Buy/Sell/Trade Forum

Hi. I've decided to try and sell some singles. I'm very familiar with E-Bay but have no experience selling on COMC or sportlots.  Wondering if you can provide me some insight as to which is better or which you prefer?  Things I'm interested in is cost, ease of listing, shipping etc... Also traffic. Which site do you do better with?  I read the FAQ on comc and it seems a little confusing. Do they charge you .50 per card? Is that a one time fee? Are there other charges? Any guidance would be most appreciated. Joe 

Personally I haven't (yet) sold on either site. But in my opinion, anything you could get a dollar or more seems like COMC is the way to go.  You can sell higher value cards on SportLots also, but it's the site to use to move commons. 

COMC charges a one time fee to add each card. (.25,.30,.50 or ?) What that is depends on what card it is. Also they charge 1 cent per month storage for cards listed for sale over 75 cents, Plus there is some insurance charge over a certain $ amount. This is just general info/numbers from what I read on COMC.. I do not sell cards anywhere other than large amounts on Craigslist that I bought locally to look through for variations.

I also have not sold on either but did disappear down a rabbit hole one day in to reading about Sportlots buyer pricing.

I can't remember specifics but really it boiled down to the more you sell the lower your % cost there.

So it seems to work well if you have a whole lot of commons to move as the minimum selling rate is just 0.18c vs nearly $1 on COMC. Depending how much you have to sell you may need to bolster this with some better (ie higher $) cards to make sure you hit the more efficient per month selling break points.

One thing I did read was that it was important when you start entering cards for sale there to set your "shop" as "on vacation" as if you only sell a few cards when you start listing and miss the good break points then you can actually end up losing money initially. Only open your shop up for sales when you have everything (or at least a large amount) entered and ready for sale.

A couple of other potentially important points I noticed with Sportlots — they list all cards as single year so for basketball this is annoying for searching at times so not sure if this would carry over to entering for sale as a potential nuisance. Sportlots can also apparently be quite hard to get going as a new shop as a lot of the big shops with millions of cards in inventory and great feedback dominate the sales as you can go through and get hundreds if not thousands of cards just from them.

I have a 1 player PC and had hundreds of that player before going to sportlots and my first order was still 100ish cards from one seller and 50+ from a couple of others.

From an international buyer's perspective I must say I like Sportlots as it is fast and efficient — most sellers have cards to my box inside 1 week from purchase and if I want to ship the whole box it happens within a day or 2. None of the months long delays COMC is currently experiencing. The only thing I do not like is that they ship internationally with USPS so orders tend to take weeks if not months to reach me and you can not raise an inquiry unless it has been 60 (or maybe 90) days. If there was a Fedex option I could have it in a week. My next box sipment I am forwarding to Shipmycards so I can Fedex from there.

Having said that I have made 22 purchases with Sportlots in the last 9 months and 0 with COMC in over 2 years FWIW.

I think it really depends on the volume and/or type (commons vs high value cards. Just giving the perspective from a buyer....on ebay comc charges 4.99 for shipping which is typically 4 days with tracking, but comc clearly states that shipping can be delayed for 2 weeks or more. Just reading about comc purchases from the warehouse can take months to recieve from your box at lower shipping costs. Seems like the longer they take the more money they make?Sportlots has been as quick as 2 days (direct and not sent to the box) with very little shipping costs. Im more wanting the immediate gratification of getting the cards in a timely manner at a fair cost (seen some on ebay raising prices for shipping on a single card to 6-8 bucks) im aware that postage is not free, but simply pass on inflated shipping prices and don't want to wait on comc, since their main focus is fulfilling ebay orders (comc press release)

Lately on sportlots i have been gettin gthe shaft from buyers.  4/5 last transactions have been either not paid or waiting the extra 17 days to pay.  So keep that in mind as well.  i have not done Com.c with my own cards from home, but have flipped a couple that I double purchased on there and enjoy the experience of keeping the cash available there for other cards.  Plus easy to manage.

It hasn't been mentioned here, partly because most people already know this, but a big difference with COMC is sellers have to ship their inventory to their warehouse in Washington State where they do the scanning of the cards and storing of them till they get sold and then they ship them out. For buyers it is great because you can shop from all the different sellers and get everything in one shipment, like for international orders on Sportlots using that "box" thing. So COMC saves the sellers a bunch of time. You don't have to hunt for cards to fill the order. They pull it from however they organize things in their warehouse. I imagine it all depends on shelf assignments akin to the Iron Mountain business documents storage facilities.

I can't reply as a seller , but I can say as a buyer through Ebay several different occasions have had no problems on my end with the Card or Cards I have gotten.

What are the fees on Sportslot? It was mentioned tht COMC now charges 50 cents to list a card, but they also charge 5% when selling a card and if you want to take your money, there is a 10% fee to transfer money, so the incentive is to buy other cards.  They do have a deal with Blowout Sports cards, but I don't think you can 100% of your money for that either (not sure what the fee is).  That being said, my overall experience buying with COMC has been good looking for common cards to build sets and occasionally flipping some cards.  I really haven't used Sportslot at all

I am using both. 

Sportlots is great for commons and low end cards. The transaction fee is high if you do not sell alot. See below. I have experience the fees being high cause I havent sold to much so far. Just this month I sold so far $ 17.84 and my transaction fee is $ 8.94 so far. So around 50%. 

Here is the Sportlots Fixed Priced Fee Structure:

Started on COMC selling back in Feb and I have to say it pretty cool to list cards I am not interested on the site. I try to send non common cards, auto, GU graded etc. The fee's to list the cards at .50 cents for most is not bad when you consider they're listing, scanning, storing and shipping the cards. Sales have been pretty steady and I have purchased cards on there with my earnings. Just sent another 688 cards so that would put me at over 2200 cards listed. I like putting my own prices for the cards and just sell without worrying about shipping and packaging the cards. I am not to concerned at the moment about cashing out and I realize the fees. I've seen some great returns on some of my cards and have sold 121 since March. You can adjust your prices to sell or make someone buy it with a bigger cost. In closing I am happy having them doing the work and selling what I do not want. I will continue to sell on COMC and will make sure my family knows I have cards there is case they need to know. 

COMC just changed some of there services so take a look so you know the times it taks to post. I did send some cards in under the quicker service for ahigher fee but those cards are higher value over $50.00 Figured it was worth the $1.00 fee and extra for a slab. 

Reach out of you have any questions or clarification. 

Mark

PS: eBay might get more traffic but the work prepping and selling is too much for me at the moment.