OuterBanks

Is there a site that I can go to to search auction houses for a single book? Say I want to find "Amazing Spider Man 301 CGC 9.0 or higher" - it would go out and search eBay, Clink, CC, HA et.c. and just return the results for me? Feels like this would be trivial to have someone build - and if it's easy it's probably already done and I'm not aware of it Right now I spend a good bit of time digging thru the auction houses / marketplaces - is there even a generic price searching tool that can scour these sites and return the results?

That is the downside to it - if you want to make a profit you'll have to make tough decisions (i.e. selling books you love). In my situation - my CPA said based on the amount I was just selling/buying and trading anyway I should go down this path. If you're selling a lot of books (or in my case - lower volume, higher dollar value) - his opinion was that the IRS would view the hobby as a business so I should just get ahead of it. I'm glad I did it - CGC expenses, bags/boards, pressing fees, shipping/handling, GPA subscription, collectors insurance are all business expenses now. My CPA specializes in e-commerce sales and basically - all my comic expenses (new purchases) can also be written off (the stipulation here is that stuff has to be sold at a profit or a loss at sometime). So far all I have to do in addition to what I did before: - Update a spreadsheet weekly with any expenses and save all my receipts in a folder - Fill out a sales tax form on the Virginia state website once per month It was a bit of a learning curve but worth it IMO. I now have comics in the "for business" and "for personal" categories.

I did this 2 yrs ago because of the new tax laws. So far it’s been less painful than I realized. I found a CPA who specializes in e-commerce sales to start doing my taxes. - I got a reseller certificate from my state and submitted it to the auction houses / eBay and don’t have to pay them sales taxes on purchases (since I’m using those goods for reselling) - I can expense some standard stuff related to the hobby - I track my inventory costs and do all the selling strictly via eBay (paid for a store to reduce the fees) to keep things easy. eBay fees some would argue are bad but I get shipping discounts and tend to sell more expensive books where the fees are around 5%. So far so good, my big concern was screwing up taxes and the amount of paperwork involved. But that’s been manageable.

Hey - Auctions started at .01 and will close tomorrow night: https://www.ebay.com/itm/334277228064. (ASM 300) https://www.ebay.com/itm/334277228061 (Marvel Spotlight #5) https://www.ebay.com/itm/334277228057 (Hulk 340)

Bidding starts at .01 - https://www.ebay.com/itm/334252876165

Some of these newer marvel comics have wavy covers - nowhere near as obvious as what OP posted and there are complaints that they are coming back as 9.6’s on some facebook forums. CGC would have to know it’s a manufacturing defect and if it can be fixed with a press - I’d err on the side of fixing it.

I get it - I think a lot of people hate on eBay, Heritage & PayPal but I think they’re all positives for the Hobby. HA is an absolute pleasure to buy from - nothing has ever been damaged and if you setup a tracking list and alerts it’s easy to follow the auction. HA also has “collectors” - people who do more than just comics that are now interested in comics as part of their collection. If you want to check out some sites that might have more affordable auctions - ComicLink (one going on right now), ComicConnect, eBay have them.

15-25% buyer’s premium seems to be common among auction houses outside of comics though. Why does this bother people so much? This is a high end auction house with massive costs associated with it - big staff, offices all over the globe, slick marketing budget etc. That’s not gonna happen for free. You want 10% and fewer bells and whistles then there are plenty of other options. Heritage routinely sets records on books and as a collector that helps me with valuation. They can have a 40% buyer’s premium - if some rich oil tycoons in Texas want to show up at their office and spend $4M on a high grade AF15 that’s great news for me and my crappy 2.5 AF15.

If they want certain features to be prime / paid I totally get that. It costs money to build and maintain a site like GoCollect and I’m fine with pricing. What they are doing now is just terrible business - we use GoCollect to quickly look up pricing data. That is no longer intuitive or easy to do like it was before.

Yeah - or better yet, talk to customers and get their feedback on this kind of stuff.

This is weird - The only way to make it useful is to click 'Dashboard' on the upper right hand corner and make Sur eyou're logged in. Going to the main page I did a search for a comic, it gave me partial results and I had to click over to my 'Dashboard' view to get the full results. Even though I'm logged in. Once in dashboard I have a bunch of stuff on the screen I couldn't care less about - concert posters? If I go into 'Comics I Want'- I can click on Hulk 1 (who doesn't want Hulk 1 amirite??) - there was an option to get alerts on when it's listed or changes in price and I've got those all turned on but when I actually managed to find a box that showed where it was selling it - it doesn't show up on eBay, Premier Auctions etc.. actually the wrong comics show up there. Disclaimer: I like GoCollect and do software development and it's not easy revamping a UI and getting it launched. I hope they get this stuff ironed out - they are building out some cool new features which I'm going to like. Just doesn't look like they are all there at a 100% yet.

It's a lot slower to load

Canadian price variant, jewelers insert, $.35 price variants, newsstand - it's just a matter of time before someone manufactures the hype and demand for the pence variant. A few spec vids on YouTube and we're good to go

I'm with you on that - ideally we should have these data points published in the open so collectors can make an informed decision.

So HA is willing to void the seller commission and even reduce their buyer's premium? I still don't know if that's as good as eBay - overall, less than 10% in fees overall and I can negotiate directly with the seller. Is HA willing to eliminate all but 7-8% of the total fees?