PWCC Videos and Future Auction
 

Lots of videos on youtube about the PWCC Ebay issue:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3EXLzyk4fg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiAw1yK90FQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6WyfSDYiCo

I saw that they will come out with a new platform in October. Does anyone know what cards will be in this October auction?

I would imagine everything that got shut down last week in a fit of rage.

Short of somehow being found massively criminally liable for all the drama of the past 2-3 years (doubtful...) I think this will be at most a blip on PWCC sales / profitability. If they are allowed to continue to have a platform to sell, and they continue to have the goods, then they will sell. Nothing throughout the pandemic of late has done much to prove that anything matters to the vast majority of collectors and investors beyond just...stuff. I could be proven wrong, but if that were going to change in any way, I think it would have already.

If you didn't buy from them on eBay you aren't going to buy from them on their own platform either. It won't change the buyer / seller relationship but you also aren't going to reel in anyone trolling eBay who may not know the story behind the seller, who no longer appears on the site.

Aren’t most auction houses all sales are final no credit cards accept?

I wonder what would happen if a card was purchased off their platform that was later found to be altered by BODA ?

+1 Agreed

I'd wager this is a huge part of PWCCs business.

Also remains to be seen how much of PWCCs client base has email unsubscribes on and push notifications turned off absent eBay.

I suspect that PWCC will quickly launch their own platform, and will not miss much by ebay's termination action. They no doubt have the resources and have their platform in place or ready to go. Others, such as Probstein would probably suffer more if ebay were to take similar action. I am guessing it would take Probstein a lot more time and the investment of resources to stand up their own platform.

I just wanted to mention that the guy who made this video - Chris Sewall ("Baseball Card Collector Investor Dealer") is BY FAR my favorite Youtube cards guy. Very laid back yet knowledgeable with a lot of great stories. Highly recommend his channel.

Agreed, I’m not the biggest fan of the high rollers and medium roller segments but he has some really good stories and interesting opinions in the library.

I like those videos but I can see they might not be everybody's cup of tea. I just like that he's not yelling at me or acting like a hype man all the time.

Something that I think will be interesting is to see how well the way they run auctions will work with lower valued cards. Nowadays on eBay, most card auctions are won within the final few seconds through snipe bids. eBay might as well be a silent auction site now. It's a totally different ballgame than the way their auctions used to run 10+ years ago. Before, everyone placed their true bids earlier on and you had opportunities to outbid and be outbid all the way through the course of an auction. That aspect is mostly gone now. With PWCC auctions, snipe bids won't be a thing. You can't really place them because of the extended bidding. It'll be interesting to see how this affects hammer prices of $100 to $1000 cards on their platform. I suspect there might be some pretty good bargains that slip through the cracks with some degree of regularity. But I also suspect that we might see larger separation on their platform for disparities between cards with the same grade (e.g., greater separation between a BGS "True Gem Plus" and a BGS "Min Gem"). I think the cards that have aspects like perfect centering on a 10, or really clean crisp autos, or well centered 7s and 8s will see more separation in a setting with extended bidding than they might otherise get on eBay's snipe-heavy platform.


I agree. Unless PWCC blows up in flames for criminal behavior (which seems unlikely at this point, though certainly still possible) then this is likely to only be a temporary setback. PWCC will probably become the most serious competitor to eBay anywhere online. I think this could be a good thing for the hobby. eBay needs some competition. They have an unhealthy monopoly on this market.


Probably nothing. They might help a buyer to take it up with the grading company if they're lucky? And really, why should they be held responsible? They're a consignment company. That's a pretty big ask to expect them to be responsible for what is essentially regrading and certifying cards that were already graded and certified by professional grading companies.

I still don't understand the idea that they will be competition to ebay. By that logic Heritage, Goldin and REA are competition to ebay. They'll just be another auction house.

I agree I don't really understand this stance that they're competition. eBay sells everything and anything. This seller deal exclusively in sports memorabilia. There is no equal footing or really a basis for comparison.

Exactly. I can't see them doing as good as they did on ebay. I don't understand people thinking they will be better.

If possible, MORE rampant shilling, pushing people to cosign...only to be left taking a "Mayweather psa 9" haircut

I wonder how their new platform, independent of Ebay, will affect revenue streams or more specifically whether they will charge a buyer's premium to winning bidders. I believe their income should now come from the following sources:-
1. Consignment fees.
2. Advertising revenue.
3. What's left of the Vault.
And the possibility of:-
4. Selling the company.
5. Going public
Is this enough, or do they need to wack winning bidders 20% like the other auction houses?

I would tend to agree.
We will have to wait and see.
They have a dedicated group that used them on eBay but will they all go to the new PWCC platform and how successful will they be with the loss of the casual bidders that were not regulars and will not look for them

If they offer cards that collectors want they will be successful. Few seem to care of the reputation of the dealer they are buying from and many still actually defend this guy.:confused: Does not seem like it is too hard to be successful when you are dealing with collectors.

Agreed: because we collectors can't abstain, we just serve as fuel for the forces of price manipulation. And that extends well beyond PWCC— to PSA, Heritage, and other entities.

Who was the resident boob, I believe he was here and on blowout, UFFDAH? Got. Turned on a trimmed pwcc and bought more!


If there is a prospect of money to be made, dont underestimate the idiocy of the common man, regardless if wealth or social class

[Heritage, Goldin, REA, and the others are only competition in the high end market though. Ebay isn't really competitive in that market anyhow. Most high end cards get sold outside of eBay through the major auction houses. Until now, PWCC has only hosted their monthly Premier Auctions through their own platform, which has gone extremely well so far despite it being their first attempt at it. They didn't have any server issues (unlike the competition), bidding was very straight-forward, their rotating 360° images of each card were great, they broke the record for a Michael Jordan RC despite the market being "down" for that card (and yes, it was a real sale), and they had countless other huge consignments right out of the gate, even 7 figure ones. Imagine some other new auction house launching their platform and doing that well on day one. LOL. Not happening. They became an instant player in the high end auction house market overnight.

But they're not just trying to compete against the high end auction houses. They're going to be running their weekly lower end auctions on their new platform as well. All those $100 to $10,000 cards that previously would have been sold on ebay will now be hosted on their platform using the extended bidding style auctions rather than eBay's snipe-bid-heavy platform. It remains to be seen how much business they'll bring with them, what their fees will be, and what sort of prices they'll fetch, but you're fooling yourself if you don't think this is going to be serious competition for eBay. They have ~150,000 buyers using their vault and many more people who have bought from them in the past. I would bet good money that unless some of these allegations come to legal fruition that they will instantly become the #2 option online for selling $100-$10,000 valued cards, surpassing all other selling platforms like myslabs, COMC, stockx, Facebook groups, Instagram, etc.

They'll also now have access to all buyer info for anyone bidding on their auctions, so they'll be much more well equipped to prevent shill bidding on their platform than they were on eBay. On eBay, the only thing they could do before was block bidders who didn't pay. And eBay's platform only allows a maximum of 5,000 users to be blocked, but PWCC has a list of 20,000+ users that they'd like to block for non payment so they have to recycle the list every time they want to add someone to it. They tried multiple times to get ebay to increase that number but ebay literally couldn't figure out how to do. I'll repeat that in case that didn't land for you. Ebay is incapable of increasing the maximum number of blocked bidders above 5,000 because their database and systems architects are archaic and incompetent. It costs money to upgrade these systems to bring them into the 21st century, and ebay doesn't think it's worth making those investments.

I agree with the cards collectors are looking for they will find PWCC

However, I just do not know if they will do the some volume of cards and the same sales potential now that they are off the eBay platform.

Of course it will be significantly less volume at first. The more interesting questions to me are how fast can they grow and how big can they get?

Interesting, had never heard that before. And just to clarify, the 5,000 limit is per seller, correct.

If true, makes you wonder why no one from PWCC ever came on here to pass that info along in any of the threads they were being bashed in regarding alleged shill bidding. If they truly were being limited in how many bidders could be blocked at once, it would make it a bit more difficult to keep up with policing on Ebay.

Of course, there are also the references in some other threads/posts about the level Ebay personnel went to in attacking the one couple who had posted some negative stories about Ebay online. That kind of story could deter almost anyone from saying anything that could make Ebay potentially look bad. Makes you wonder and think about what all we don't yet (or never will) know that may be going on behind the scenes of everything currently going on.

EBay = Don Corleone ?

If so, would you release possible derogatory "inside information" about them in public?

Steve

I know, that is kind of what I was getting at. Wonder if anyone else selling on Ebay can confirm or deny the 5,000 blocked buyer limit.

Never really looked before, but the 5,000 max is true ...here is my screen

FWIW, I just had an ad for PWCC pop up on my YouTube feed. I was looking at something totally unrelated to cards. (https://youtu.be/0u0M4CMq7uI if you're into a little light opera.)

Bill