If you are paying significant storage fees monthly and only selling a few items per month, this only serves to cut into your profits as a seller on COMC. The best place to start is to re-price your items more competitively so that items sell out of your account more quickly, resulting in your not being charged storage fees for those items that have sold. If a seller is only selling a few items a month, that is a common sign that their items are priced too high for what buyers are willing to pay in the current market. An oft-utilized strategy by sellers is to ensure their copy of a given item is the lowest-priced on the site by taking advantage of the You have X at $A. There are Y from $B-$C verbiage that accompanies every item in a seller's inventory. Please see the below example of a Joe Horn item, which states that There are 3 from $1.20-$4.00. The owner of this item has their copy priced the highest on site, with their asking price ($4.00) being more than 3 times the current lowest asking price ($1.20). Re-pricing this item at $1.19 would greatly increase the chances of it being sold, as the seller would at that point have the lowest-priced copy (and therefore likely the most attractive copy to buyers, condition issues notwithstanding) on the site. Regarding reducing storage fees specifically, items can be listed indefinitely, but storage fees will begin being charged once an item actively listed for sale has been consigned with us for more than 90 days. The storage fee rate is $0.01 per item per month for items listed at more than $1.00 (i.e., with an asking price of more than $0.75). A seller can therefore mitigate or even eliminate their monthly storage fees by reducing the asking prices of their items to $0.75 or less, which makes the items free to list indefinitely. You can quickly identify which items are incurring storage fees by clicking the Show Items drop-down menu on the Inventory Manager page and selecting the Subject to storage fees option. Additional information on storage fees can be found here.
Another easy way to generate interest in your inventory is to initiate a Sale. Sales allow sellers to discount their entire listed portfolio by a set percentage for up to 11 days at a time. Sales are highly economical to run, as the cost of a sale is $1 per 10,000 items to set up and 1% of the pre-sale asking price for a given item. The 1% is collected when the item sells. Sales attract a lot of attention as a result of being advertised on the COMC homepage and on the Promotions page here.
Another option is to run a portfolio sale or Port Sale in order to sell an entire lot or batch of items at one time. The seller can elect to bundle their entire inventory together, or a specific sport, and/or narrow the range of items' manufacturing years for their port sale. Buyers can then place offers and, if accepted, purchase all the cards included in the port sale for one price. While a port sale is active, cards from that portfolio can still be listed and purchased individually. Port sales are also economical in that they only cost $5/week to run.
An especially powerful option is to run a "progressive" sale in order to clear inventory quickly, especially stagnant inventory. Sellers can set up a sequential series of sales, starting, for example, at 10% and running them for 1 week each, and increasing the discount by an additional 10% with each subsequent sale. Continually increasing the discount percentage weekly ensures that items sell off within a given timeframe while simultaneously netting the greatest possible amount of credit that one could reasonably expect over that period. By the end of the sequence of sales, nearly everything in an account that is listed for sale should be sold as a result of getting to 90% off by the final week. Sales only cost $1 to set up, so the total cost of a progressive sale that runs for 9 weeks, increasing the discount percentage by 10% per week, would be $9. Please feel free to modify this example plan by choosing your preferred sale frequency, sale duration, and discount percentage.
In sum, there are a variety of flexible and powerful options that allow sellers to begin turning a greater profit more quickly:
- Reviewing one's inventory and re-pricing items more competitively
- Reducing the number of items that are subject to storage fees
- Running sales
- Running port sales
- Running "progressive" sales in order to clear your inventory reliably within a specified timeframe
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