COMC Delivery Speed

[swarmee]

Their CEO explained a little of the problem during an interview at the beginning of April. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JghkghmDcUc

Cliff notes:
1) Demand for cards (and therefore shipments/processing) has skyrocketed during COVID. But it even got further accelerated earlier this year.
2) They decided to move to a new card storage facility in Feb/March but didn't explain that to customers. When they finally notified the world that they had moved to a new storage facility, they decided to post it on April Fools Day (my thoughts: terrible PR).
3) They had let go some long time employees about a year ago who were "one-trick-pony" types instead of people who were cross-trainable. Then they had a hard time hiring through the pandemic to keep up with demand. Still trying to hire.
4) They supposedly aren't able to reduce their eBay listings to focus on core COMC customers because eBay requires them to have a certain number of listings to get the rates they have under their contract.
5) They can't limit people from making shipment requests because people would complain their cards are being held hostage.
6) Middle of February trying to fulfill shipment requests at the new facility, they jumbled up a whole bunch of packages, sending out incomplete shipments and mixing up (thousands of?) other orders. So if you tried to get a rushed or expedited shipment during that time, they were still trying to untangle the screw-up with their newly trained employees.
They also bought some million dollar sorting machine that works on bar codes, so every card (even commons and UD ePack cards) are getting an individual bar code slip of paper now. This will hopefully solve their employees screwing up the packaging of orders.
7) If you paid for Rushed or Expedited and they didn't meet timelines, request a refund of the additional shipping charges and mention Tim's interview and they should refund you the difference.
8) If you just want to cancel your order since they aren't fulfilling it, they will refund your money and eat the loss instead of returning the cards to the original seller on COMC. They will put the cards in a Staff account and try to sell them themselves to recoup their payout.
9) Tim expects it to take them until December to get enough staff trained and working at a high enough pace to clear the backlog. That was 7-8 months from the air date.
10) There is now a global shortage of toploaders. So you can't add them indiscriminately to your cards for shipments anymore; COMC has effectively run out. However, if you ship cards home "worth" $50 or more, they will automatically come toploaded. I'm guessing that means you had to pay $50 or more for them, or have them from Elite scans (black background higher resolution).
11) They no longer cross-post cards from Dean's on COMC.

So there is plenty going wrong, and they have some plans to fix them, but not in any kind of quick fashion. Of course, nobody would believe them if they said they would iron it out and be fully staffed and trained soon.

Unhappy blowout posters have been filing complaints against them through the Better Business Bureau or even the Washington state department of commerce. Their eBay orders are even taking weeks or a month to ship out, so their feedback has been plummeting on eBay.