Deans Cards - something I never knew...

[rkrolewicz]

Originally Posted by Cliff Bowman

This site has nothing on the Collectors Universe Forum, there are some cruel and vicious posters over there.

Thank you, but that is not very consoling.

[Rich Klein]

1) if you are just doing this purchasing for collecting interests, I do apologize for saying it was for re-sale purposes

2) What I'm NOT going to back down on and this is the same for COMC, where I was doing the COMC Challenge for as part of Rich's Ramblings in 2013 is, if you did not complete the purchase then don't complain.

Look, and this is also true for COMC -- if someone buys the card you are working on then it will be removed from your cart if you leave it open

And

if there is a run on a specific card for any reason, whether it makes sense or not, then the seller has a right to adjust his prices upwards for any reason and this is true for Dean's, COMC or even for same seller on EBay. As I said, and I'm sure in today's world it can be adjusted even quicker, if a card starts selling and you have inventory triggers prices can go up or down.

I'm sorry the price changed on you, but that's part of any collectible business.

If I put out a Clayton Kershaw RC at $3 in January 2014 and I find a year later the book price is $30, I can raise my price now and if hehas a sore arm and his price collapses in 2015, I can put the card out for $3 again next year.

Rich

[slidekellyslide]

Obviously people are buying from Dean's...I just looked at his completed auctions and he sold exactly (as of a few minutes ago) 100 cards today with BINs.

[rhettyeakley]

Originally Posted by slidekellyslide

Obviously people are buying from Dean's...I just looked at his completed auctions and he sold exactly (as of a few minutes ago) 100 cards today with BINs.

It blow's my mind a bit that he has as many sales as he does given his prices but the majority of sales are low value items (although someone paid $48,000 for an overpriced T206 set back in November!), that being said with 101,000 listings active he is bound to sell some stuff I guess.

On a fun note (for those eBay sellers) just today I got an email from a long winded ebayer that was more than a little condescending about how he thught my pricing on an Old Judge boxing card was wildly overpriced and that he just moved to the US from the UK and that we here in the States don't know how to price cards (ie we are way too high). I don't feel like my prices are out of whack but I can't imagine the type of messages Dean's gets from people that have nothing better to do with their time.

I wonder what the monthly fee is to simply have 101,000+ listings on ebay after taking into consideration the final value fees? As far as the listing fees alone, the cheapest you can get (I think) is .05 listings per item with an anchor store (you get like 2.500 free listings) but have to pay $200 for the right to get the .05 listings. Thus at a minimum it is roughly $5,000/month just in listing fees alone for his stuff.

[the 'stache]

Originally Posted by JollyElm

This is a card I bought recently (NM with nearly perfect centering. An almost exact clone of this very card) for $6 with free shipping, so I thought I'd do a quick ebay search for it tonight in NM, and there were absolutely no surprises here. Look at the results with his dumb 'actual image' logo (I, too, eliminate this moron from my searches, but sometimes he squeaks through and when you see that logo, you know it's time to just zip past that listing). He prices his card at basically ten times what the other people are asking and with them your shipping is included. Granted, the other two cards are o/c, but if they were greatly centered, the cost would probably be the same. As I said, mine cost a mere $6.

And I won't even mention that he (yes, I purposely personify this laughable company as 'he') calls a card with an obviously rounded/damaged lower left corner as NM. And this isn't some isolated incident. He does this ridiculous pricing with all of his cards. He annoys the living crap out of me!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What a joke!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Attachment 177299

Darren, this will blow your mind then. Here's a direct excerpt from an email correspondence I had with Dean's Cards regarding their claim of having "low prices".

Also realize that try we keep EVERY post-war vintage card in stock, in every condition. To do so, we have to pay more and charge more, depending on the card. So we are not the cheapest on every card, but we have every card. Also, our prices have come down by that percentage in the last year. Please check out the post-war vintage commons that we have listed and this should answer your questions.

This morning I was looking at 1957 Topps commons on our site. Considering the most cards on eBay our overgraded by at least one grade - if not two - our prices were far lower than most other options. Again, focus on the cards, in which we have higher quantities. Those our the best deals.

This communication was from January 2nd of this year.

The rationale here is "we keep every Marco Mendoza card in stock, so, therefore, we are justified to charge $60 on a 1962 Topps [finger quotes]near mint[/finger quotes] Dick Stuart card that nobody else charges more than $10 for.

But if we go to their website, we can save 20% there! So, we could go to Dean's Cards .com, and pay only $48!

[brightair]

OP here again.

I'd like to thank all who responded, and I did learn something from this thread. I learned that the practice of adjusting the price on a card when it is in your cart is not unusual.

What I did not learn much about, and what I was most interested in, was how people felt about this system having no transparency. I guess I could, as one poster suggested, keep copies of my cart and look for changes. Perhaps I will have to do that. I would rather be advised that a card price has been adjusted. Then I can respond as I see fit.

Maybe if I had worded my original post differently, I could have been more precise, and gotten more of the replies I wanted. I did not intend a DC bashing thread. My fault there.

I'd like to say one thing more in defense of DC (and I know I will take flack for this, but I feel it needs to be said for fairness and balance) since so much of the opposite has been aired.

There are not many online sites that will show both sides of thousands of commons at several different grade availabilities. I say not many, but I can only really think of one. This is very important to me. This service costs Dean time and energy, and his customers should pay for it. So it is not surprising that DC prices are higher than others who don't offer this service.

Further, from my, somewhat limited, experience, their grading is fair, and they deliver quickly and pack well.

I don't buy a ton from DC. I pick and choose and look around a lot. But some special things I can't find just anywhere. I am a bit of a cheapskate and will get the best deals I can wherever I find them, but I don't have the time or resources to search thousands of commons in any other way but online. And that is often what I need to do to find the cards I want. So DC really fills a niche that I appreciate. I would love it if they were cheaper, but I also would love it if I were a few inches taller and a few decades younger.

Thanks again to all, and to all a good night!

Richard D

[Rich Klein]

Now that is a good question

If you have cards in a shopping card and prices change while they are sitting in your cart, if there some way of getting notifications of price changes,

I'm not a programmer but I think that is, and not just for Richard but for anyone, the real crux of the question.

If the question had been asked like that, I think we could have avoided the DC thread and kept it to the real question at hand

[slidekellyslide]

All sellers should scan both the front and back of a card....I assume that for his ungraded common cards he uses a scanner like a Fujitsu SnanSnap...that will scan both front and back of an item with one pass through the scanner. It's what I use for postcards and it adds maybe 10 seconds of time while preparing a listing to add the extra scan.

Edited to add: I can scan 10-15 postcards at a time with the ScanSnap S1500...it takes me less than 10 minutes to scan 100 postcards front and back. This used to take me an hour or two with my old flatbed scanner.

[D. Bergin]

Originally Posted by slidekellyslide

All sellers should scan both the front and back of a card....I assume that for his ungraded common cards he uses a scanner like a Fujitsu SnanSnap...that will scan both front and back of an item with one pass through the scanner. It's what I use for postcards and it adds maybe 10 seconds of time while preparing a listing to add the extra scan.

Edited to add: I can scan 10-15 postcards at a time with the ScanSnap S1500...it takes me less than 10 minutes to scan 100 postcards front and back. This used to take me an hour or two with my old flatbed scanner.

Isn't that a sheet fed scanner? Does it crop the image properly around the outside of the borders?

I was never comfortable putting cards or photos through a scanner like that. I also prefer to preview the scan before actually scanning it, so I can adjust cropping, sharpness and matte patterns, depending on how the scanner is reading a particular type photo or print, to try and get it as close to actual appearance as possible.

I've always been on the lookout for a two-sided flatbed scanner to eventually hit the market, that doesn't cost thousands of dollars.

[Cozumeleno]

Personally, I'd love to know what they offer as buyers when acquiring a collection. Anyone ever sold anything to them? Even with the inflated prices I can't imagine they're paying more than anyone else.

[bobbyw8469]

Originally Posted by Cozumeleno

Personally, I'd love to know what they offer as buyers when acquiring a collection. Anyone ever sold anything to them? Even with the inflated prices I can't imagine they're paying more than anyone else.

I would think less.

[slidekellyslide]

Originally Posted by D. Bergin

Isn't that a sheet fed scanner? Does it crop the image properly around the outside of the borders?

I was never comfortable putting cards or photos through a scanner like that. I also prefer to preview the scan before actually scanning it, so I can adjust cropping, sharpness and matte patterns, depending on how the scanner is reading a particular type photo or print, to try and get it as close to actual appearance as possible.

I've always been on the lookout for a two-sided flatbed scanner to eventually hit the market, that doesn't cost thousands of dollars.

Yes...I have used it to scan all kinds of cards without any problems...it doesn't always scan an entire card if the border is white though and it won't scan cabinet photos or anything with about that thickness. I don't think I'd use it to scan something I considered to be a PSA 8-10 candidate.

[savedfrommyspokes]

Originally Posted by slidekellyslide

All sellers should scan both the front and back of a card....I assume that for his ungraded common cards he uses a scanner like a Fujitsu SnanSnap...that will scan both front and back of an item with one pass through the scanner. It's what I use for postcards and it adds maybe 10 seconds of time while preparing a listing to add the extra scan.

Edited to add: I can scan 10-15 postcards at a time with the ScanSnap S1500...it takes me less than 10 minutes to scan 100 postcards front and back. This used to take me an hour or two with my old flatbed scanner.

The Scan Snap s-1500 is a great scanner and worth every penny....1000 (crisp, non-glossy) singles scanned front and back(on a single pass), auto numbered and linked to my listings, all in an hour. I self-host the images for my ebay listings, so with the front and back scan, I create a file path that I link to each listing so that both images appear in the listing. Takes less than a second to link the 2000 (f/b) images to the 1000 listings. I have not had any damage caused to the cards I am scanning....I tested it with several hundred clunkers before trying on normal cards.

The only downfall to this scanner is that the auto-cropping feature does crop along one edge. The whole card is indeed shown, however, some buyers feel that they are not seeing the whole card due to the one edge being cropped closely.

[pokerplyr80]

Originally Posted by brightair

OP here again.

What I did not learn much about, and what I was most interested in, was how people felt about this system having no transparency. I guess I could, as one poster suggested, keep copies of my cart and look for changes. Perhaps I will have to do that. I would rather be advised that a card price has been adjusted. Then I can respond as I see fit.

Richard D

In response to the OP's question, I think it's common knowledge that prices on any website can fluctuate. Just because an item is in your card does not mean it has been purchased. The item can also be purchased by someone else, and happens on major sites like ebay and amazon. If the cards were only in your cart for minutes before you made your purchase than the timing is unfortunate. But I don't believe a website should be expected to notify you of a price change for something in your shopping cart.

Just my opinion.

[slidekellyslide]

Originally Posted by savedfrommyspokes

The Scan Snap s-1500 is a great scanner and worth every penny....1000 (crisp, non-glossy) singles scanned front and back(on a single pass), auto numbered and linked to my listings, all in an hour. I self-host the images for my ebay listings, so with the front and back scan, I create a file path that I link to each listing so that both images appear in the listing. Takes less than a second to link the 2000 (f/b) images to the 1000 listings. I have not had any damage caused to the cards I am scanning....I tested it with several hundred clunkers before trying on normal cards.

The only downfall to this scanner is that the auto-cropping feature does crop along one edge. The whole card is indeed shown, however, some buyers feel that they are not seeing the whole card due to the one edge being cropped closely.

Yes...this is info that I will freely share here on Net54, but I never tell my local competition at auctions and tag sales that it is this easy with the ScanSnap. For the most part they stay away from postcards because they find it too tedious to list them on ebay.