Wednesday, September 18, 2019

My Leap Into COMC Selling

I got back into collecting about 4 years ago and it was actually the KBO and KBO baseball cards that got me back into it. I collected as a kid in the mid-'80s and early '90s and ended up selling my entire collection in the early '90s to put toward buying a car. Honestly, it was probably a good choice since my collection of the "junk wax" era pretty much paid for my 1st car at 14 years old. Yes, I bought my 1st car at 14 years old because at that time I could get a learners permit at 14.5 years old and my actual license at 15. Anyway, I was away from collecting for a large number of years so let's get back to my current collecting and making a choice to start selling on COMC.

After about 1 year of collecting KBO cards, I started to collect MLB cards again. So for about 3 years, I have been building up some MLB cards without really thinking much about how to focus my collection. I like to build sets and I'm also a Cardinals collector. However, in the process of ripping boxes to build sets and obtain Cardinals cards, I started to accumulate boxes and boxes of base duplicates as well as autographs, relics, SPs, etc. that I really had no need for. I started by clearing out the base, by just giving boxes to other collectors (they pay shipping) and that helped to cut down on all of the build-up.

It felt good to get the cards out to collectors that would appreciate them, but it also left me with a lot of autographs, relics, and SPs so I started to take to twitter to offer trades and sell a bit. I made some trades and sold a few over the last year, but my stacks of cards were not really going down much since I would buy additional boxes from time to time and accumulate more. I thought about starting to sell on eBay, but since I live in Korea there is always a concern about shipping and it also takes a lot more time to take pics, list, and ship than I want to spend. As a result, I started to look into COMC.

1st COMC Submission Ready to Travel From Korea to their Headquarters

COMC will scan my cards onto their site, list my cards across sites like eBay and Amazon, store my cards, and ship my cards once I make a sale. It all comes at a fee, which I find reasonable, but it also takes all of the unwanted work out of my hands. After all, this is a hobby and not a business for me so I just want to do the things that I find enjoyable within the hobby. Also, COMC has a lot of cards listed that I could use to fill holes in my sets or team collections and I can use the credit that I get from my sales to purchase them and they can hold them and send them to me in one big batch. But for me, one of the biggest things that COMC will do is get my cards in front of a larger audience and people will know that the cards are coming from the US. I have lost more than a few sales or trades over the years when people saw that the cards would be coming from Korea. I don't blame them or fault them about it. I feel the same way when I see cards coming from the US. Shipping can be expensive and a lot can happen between here and there.

Anyway, with the pros outweighing the cons for me, I signed up for a COMC account, packaged up a box of about 200 cards, completed my submission order on their website, and headed to the post office to send them to their headquarters. The submission will cost me roughly $60 for their end of the work with listing and everything, and shipping to the US cost me about $35. So in total, I will have about $95 put into this project, but I think it will all be worth it in the end. Once things are posted to their site, I will be sharing my link to my cards for everybody to take a look at and hopefully make some purchases. Fingers crossed that it all works well and I look forward to doing future updates about how things are going. Now, I will just wait for the 1st cards to drop.

Also, if you are interested in how to get started with COMC, take a look at this video to help you out.


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