Ah! I misread. That is nice to make a steady stream of $3k a month by sending in cards to that site. Is it scalable? Can you just buy more and more and send them all in?
A lot of the income stream I’ve developed from using COMC was from the backlog I accumulated over the last few years of buying and selling on eBay. For the first half of last year, I was sending in at least one medium flat rate box every week. There were only so many cards I could list on eBay, but it was easy to keep buying, especially since card prices are so volatile and so many large eBay sellers rely on auctions and inefficient lot listings to keep inventory moving. Plus I don’t have kids or any other big expenses and I’m frugal in basically every other area of my life. I still a few monster boxes (3000+) of random cards but it’s a lot less than I had.
Some of the cards I send in to COMC sell in hours or even minutes, others take weeks or months until the right buyer or event comes along, others I need to keep slashing the price or they will sit forever. Pricing can get competitive when another seller has a copy of the same card, but not every seller has the mentality of race to the bottom. Some COMC sellers have really wacky high prices which I don’t understand, but not everyone is as focused on selling as scavengers are.
COMC cross-posts a lot of cards to eBay, so some of the money from my COMC sales is actually from eBay buyers! I pay $1 submission fee to COMC (more on certain types of cards) when each card posts to my account, so that’s how they make their money. Plus a cut of every sale. I didn’t get consistently profitable with COMC until late last year but now it’s really going well. A lot of the cards that I sent in early last year, I wouldn’t send in today, but it was all a learning experience. I can run sales on COMC’s site as well. So sometimes there are good buying opportunities, then I either reprice the cards on COMC or I get them shipped to me and sell on eBay. It’s kind of amazing how this has transformed my business in so many different ways — buying less, buying using COMC credit instead of money from my bank account, a much more curated eBay store, less clutter. But it’s been a year of solid work to get to this point. It takes a while for a plan to come together.
Right now, my plan through this summer is to send a box to COMC maybe every other week (mostly new eBay purchases, but now I’m really picky about only buying the best deals), keep repricing what’s already in my port and buy on the site when I find the occasional good deal. I have sold at least 500 cards a month from my COMC port every month since last February, so I know this works and I have enough inventory to last me a while even if I stop buying or if I decide to run a big sale for any number of reasons.
It is interesting to think about the different opportunities that open up once you scale up. Definitely reminds me of what happened for you and Ryanne once you added Airbnb to your income stream and then once you added a second rental. The National card show is in Chicago this year, and I will go just to get a 30% discount on COMC submission fees. If I bring 1000 cards, that will be $300 less in fees by dropping them off! I went to the national last year when it was in Atlantic City, it was huge and overwhelming and a little too loud and busy for me. And honestly I prefer to buy from behind a computer screen. But this will be an excuse to explore a new city which should be a lot of fun. I could probably put my eBay store on vacation for the length of the trip and even cover the costs by running a sale on COMC.
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