cardtrader’s blowout sale - 80% off

cardtrader’s cards have all been discounted to 80% off. Take adantage of these huge discounts while they are still available.

Here are a few of the great cards at blowout prices.

Planes, Trains & Automobiles… and Ferries

Well, I am sitting at the ferry terminal on my way to Shaw Island for the weekend. Just missed the ferry by 2 cars, and there is a three hour wait for the next ferry. So, now is a good time to write about our trip to the National Sports Collectors Convention.

We had a great plan going into the National. My brother Toby was living in Milwaukee, and we could save about $100 per ticket by flying into Milwaukee instead of Chicago. We would fly in a day early and have my brother show us around Milwaukee before we all headed to Chicago. Toby was going to drive us to Chicago and help us man the booth. We would have a vehicle in Chicago, and he would then drive us back to Milwaukee so we could catch our flight back to Seattle.

It seemed to be a fairly simple plan… until my brother got a job offer in Minneapolis. Just two weeks before the National, tickets booked, and now we had to juggle our schedule.

Oh well, no big deal. There is a train between Milwaukee and Chicago, and we can take taxies for everything else. Rather than giving you to blow by blow, I will just give you the itinerary that we finally ended up with.

• Mon July 28th 10:00 PM PST, get a ride to the airport to catch the redeye to Minneapolis
• Tue 3:30 AM PST, 1 hour layover in Minneapolis
• Tue 6:00 AM PST, arrive in Milwaukee
• Tue 6:30 AM PST, take a shuttle to a hotel
• Tue evening, take taxies to and from the Brewers - Cubs game
• Wed 4:30 AM PST, take a taxi to the train station
• Wed 6:00 AM PST, take the train from Milwaukee to Chicago
• Wed 8:30 AM PST, take a taxi to our hotel in Chicago
• Wed 9:00 AM PST, walk about 1/2 mile to find our booth and set up

That was our trip to the National. National went great. I will do another post about that, but first you get to read about our trip home.

Just before we were about to leave the national and head to the train, one of the dealers decided to take us up on our offer to ship cards back to our warehouse for free. He dropped off 4,000+ cards in toploaders. All of a sudden, we had to repack so that we could carry the equivalent of more than ten 2 row shoe boxes full of toploaders to Milwaukee so that we could ship them on Monday. Mark happened to be staying in Wisconsin for a few extra days to visit with his brother. So he would be holding on to the customer cards and shipping them for us.

• Sun 4:00 PM PST, take a taxi to the train station
• Sun 5:00 PM PST, check our luggage and carry 5,000+ customer cards
• Sun 5:45 PM PST, board the train heading from Chicago to Milwaukee
• Sun 7:15 PM PST, Mark gets off at the Milwaukee airport to pick up a rental car
• Sun 7:30 PM PST, arrive at the main Milwaukee train station
• Sun 8:30 PM PST, get picked up at the train station by Mark
• Sun 9:00 PM PST, Mark drops us off at a hotel and takes the customer cards in his rental car so that he can ship them the following day
• Mon 1:30 AM PST, wake up and schedule a shuttle to the airport
• Mon 2:00 AM PST, take the shuttle to the airport
• Mon 4:00 AM PST, board a plane headed to Denver
• Mon 5:00 AM PST, plane delayed due to weather finally takes off
• Mon 7:30 AM PST, plane arrives in Denver, just 5 minutes after our connecting flight took off
• Mon 1:30 PM PST, we finally board a flight heading to Seattle
• Mon 4:30 PM PST, we arrive in Seattle 6 hours later than expected
• Mon 5:30 PM PST, we arrive at Steve’s house and jump in the hot tub
• Mon 6:15 PM PST, I head to Redmond for a 7:00 basketball game
• Mon 9:30 PM PST, I watch the Mariners come back to beat my Twins
• Mon 10:30 PM PST, I swing by the office and notice that the site is having issues
• Mon 11:00 PM PST, the site is back up and the issue shouldn’t happen again
• Mon 1:30 AM PST, I finally head home after pushing card into sellers’ accounts and writing a blog post

It has been a long week, but we are glad to do the work necessary to provide our consignment service to fellow collectors. Oh yeah… and my brother’s start date for his new job got delayed. After all of this, our original plan could have worked.

Blowout Cards forum talking about us

At the National we got to meet a couple people that discovered us through the Blowout Cards forum. Back in February WunderkindCards started a thread about CheckOutMyCards.com. Over the last 6 months, there have been more than 200 replies, and the thread has been viewed more than 8,000 times. This is nearly 3 times more than any other thread on their site. The 221 replies is also a record. The next largest thread only has a little over 100 replies.

This thread does a great job of showing an unbiased history of several sellers experience with the site. It discusses our advantages and our growing pains. I highly recommend reading through it if you are curious about using our consignment service.

Get your $20 coupon

For the month of August we will be including a $20 coupon in all orders we ship out. This coupon will cover the processing fees for 100 cards to be added to your account. Limit one coupon per account.

Simply include the coupon when you send in your cards and we will drop $20 from the processing fee. If you send in 100 cards or fewer, we will completely waive the processing fee. To get your coupon, place an order or send us a shipment request for one or more cards and we will include the $20 coupon.

Unplanned Down Time

Sorry about the unplanned downtime last night. The traffic on the site continues to rise, and the log files for the website filled up one of the hard drives a lot faster than I had been expecting. This caused the site to be down for a little while, but it was very simple to bring it back up. We have taken precautions to prevent this from happening in the future.

Again, sorry for the downtime. As the site continues to grow, there will be growing pains, but I will try to plan further ahead and announce when we will have to schedule downtime to make upgrades.

Update from the National

The response from the National has been overwhelmingly positive. A few people still don’t have computers and aren’t interested in buying or selling online, but unlike last year, we are now more than just a concept. People are ready to give us a try. We talked to numerous large dealers, store owners, and eBay power sellers that are ready to try something different.

Considering the fact that more than half a million different people have visited the site over the past year, I was surprised by how many people have still not heard of us. Everyone we talked to that has used CheckOutMyCards.com or even just casually visited it has loved the site.

The highlight of the show for me is definitely seeing how excited our users are. hotsmurf1390 made sure to come by our booth on the first night and introduced us to some of his friends from Austria. He met us at last year’s National and became a seller soon after that. bdrum67 started selling football cards around the time of the Super Bowl and has helped spur on a snowball effect that has tripled our inventory of football cards. rithm is one of our sellers that has only used the site to flip cards. He hasn’t yet sent us cards that he has on hand, but he has successfully re-sold cards that he has purchased off the site. We also got to chat with Seattle area dealers eaglescards and hankssportscards.

Get 100 cards listed for free!

Come meet us at the National, and pick up your coupon to have 100 cards listed for free!

Even better… drop off your cards at booth #783, and we will ship them back to the warehouse for free too!

See you at the National!

Now it takes $20K to reach the top 10

It wasn’t even two months ago that I posted about the #10 seller crossing the $10K mark for the first time. Today the top 10 sellers all have more than $20K worth of cards for sale through our consignment service.

10 sellers over $20K

RFleshin is the new seller in the top 10. Here are some of the amazing cards he has for sale.

4 new testimonials just added

Here are two great testimonials from buyers and two from sellers that just arrived in the last 24 hours.

“I am very pleased to be utilizing your services and I intend to continue to send cards and sell them through your company. This is too easy.
Thank you very much - you folks do a great job !”
- rfleshin

“I just wanted to say this store is awsome!!! The prices are great and the shipping and handling is cheap and fast! Thank you checkoutmycards for everything!”
- Morgan, Visalia, CA

“Thanks to you and your team for the super speedy service!”
- j17

“The shipment arrived today. Great stuff !”
- Brian, Alberta, Canada

Read the rest of our testimonials.

2 weeks until the National!

Get your cards to us ASAP if you want priority processing. We leave for the National Sports Collectors Convention in two weeks. Steve, Mark, and I will be manning our booth (#783).

Check out our updated About Us page. It now has a little snippet on each of our 6 fulltime employees.

We have been cranking through cards at an amazing rate. If you get your cards to us by next week, we will likely get them on the site before the National. I just finished pushing 18 shipments of cards into different sellers’ accounts today. As the sellers set asking prices over the next few days, there should be a lot of fresh inventory on the site.

You can keep an eye on this page to see the most recently added cards.
http://www.checkoutmycards.com/Search.aspx?Sort=Recently+Added

Here are a few cards that should show up very soon.