How Does COMC Work? Is it Worth the Fees? An In-Depth Review.

COMC works as a consignment platform, meaning you send your cards to COMC and COMC scans them and populates the listing details. You then set the selling price and manage your card listings until they sell, at which point COMC is responsible for shipping the cards to the buyers.

Please note, I am not being compensated in any form for the opinions and statements below. I’ve used COMC for years, and as both a card “flipper” and collector, find that it is an amazing platform.

It might not be my biggest pet peeve in the hobby, but it’s up there—yes, there are fees when selling cards. eBay has fees. PayPal has fees. COMC has fees. Basically every platform has fees. Why? Because they are businesses. What do businesses try to do? Make money? What else do businesses try to do? Not lose money.

In exchange for use being able to advertise our cards for sale to thousands and thousands of potential buyers, we need to pay fees. I believe it’s a fair trade off.

So, the fact that a platform has fees shouldn’t be a reason to not use it in my opinion. Now, of course, does it make sense to look at the fees between platforms and then compare to what you’re getting out of it in order to find the one that makes the most sense for you? Yes!

Is COMC Worth It?

With similar fees to eBay, COMC is worth it for these reasons:

Visibility: It can be argued that visibility is greater with COMC given that most cards listed on COMC are cross listed on both the COMC and eBay platforms.

Convenience: When you sell cards on eBay, you must first list the card details and go through the process of scanning cards, and then when purchased, wait for payment to be sent, wait for payment to clear, pack up the cards, and drop the cards off at the post office. With COMC, you can ship hundreds if not thousands of cards one time, and from there, the cards are scanned, details populated, and then they’re listed. All you are required to do is price the cards, and then when they sell, money hits your account and everything else is taken care of.

Flexibility: That is, in terms of timing the market, you have flexibility. For example, you can buy a card and then within seconds immediately relist that card for sale at your determined price. On the other hand, you can buy cards and stack them in your inventory until you’re ready to sell when the time is just right.

In my opinion, the above reasons make COMC worth it, but I’ll add some details below. Again, are there downsides? Sure, every platform has them. And, COMC makes sense for me and my card habits and that might differ for you.

Visibility

When it comes to selling cards, there isn’t any argument that eBay is going to offer you the greatest visibility in terms of the thousands of eyeballs searching for a card just like the one you’re selling.

So, if we know that to be true, think about what COMC offers. Did you know that most cards listed on COMC are cross-listed on eBay? That is, when you list a card on COMC, that card is often listed for sale on eBay under the COMC seller profile. Now, not only are you getting the amazing eBay visibility, but you’re getting that plus all of the people surfing the COMC platform.

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And if you’re thinking that, well, then most of the cards you sell on COMC are probably being purchased by eBay buyers, I’d challenge that. Right this second, just looking at my last 50 COMC sales, only 14 were purchased on eBay.

Now, a quick sidebar—when a COMC card is cross-listed on eBay, the price is marked up. For example, here is a 2020 Topps Update Ronald Acuna Jr. SSP I have listed on COMC. You can see the price is $199.

Now, when I locate that card on eBay, take a look at the listed price. You can see that the eBay price for that same card is about $30 more than what you can buy it for on COMC.

Thus, savvy buyers who know this and recognize that the listed card is a COMC card, they’ll probably just go to COMC to purchase. So, that could be one reason that more cards are purchased on COMC than eBay. That said, remember who COMC caters to—flippers (one of the core groups of people who buys baseball cards). There are a ton of COMC buyers who are purchasing to flip, and will browse only COMC for that reason.

Convenience

There isn’t much more to add here in addition to what I already listed out above, but just put yourself in the following scenario.

You have 100 cards you can sell for about $5-$10 each. On eBay, your options are:

• Sell each card individually
• Sell cards in small lots by player, etc.
• Sell as a large lot

Many people subscribe to the fact that in order to maximize profit per card, you should probably sell each individually. So, if you go that route on eBay, that’s 100 cards you need to list, which means 200 scans if you’re doing front and back.

Then, when each card sells, you’re printing off a label, packing up, and dropping off at the post office. If you sell one card per week, or even five cards per week, that’s a lot of trips, not to mention all of the work and supplies to get those cards packaged up, either BMWT or PWE.

On the other hand, think about the COMC process. Take those 100 cards and package them into one shipment. Take one trip to the post office and send them on their way to COMC. Once those cards are processed by COMC, simply go in and price each one. (There isn’t a bulk pricing updater, unfortunately.). As those cards sell, you don’t have any additional work; your job is done.

Now, there is a waiting time when it comes to processing, so you might be waiting a few weeks or longer between the time you ship off your cards and when they’re ready for selling.

Last, and I won’t get into this too much here because it might be a corner case, but let’s say you’re starting from scratch and want to get into the business buying and selling cards. You can go onto COM right now and buy 100 cards you think you can sell for more soon or down the road.

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Once you make that purchase, you don’t have to wait for those cards to be shipped to you. In fact, you don’t have to wait for much at all—you make the purchase and the cards are in your account, and you’re free to do with them as you wish. Convenience.

Flexibility

All of this leads me to the final bucket, which I’ll probably rename once I think about a better way to describe it. But, for now, here goes.

Let’s say you have those 100 cards we previously talked about. For sake of the example, lets say they are 50 Taylor Ward rookie cards and 50 Jeremy Pena “rookie cards.” As each player heats up, you want to get them listed, so you hustle to make it work.

On COMC, if you have those 100 cards in your account, all you have to do is click a button to put them to sale.

Additionally, if you wanted to buy more in order to get ahead of the market, if you do so on eBay, you purchase and then wait perhaps a week before they arrive. At that time, the market could have already cooled. But on COMC, you can, again, purchase and relist immediately to capitalize on the market at that very moment.

Anyway, I’m running out of steam, but there is more to talk about. Subscribe to be notified of future blog posts or just come back soon and check this one for updates! As always, feel free to email with questions.