Bulk Listing on Ebay - Advice?

[btcarfagno]

Does COMC do autographs as well? I know they have autographed cards. But 3x5's, photos and the like?

Tom C

[swarmee]

Originally Posted by btcarfagno

Does COMC do autographs as well? I know they have autographed cards. But 3x5's, photos and the like?

Only if they've been slabbed by PSA/JSA/SGC. Send them an email at staff@comc.com to confirm, though. If you send in unverified autographs, they will usually load them into your account as "NEEDS TO BE AUTHENTICATED" and you can either send them back to yourself or submit to BGS through their service with COMC.

[bravos4evr]

Man.... I know you say you don't want to use an auction house, but think of the labor of just doing 1/40th of your collection for sale? 1000 things!!! If it took you an avg of 10 minutes to make the ebay page that's 10,000 minutes or 167 hours! Then the same ten minutes to make a label, pack the card and ship it off is another 167 hours!

For 40k cards that is 3334 hours (or 416 days at 8 hours a day with no breaks non stop) realistically we are talking a full time job for 2 years just selling em.

If you valued your labor at $15 an hr that's $50k AND you have to do all the work. I would think that even if you paid $75k in commissions the ease of just shipping em off would offset that.

but ymmv! good luck!

[mooch]

At a board member's recommendation, I tried comc last summer. Since then, I sent them 300 cards and about half have sold. I love paying .25 per card to get an uploaded picture. And, as of this last month, all my listings are now on ebay. You must pay 20% for the ebay fees (same with amazon). Never dealing with the buyers and never scanning and going to the post office a few times a year is wonderful. From experience, I would say that it is good to take comc's advice and don't list too many cards that are under $1 because you don't really make much money. As a buyer, comc is also a great way to bundle shipments that only cost $3 to mail to you.

[KC Doughboy]

I appreciate all of the input.
I've been selling cards for several years and have used some of the ebay tools such as turbo lister. I've listed up to 1,200 cards over 3 days. Adding them took a lot of work.
I'm set up to do a lot of shipping in a timely manner.
Because I have all of the cards already entered into Excel and will have all of the scans done soon, I'm looking for another alternative.
I know using File Exchange will allow me to set up an EXCEL spreadsheet. I just need to use proper HTML for each heading.
Once this is done, I can paste the list of cards from that year, then paste the links to the correct images, then you can upload the entire set.
It will take under 30 minutes to list every individual card from each complete set (because image links have to be added one at a time).
I just don't know how to write the HTML for all the headings.

[thecatspajamas]

Originally Posted by KC Doughboy

I just don't know how to write the HTML for all the headings.

If you're used to using TurboLister, just create a sample listing in it that is set up how you want, export it to an Excel csv file, and use that as your template.

I would also advise using some sort of naming convention or id number to link each item to its associated images as you scan or photograph them. If you're handy with Excel, you can use formulas to "write" the necessary headers and descriptions based on your inventory spreadsheet, auto-generate links to the images, and basically create the listing for each item based on the information you have entered in your inventory spreadsheet, keeping all of the shipping info, weight, return policy, etc as static information (assuming you are listing all the same type of items). Using a 3rd-party image hosting account that will create a predictable link to each image that you upload will save a ton of time over dragging individual images into each listing, and even if you use a paid account, will be well worth the time saved.

This is exactly how I used to upload to my eBay store/auctions before I set up a separate website using the Simple Auction guys' "Simple Store" platform (thanks Bob!), which has eBay upload and relist integrated into the store software. I still use a series of Excel spreadsheets to catalog items and generate the listings, but the functionality of the SS platform software is worth the expense to me in the time it saves managing my eBay listings. Also, the TurboLister software tends to get very *kachung*y" when you get up to managing several thousand listings, and will tend to crash or bog down your machine where the SS software does not. So that might be something else to consider once you've gotten into the swing of things.