Few businesses in the sports memorabilia industry have made as much of a splash in a short period of time as COMC.com. The company has experienced strong growth over the last couple of years and its latest feature, The Vault, is designed to offer collectors and dealers another option for selling their more valuable cards.
COMC (formerly Check Out My Cards) debuted The Vault at the National Sports Collectors Convention in Chicago earlier this month. The Vault is designed for items valued
at $100 or more but must have a high Beckett book value of at least $20 and an asking price of at least $40. In return, sellers get a few perks including 36x zoom scans of the front and back of the card being sold, exposure at major card shows COMC attends and a 90% cash out rate (COMC keeps 10%). As with its regular service, sellers can set a minimum accepted price and auto accepted price.
Items can be for sale on both COMC.com and in The Vault or on both. Unlike COMC’s main site, which requires 100% of the offer amount to be funded before making an offer, The Vault will only require an offer reserve of 5% of the original asking price in COMC Store Credit. It will be refunded if the offer is countered or rejected, just like COMC offers.
“The main thing that I think people find attractive in the ability to negotiate prices on high end cards,” said COMC Founder and CEO Tim Getsch. ” That was a much more difficult process on the old site. Also the big scans are beautiful on the new site. It is very brand new but the concept people are starting to grab.”
Through September, storage fees for COMC handling your items are waived but beginning in October, the price to house your cards in the Vault will cost $.01 per card each day per $1,000 of asking price.
Getsch recently yhired former Beckett Grading Director Mark Anderson as Seller Advocate and expects he’ll play a role in implementing The Vault’s benefits to the COMC audience and beyond, aiding sellers by maximizing the value of their items.
“We’re going to be a lot more high-end, vintage, a lot of modern cards that could possibly be worth a lot more if they were graded,”Getsch said. “So we really wanted to help maximize our customer’s value. Mark has all the expertise to look at something and say ‘Okay, this vintage card, even though it is in poor condition the Pop Report in a low grade is still really low so this should still get graded or this modern card is likely to get a high grade.’ So we have someone that can look out for things that should be able to provide additional value for our sellers and get the right product in the buyer’s hand.”
Getsch envisions Anderson possibly helping evaluate cards that are submitted for sale and finding hidden gems that could net both the seller and COMC a better profit.
“We’ll probably do something were if we find something that needs to be graded, we’ll flag it and recommend that and the person that owns it could get graded (through a direct COMC submission) and get it sold so we will look for more and more services like that to add value and make it a better experience so people can just bring their stuff to us. We have a solution that lets them sell from one place.”
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