I don't get sellers on COMC
 

Okay perhaps I'm just venting because I just had a seller on COMC counter my offer with a 3 cent price raise (really you'd walk away from a sale for 3 cents?), but I just don't get sellers on COMC that counter offers.

Every buyer on COMC knows you can offer about 50% of list price, so no smart buyer is ever going to offer you full price as their first step. Right? They're going to put in a low price, and see how low an offer the seller will accept.

When they do that, COMC responds based on what discount price this particular seller has told them that they will accept.

So unless you accepted the default % off (which most don't), then you are in effect telling your buyer the lowest price you would accept. Why?

Because you as a seller cannot reasonably counter offer when I offer you the price that YOU set! You are saying "offer me at least X." I offer you X. You can't then say "Oh, the X price that I told you to offer me isn't enough. Give me more."

Yet, almost every single seller counters. Duh. Of course you won't get a sale if you do that. You are in effect pulling a bait and switch.

As a buyer, I love COMC (great scans front and back). But unless they knock some sense into their sellers (I won't even comment on the insane starting prices) they are going to go out of business.

Cheers,
Patrick

I was not aware of this, however in a lot of ways it is like auto rejecting BIN offers on Ebay.

Some get instantly rejected, so you increase your offer and it no longer gets instantly rejected. This tells me that I am at least close to 'in the range', but they may not accept your offer.

It is basically the same thing. 3 cents? My gut intuition would say that is a mistake rather than a real counter offer.

i feel the same way
 

love the concept as a buyer but the prices for the cards I am interested in are 5x-10x actual value. When I put a market price offer in on these cards they were all auto rejected with a minimum offer stated that was still 3-5x actual market value.

every now and then i find a reasonable buyer with reasonable prices, so patience is the key, as it is with other buying/selling platforms.

Mike

I agree with COMC becoming a museum. It is sad because I used to buy a lot of cards there and now rarely do.

My favorite is when I make an offer that is rejected the seller then raises the price on the card.:)

There are jerks on every site, and there are plenty of sellers on COMC that I think stopped logging in. My best suggestion is to put those cards on your watch list, and wait for the seller to run a sale. I have picked up some beautiful cards in the last 6 months during their sales or my making offers.

http://www.net54baseball.com/showpos...2&postcount=38

http://www.net54baseball.com/showpos...&postcount=102

+1 on both these comments

I sent in 25 or so psa graded cards in the last month. These are all popular registry vintage cards that trade frequently. I priced them within 0-10 percent (under) of the low-end recent eBay sales when I auto accept a 20% discount, figuring they would sell relatively quickly. Half of them sold within 1 hour to major vintage comc flippers and were immediately reposted for 200% to 300% of what I sold them for. I have no problem with that--I got a reasonable price without eBay/Pwcc fees. Here's the thing I don't get: even with heavy discounts, these cards can be had for much less on eBay bin. What's the angle? I think this creates the museum effect, which I didn't find with comc 1-2 years ago.

My experience (mjohnatgt) is that sellers get the best volume of sales when they're running a sale on the site. I run sales anywhere between 30-50% off, and consider offers down to the site minimum of 50% off. I accept probably 75% of all offers that come in, and I normally counter-offer any I don't accept. So if I buy a card to flip on site, I have to double or triple the price on it so that when it sells during a sale, I don't lose money on it. There are many times where those cards sell through eBay or Amazon at full price, even when I'm running a sale on COMC for 40% off. COMC sales do not propagate pricing to eBay or Amazon. So I could have a card with a regular price of $100 on COMC discounted to $60. It will actually show up on eBay as $110 because they embed the shipping/insurance cost on cards over $25 into the card price, so that they can claim they offer free shipping.

For the OP, obviously the guy who is charging you 3 cents extra is a jerk. Some people don't accept their minimum offers on every card because they don't want to lose money on a specific card. COMC keeps track of what you bought each card for, so you can see if you turn a profit on it. Some people hate taking a loss on any card; I have actually taken a loss of $100 on a card before on COMC. It was a Johnny Manziel auto card that I had sent to Beckett. So if someone offers me a half price offer on a card I spent more on, I might counter them to just over my purchase price.

On the flip side, I've bought many cards on COMC for 10% of what I have them listed for on COMC. Most of those I either bought in a liquidation "port" sale for 10-20% of the entire lot price so I have a lot of profit embedded, or I have picked them up when sellers run sales on their cards from 75-90% off. People have different strategies. I have no problem accepting half off offers for those cards.

site
 

What is COMC ?

comc.com

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I'll continue to keep an eye out but I don't believe I have ever seen reductions that low, but then again, I am solely looking at 52 Topps cards.

I did purchase my Feller card there for a very decent price, imo, but the majority of the time, the cards are priced so high I do even bother putting in an offer as I assume the seller will laugh at me.

Yeah, the cheapest I seem to pick up 1952 Topps baseball for is $3-5 for uncreased cards. That's the thing about in-demand sets. When the top cards go on sale, they get sold quickly.

https://www.comc.com/Promotions/Sale,sp

Here is the sales page, sorted by percent off. Many of them are way overpriced and then heavily discounted, but some sellers run sales that are actually worth it. I'm at 40% off through Sunday right now. The flash guy that has "90%" off has some mid-grade 1953 Bowmans for $5-15 each now, which is probably reasonable.

Thanks John.

I was trying to filter or remove cards/dealers (Dean's) that I wasn't interested in but when I managed to do something, I got a whole bunch of reprints and those newer as like cards. Truth be told, I got frustrated after putting a couple cards in my cart, and logged off.

Searching through page after page is tiresome. I just wish there was a better way of downsizing/reducing and looking strictly at the cards I want to look at instead of all these reprints and anything else that remotely looks like a 52 Topps card.

Any tips on how to how to achieve that, if possible, would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks :)

https://www.comc.com/Cards/Baseball/...-_Base,sc,i100

Here's the direct link to the 1952 Topps baseball set. If you click on any card from the set you're interested in, and click the link at the top of the page for the set it's in, it will take you to only that set. The other way to do it is to use the menu bar on the left and click the "Baseball", then "1950s" and it will take you to only cards made in the 1950s.
I don't know how to eliminate Dean's cards from coming up in the search, but they're easy to ignore since the raw cards all have black backgrounds.

I guess I'm confused at the OP in a way. The 50 percent offers, in my opinion, is what it takes to start the conversation, and is basically like going to a card shop and making an offer on a card there. Most people are flexible and will come down on a price if the buyer shows he or she is serious.

Also, for me, I have cards on COMC that I'd gladly take 50 percent for, but others that I wouldn't go that low on. The site doesn't offer the option for setting the threshold on specific cards, it's a catch-all, and I would assume most sellers are like me in that the amount I'd move on any given card might be different depending on the card.

And there is different options for auto-accept and minimum offers, which again, would be a catch-all setting rather than specific to a single card.

What I really don't get for COMC sellers are the ones who do sell items on Ebay/Amazon, which nets them 80 percent of the sales price, but who reject offers at 80 percent of the price on COMC. That's happened to me many times, and it doesn't make sense. They're willing to give up the 20 percent if the sale is through Ebay/Amazon, but not with a collector through COMC? Seems a double-standard that benefits the big corporations of the world and sticks it to the little guy.

Garth - at a card shop, you the buyer make a first offer. At COMC, the seller tells you the buyer how much of a discount they'll accept for an offer.

In other words - they tell you the buyer how much to offer.

It's completely dishonest to have a seller say, "Offer me $2" ... and then when you send him an offer that says "here's your $2 offer" .... he replies "Sorry I now want $4."

If you the seller wanted $4 ... you the seller had the option to say that when you specified how much of a discount you would accept. But you chose to say you would accept a $2 offer.

Bottom line - any seller who counters the offer they told you to make is dishonest. It's called bait and switch. I'm not a lawyer, but I seem to recall that's illegal (not just dishonest) in many cases.

Cheers,
Patrick

Wrong, man. The seller is telling you which offers they'll CONSIDER, not auto-accept.

Patrick,

I'm with swarmee on this (who posted just after you). COMC sellers can set the minimum offer threshold, which is even described on the COMC Profiles and Options page. The auto-accept threshold is a completely different ballgame.

I'm not sure what seller told you what to offer, the way you phrase that seems to indicate something else going on than a typical COMC transaction (in particular since there is no way for users to directly correspond through the COMC interface). A seller on COMC isn't saying, "Offer me 50 percent and I'll accept it," through the setting, the seller is saying, "I'm only willing to consider offers at 50 percent of the ask price."

At a card shop or show, my experience certainly includes countless times when cards have been priced by the seller, I make an offer and the seller makes a counter offer. I don't see how COMC is operating any differently than this.

I'm not a lawyer either, but I think a bait and switch is when whatever you are buying are substituted by an inferior version of the product. In this case, I think that's very different, as a seller can't switch cards out that are involved in a potential sale on COMC.

I think I'm getting your confusion, Patrick.

If you make an offer on a card that is listed for $50 but ON SALE for $20, it will say "An offer of $20 will be immediately accepted." Because that's already the price of the card. You can't offer any lower because the card is already more than half off list price. When you make an offer for $20, it automatically processes the offer and the card shows up in your inventory.

However, if you make an offer on cards that are not on sale, the seller has the option of: 1) Not accepting any offers, 2) Auto-Accepting offers up to 50% off, or 3) Considering offers up to 50% off. Each sellers sets their own settings for those options.

No confusion. You as a seller told COMC what offers you'll take. YOU decided that. Not me.

So you can't tell me (the buyer) to offer you $2, and then after I give you the offer you told me to give you in the first place, turn around and tell me now to offer you $4. I'm never going to accept that offer because you were just dishonest with me. You could have chosen to tell me the offer you wanted. But you lied and gave an amount you won't accept. If any of us was at a card show and a dealer told you to offer $2, and then after you did, turned it down and said he wanted $4 - every one of us would leave the table as fast as possible. Both of you, Garth and John, included

Now if you want to be an honest and ethical seller on COMC - don't counter an offer or don't take any offers and just price things as you wish.

But even if you choose to disagree, I just solved the problem by closing my COMC account.

Given the seller's behavior and pricing, COMC just isn't a value proposition as a buyer.

Cheers,
Patrick

A seller on COMC can be willing to listen to offers without being obligated to accept them. There's nothing to even suggest there is.
Bartering has been around for ages, probably before currency. COMC allows seller to only get serious offers and not deal with low ball ones.
There is nothing unethical or dishonest about allowing offers and rejecting them.
I doubt a day goes by on this board where somebody makes an offer through the B/S/T section that gets rejected. Asking prices, offers, counter offers, rejections... they are all part of the hobby and always have been.


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You TOLD the buyer what offer to make! The buyer didn't give you a low ball offer ... the buyer gave you the low ball offer that YOU told him to make.

If you're at a card show, you walk up to a dealer and say ... "I'm interested in this card" ... and he says "offer me $20" ... and when you offer $20, he says "No I won't accept that - but I will take $40" ... how would you respond?

I have had that sort of thing happen at a card show.
Not exactly but sort of. I had a very nice guy come to my table and ask if I would take certain amounts on several cards. And these were individual questions several minutes apart. I finally, being as polite as I could, told him we could do this a different way. How about if he makes an offer it needs to be one that he wants to actually buy the card for, not just to see how low can I go on it? :) .. I was very polite and smiled..It worked well and he spent somewhere around a grand with me...this was only a few weeks ago at a local show. Sometimes ya' just gotta say WTF, in a conciliatory tone. :cool:

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