COMC Hoping You Can Help Build Sports Card Database

If you are like me with a full-time job and a side occupation as a free-lance writer, then COMC is a great venue to sell your cards. Once the cards are shipped to them along with the initial monies to process those cards, all you have to do is price them and wait for them to sell. You can be aggressive and offer your inventory in a “port sale” or be like me and just sell slowly and take advantage of the sales COMC occasionally offers such as their current Spring Cleaning promotion. However, COMC is evolving and they are asking for users like you to help them in the process.

Very few companies are as open about how they work as COMC. In fact, any time there is a new blog post about any change big or small, one can count on a multitude of replies from their users, some of which are very positive and others which complain about specific issues in the message. In recent years, one of the biggest issues that both COMC and its users have been facing is the adjustment to using data from Beckett Media.

When COMC was first initiated in 2007 under the name CHeckoutmyCards.Com they had set up a demo at the 2007 National Sports Collectors Convention. During a walk along the floor, Jim Beckett and Peter Gudmundsson, who was Beckett Media CEO, saw the demonstration and were both very impressed. They were so impressed that a very beneficial deal to Check Out My Cards was implemented.

As COMC grew, so did the people using their services, some of whom were really only interested in the free Beckett pricing. Obviously, that was not beneficial to Beckett which was charging for that service on their end. Eventually the free Beckett pricing went away. Many COMC users were upset about losing the data but what had been going on was a well-known “hobby secret”.

In the past year, the contract between Beckett and COMC has continued to evolve and the contract is now set to expire at the end of March. This means COMC will not be able to use the Beckett data anymore but as a company that has scanned millions of different cards, the answer is that COMC will now create their own data sourcing.

Since every card that has come into COMC has been scanned, there is a great deal of information available to them already. However, no matter how good their staff is at gathering the information, they’re looking for help. And since COMC has always been a company which has attempted to involve their users in the process, the COMC Challenge Initiative has been created. The challenge is just to work and identify various aspects of cards and use the greater community to help with the process. Through the end of Monday, March 31, they will pay you $1 Store Credit for every 1000 points you earn in the COMC Challenge.

The process is extraordinarily quick and simple. In less than 15 minutes you can add a significant amount of data by simply identifying players and/or teams represented on images that pop up via the ‘Get Started’ page (you must be a COMC member and logged in to participate).

For the users, the best part is not only are weekly winners who can earn prizes to use on the site, but also a feeling of general satisfaction you are helping the hobby synthesize more information.

Rich Klein can be reached at [email protected]