about two weeks) from when they showed as "received" to when I could set the prices for them, but I admit I was over-anxious to get started & that's really not a big deal in hindsight.  I made some rookie mistakes, like not immediately noticing super-obvious helpful features like being able to see recent sales, when my book would get listed for Auction if I went that way.  Just dumb stuff on my part (so, maybe, in hindsight, a "Rookie Seller FAQ" link on the page where you can see your comics might be a suggestion? ).

I wound up using a spreadsheet to track them & went through recent sales on ebay to get an idea of where I should start my prices (all BIN at first).  I had a wide range of grades but most were at least "keys" or "semi-keys", stuff like ASM 194 in various grades, ASM 300 5.0 , Iron Fist 14 5.5, New Mutants 98 9.6, X-Men 4 (Omega Red) 7.0 & 8.5, Flash 92 (1st Impulse) 8.5 - so you can see, quite a wide range of "desirability", but no real drek IMO.  This all started off great with a bunch of books selling quickly & suggests I maybe should have even added a premium to all my initial prices (that could go in the FAQ - it's better to start off a little on the high side & then gradually decrease prices, which brings me to...). 

Every couple weeks, I would decease prices on all the remaining books by 5% (doing so gets your book listed in the "New Releases" on MCS, so more publicity).  After that initial large rush of sales, this tactic worked really well over the next several months & resulted steady, but lower volume/week, sales..

As mentioned, my books were a wide range of grades, so some were easy to move & high value, while others were... less so.  As these lesser value books kept sitting (not all did - a lot would sell when I eventually hit the ~$40-$50 range, which might take several 5% drops to get there), once they were about to dip into to the <$40-ish range using my "-5% every couple weeks" method, I eventually started using the Auction feature.  Just a few at a time.  That was fun - just watching them.  Some, maybe overall 25% of my Auctions, actually went for above where I had given up on BIN even!  Maybe another 25% were right around my last BIN or within 10% (keep in mind these are already at ~$40, so we're still talking high $30's).  About half went for less than I had hoped, but not like super cheap numbers - maybe the high $20's/low $30's, so meh, no big deal - these were mostly ones from my own collection I had sent in to CGC & came back with slightly lower grades than I was hoping for, so no real surprise there. 

I eventually got down to about 15 books.  I decided to just let them sit for about a month & a half.  Roughly half of them slowly sold over that time, then I put all the rest into Auction, & a few weeks later was done!

It was immensely enjoyable (& profitable) experience - I highly recommend using MCS consignment, at least for CGC graded comics (which admittedly is all I can speak to). 

Appreciate your detailed post.  First time I sent books I also went through each book doing research and building a spreadsheet.  Then I went to price books and realized they provided a ton of pricing data.

Out of the approximately 100 books I've sent all have sold but 4.  3 of them I've kinda dropped the price as far as I want and I'm just feeling stubborn.  1 is Comic Reader #179 9.8 - Death of Stan Lee parody - and it was a $300 book when I sent it in and now it's a $100 book and frankly I'd rather keep it than sell it for $100.

[Artboy99]

On 3/29/2024 at 6:27 PM, thehumantorch said:

Appreciate your detailed post.  First time I sent books I also went through each book doing research and building a spreadsheet.  Then I went to price books and realized they provided a ton of pricing data.

Out of the approximately 100 books I've sent all have sold but 4.  3 of them I've kinda dropped the price as far as I want and I'm just feeling stubborn.  1 is Comic Reader #179 9.8 - Death of Stan Lee parody - and it was a $300 book when I sent it in and now it's a $100 book and frankly I'd rather keep it than sell it for $100.

I have sold all but 1 of all the books I have sent in.

[Kramerica]

On 3/20/2024 at 11:05 AM, mycomicshop said:

Our terms say that after 12-24 months we may require either periodic price reductions, moving the item to auction, or else will begin charging storage fees. However, we haven't actually begun charging anyone storage fees and are working toward a different model that would still accomplish our goal of not allowing indefinite storage of overpriced consignments.

That will be great. The massive amount of consignments with 2020 prices is getting out of control. There are a few books I'm looking for and I'm finding them but they are double the price they should be. They are either stubborn and don't want to admit they're going to lose money or have no concept of "These titles have cooled off".

These folks are free go to eBay and ask whatever they want but at MCS they should be required to take a class of "Just because you bought it for $XXX in 2020 right before the Shang-Chi or Captain Marvel movie doesn't mean you can ask the same price now"

[thehumantorch]

On 3/30/2024 at 11:29 AM, Kramerica said:

That will be great. The massive amount of consignments with 2020 prices is getting out of control. There are a few books I'm looking for and I'm finding them but they are double the price they should be. They are either stubborn and don't want to admit they're going to lose money or have no concept of "These titles have cooled off".

These folks are free go to eBay and ask whatever they want but at MCS they should be required to take a class of "Just because you bought it for $XXX in 2020 right before the Shang-Chi or Captain Marvel movie doesn't mean you can ask the same price now"

While I agree it's a pain to go through all the over-priced consignment items it's difficult to come up with a policy to get rid of them.  How much is too much?  Who spends the time to determine that and what sales data do they use?  And if you start using past sales data, of whatever form, to limit a consignee's listing price, you'll be restricting the market and a suddenly hot book that could sell for multiples of recent sales can't be listed.

I think they've kinda got it right.  Let people send in consignments and set their own prices and let the market decide.  If the price is too high and a seller wants to make a sale he'll change his price.  And design a policy that encourages consigners to reduce their price after a period of time.  

[Kramerica]

On 4/1/2024 at 10:50 AM, thehumantorch said:

While I agree it's a pain to go through all the over-priced consignment items it's difficult to come up with a policy to get rid of them.  How much is too much?  Who spends the time to determine that and what sales data do they use?  And if you start using past sales data, of whatever form, to limit a consignee's listing price, you'll be restricting the market and a suddenly hot book that could sell for multiples of recent sales can't be listed.

I think they've kinda got it right.  Let people send in consignments and set their own prices and let the market decide.  If the price is too high and a seller wants to make a sale he'll change his price.  And design a policy that encourages consigners to reduce their price after a period of time.  

Actually, my response here is in response to MCS talking here on the Boards about this being a problem and their plans for how to resolve. No, I agree that before it was fine. But it crossed a line at some point and people started taking advantage of their generosity and using the site to shoot for the stars and ask ridiculous. Colin (I think it's Colin) has spoken here about how it actually give MCS a bad look if everything is priced far outside what is acceptable.

I think that your questions are exactly the questions that MCS has been thinking about how to address. Asking $2400.00 for a book that just sold for $400.00 is bad enough but when other consignors see that $2400.00 they get stars in their eyes and ask the same you'll have 6 sellers asking silly prices. And these sellers are anonymous (well, most are) so the only people that look bad are MCS. And in this case "letting the market decide" means people go elsewhere. And that's something MCS definitely doesn't want.

Edited April 1 by Kramerica

[the blob]

What is the experience with comic art? Is that an area you are looking to expand in? I don't see many listings. Last time I tried to consign art with Heritage they said no because they only thought it was worth about $750. I wound up selling it for closer to $2,000, so I'm not going to bother with that again.

[mycomicshop]

On 4/1/2024 at 3:50 PM, the blob said:

What is the experience with comic art? Is that an area you are looking to expand in? I don't see many listings. Last time I tried to consign art with Heritage they said no because they only thought it was worth about $750. I wound up selling it for closer to $2,000, so I'm not going to bother with that again.

We don't have nearly the volume of higher end art sales that HA and ComicLink do but we do sell plenty of it, and have sold 5 figure pieces via both auction and BIN for very respectable prices. When Steve Borock was with us one of his efforts was expanding our support for art and volume of art inventory. Part of that effort was significantly improving the data model and categories that we use to record our art listings, so it's easier to browse by category instead of them being in a single big list with low value prints mixed in with good OA pages.

Our art section

As with our comic listings, all art that's consigned with us for BIN sale is also cross-posted to eBay, so you're getting that exposure in addition to the MCS site.

I would love to grow our art selection and do more with it, but can't devote much attention to it right now, and since Steve left we don't currently have anybody specifically spearheading that area.

[thehumantorch]

On 4/1/2024 at 12:10 PM, Kramerica said:

Actually, my response here is in response to MCS talking here on the Boards about this being a problem and their plans for how to resolve. No, I agree that before it was fine. But it crossed a line at some point and people started taking advantage of their generosity and using the site to shoot for the stars and ask ridiculous. Colin (I think it's Colin) has spoken here about how it actually give MCS a bad look if everything is priced far outside what is acceptable.

I think that your questions are exactly the questions that MCS has been thinking about how to address. Asking $2400.00 for a book that just sold for $400.00 is bad enough but when other consignors see that $2400.00 they get stars in their eyes and ask the same you'll have 6 sellers asking silly prices. And these sellers are anonymous (well, most are) so the only people that look bad are MCS. And in this case "letting the market decide" means people go elsewhere. And that's something MCS definitely doesn't want.

They go elsewhere or they adjust their prices.  In reality something priced 4 times current market isn't likely to sell anywhere.  I do spend time watching their feed of recently consigned books.  If something is underpriced or priced reasonably the time to buy it is right when it's listed for sale.

[the blob]

On 4/1/2024 at 5:05 PM, mycomicshop said:

We don't have nearly the volume of higher end art sales that HA and ComicLink do but we do sell plenty of it, and have sold 5 figure pieces via both auction and BIN for very respectable prices. When Steve Borock was with us one of his efforts was expanding our support for art and volume of art inventory. Part of that effort was significantly improving the data model and categories that we use to record our art listings, so it's easier to browse by category instead of them being in a single big list with low value prints mixed in with good OA pages.

Our art section

As with our comic listings, all art that's consigned with us for BIN sale is also cross-posted to eBay, so you're getting that exposure in addition to the MCS site.

I would love to grow our art selection and do more with it, but can't devote much attention to it right now, and since Steve left we don't currently have anybody specifically spearheading that area.

Thanks. I probably have 50-70 items I am considering sending over. Probably not five figure stuff.

[Number 6]

Anyone know what’s going on with their Prime Auction?  Auction listings say they open on the 6th but we’re several hours into the 7th and bidding still isn’t open. Is this normal for them?