MySlabs
 

Does this site serve any purpose at all? At least on the buy it nows, every single price I have looked at for months is absurd, there's no way to contact sellers directly and indeed you can't even see their ID (far as I can tell) to try to figure out some other way to contact them. Some auctions have best offers, but in my experience it's a waste of time. This is far worse than ebay. What's the point?

Ya, it's horrible. They need a way to weed out the stale listings. Nobody uses it. I'd like to see a site like that succeed, because the hobby needs a platform with MUCH lower fees than what's on offer, but everyone there just expects ebay prices with no fees, so there's no incentive for sellers to list there. They need a way to create incentives for sellers to list.

The auctions are stupid (way too long), now some sellers charge shipping, I haven't bought anything in months. I was buying 2-3 per before.

Sent from my SM-S928U using Tapatalk

I used them when they had the agreement with slabfolio (which later was absorbed into mascot) because I could just cross-list my eBay listings with a click (and even drop the price by a set %). Back then, I would sell a few cards a month on there, and I really thought they were gaining some traction. However, they no longer work with Mascot, so I removed all my listings because it's too much trouble to keep up with the inventory manually across platforms. I'd guess that has a lot to do with the staleness of the listings.

-Burl

I thought it would cut into ebay to a huge degree. Now it just seems like people post their collections with crazy prices and no intention of actually selling anything.

While far from perfect, MySlabs has been a decent place for me to sell.

In the past couple of years, I've sold 24 cards on MySlabs for a total of $40K.
This compares with the 31 cards for $41K sold on Net54 and 9 cards for $7K on Blowout in the same time period. I list everything on Net54 first.

So for me--someone that doesn't like to use social media, and wants control of the price they get, its been a good option.

I haven't bought or sold in one of their auctions yet, but it does look like they are getting a tiny bit of traction there--looks like they sold ~40 cards in their last auction on 9/20, which compares to the 14 cards they sold yesterday through the Fixed Price/Best Offer. Small potatoes site for sure, but better than nothing.

I like the platform, but there's a lot stacked against it. They don't advertise well, the buyer traffic is quite low, and the seller fees are actually higher than eBay's on higher-value cards (at least for top-rated sellers with an eBay storefront).

That's certainly my impression. Absurd prices and no flexibility. And the platform sucks, you can't ask questions. I am sure there are occasional exceptions and in the past I have found them but not worth the effort.

I actually think not being able to ask questions/harass the seller is awesome. Same goes for COMC. Unfortunately COMC has also turned into a complete $hit show full of insanely overpriced cards that have been sitting there for many years or even a decade in some cases. Combine that with a basically worthless search engine and a beyond horrible way cards are listed. The only really great thing they still have is being able to buy cards and they will hold them until you want them sent to you. It has saved me a ton of money on shipping.

One area I think MySlabs never developed the way they needed was for "tracked" items.

Once you track (or watch) an item, that is it...it's just for your records. You never get any pro-active updates if the item's price is reduced or if the seller starts accepting "offers" for the item, nothing.

Of course you can check back on the item, but nothing comes from MySlabs to prompt or engage a buyer to take a fresh look at an item they are tracking if the seller makes it more appealing.

Buy the card; not the MySlab.

I have filled out a lot of sets with cards from COMC. And I thought they added a small monthly fee for listing cards, to discourage museum pricing.

I have found numerous tough nonsports or obscure sports cards on COMC at what seemed reasonable prices.

I have sold many on there, but bought only one.....listing is easy though...5.5% selling fees much better than ebay

Bruce Perry

Same -- especially old Star Wars. I did pick this up on there for $75 last year -- but now the same card/grade is listed there for $231 ...

I see they have seller fees of 2 or 3% plus $3.49 + .49 processing fee.

Does anyone know if the processing fee is for each sale or is it a monthly fee on your sales when they send you payment?

Thanks,
Bob

It suffers from issues most eBay competitors deal with. Sellers fear fewer eyes equals fewer dollars and they price their goods to reflect that fear. I can’t remember who, but someone here opened a eBay competitor 10-12 years ago and it was a great site, but it quickly became a BIN museum as sellers feared no reserve auctions rightly or not.

They don't send you payment, you get paid from PayPal or Stripe. And you incur those transaction fees in addition to the 2 or 3% selling fees. That $3.49 that you wrote above is not a dollar amount, it's actually 3.49 percent...the PayPal/Stripe fee.

The $.49 processing fee is for each sale, I believe.

I listed some stuff in a MySlabs auction a couple weeks back. MySlabs COO Matt Greaney said "We fully recommend reserves on key/high end items for the time being."

It's likely that the final bids were depressed by the existence of a reserve (I avoid no-reserve auctions myself), but the final bids didn't even come within shouting distance of what I eventually sold most of the items for on Facebook or eBay. I'd estimate that the closest was a Tom Brady that ended around $7500; it sold on Facebook for $10K. Most of the bids ended around 50 to 60% of the eventual sale price. I'll never know what might have happened with no reserve, but I suspect it would have been a bloodbath.

Not for the buyers.

But I do get your point.

Don't forget to include the 1% "Buyer's fee" as well. That counts despite them constantly trying to tell you not to include it when assessing their actual fee structure.