I am a representative at CardShark.com and wanted to offer a few insights into the shipping.
First of all we have been in business for over 10 years and serving the Magic community with great prices and service. Our goal is to keep costs as low as possible for buyers.
In the last few years, the US post office has raised their prices a huge amount. You used to be able to ship cards in a plain white envelope with a top loader for less than .40
A few years back the USPS has created a new rule that if the contents of the package are non-uniform or rigid that they cannot be processed by a machine and have a surcharge added. They just raised their prices again in April and it costs $1.71 (before materials costs) to ship a single card legally. Sometimes you can get away with shipping for less, but we have to support the worst common denominator as we support thousands of sellers.
The second issue is that our business model (like half.com which Ebay owns) uses part of the buyer shipping as part of our revenue stream. PayPal charges .30 on every transaction + their fee which we do NOT pass through to our sellers. We need to make enough on each order so that neither us nor the seller loses money. Otherwise we would need to have a very high minimum order size. Some sales we make only a few pennies on and need to run a company, customer service personnel, etc.
Recently we have listened to the community and lowered our 4-7 card rates by over .50 on shipping. We feel that if you buy a large amount of cards the shipping increases just a little bit and becomes a very small part of the order. Our goal is to keep the 1-7 card rates as low as possible so you can buy that extra 1 card and not have it be insanely expensive on shipping.
We are curious if any of you smart people out there can offer a creative solution to this. The only option we see is to charge back some of this to the sellers, setup some sort of subscription system for buyers or sellers, where you pay a monthly fee to be part of CardShark and then have adjusted shipping rates or create minimum purchase sizes.
Thanks for your understanding and please know that we are very concerned about keeping shipping costs as low as possible.
Yes I agree shipping prices have gone up but its definitely not as high as claimed. A single card is no where close to 1.71. You can ship a card for 88 cents. A bubble mailer? 5 cents. You run a company that sells cards online, bulk mailers shouldn't be an issue. For the 88 cents shipping 3 or 4 cards isn't impossible. And even when I've shipped 20+ cards it was never that high.
I understand the business perspective but doesn't it make more sense to pass on a percentage of monthly sales as fees to your sellers? Similar to ebay or tcgplayer systems. Sellers can still charge what they want to cover costs. With shipping a seller should also decide the rates that is right for them rather than a system like the one outlined.
You cannot ship anything for 88 cents that includes delivery conformation, which paypal REQUIRES from all sellers if they want to be protected under paypal's seller protection. I dont mean this to be rude, but people who ship without delivery conformation arent very smart insomuch as they are taking 100% of the risk if the cards dont arrive or if the buyer simply says the cards wont arrive. I as a seller and business person would never ship anything of value to someone without at the very least delivery conformation on the package to assure that it arrived safely.
As far as the paypal fees and such, the sellers should have to eat those, its called a cost of doing business. The higher the shipping cost is to the buyer the less buyers you will have willing to pay the money to buy cards there. If I can go to other reputable sellers and purchase from them for the same prices and pay less shipping, then Ill do that, and would often be the case for customers in general. If the shipping was more reasonable, then Im sure you would find your sales ramping up a good amount as people now find that the good prices are coupled with good shipping prices and thus are more willing to shop there over other places.
As for bubble mailers, I can get the ones I use that Ive always found to work perfectly, for 8 cents each, and you can get slightly larger ones for about 10 cents each. Label paper is about 10 cents per label or so. Decent Toploaders are around 8 cents each, and then 2 cents for little stuff like an interior envelope to wrap the cards in/soft sleeves/etc. So you are looking at about 30 cents more for those supplies, plus the cost of shipping/delivery conformation on a package, so about $2.05 or so in full cost for up to 4 cards (1 oz) (one sleeve/toploader/etc), about $2.15 for up to 12 cards (2 oz) (two sleeves/two toploaders/etc), and then up small amounts at a time for additional ounces accordingly.
Thats the math I came up with (and use for my shipping). I personally charge $1.75 for the first playset and .25 for each additional playset (which I upgrade to priority mail above a certain amount of cards) and I include free shipping if the value of the purchase is $40 or more. Do I lose a little money on shipping some of the time? Sure. Are my customers always 100% happy because their cards are never damaged and the shipping is reasonable (you bet).
If businesses want to charge more, then thats up to them, but the higher your shipping + item cost is vs the shipping + item cost from your competitors, then the less business youll find yourself getting comparitively.
We are curious if any of you smart people out there can offer a creative solution to this. The only option we see is to charge back some of this to the sellers, setup some sort of subscription system for buyers or sellers, where you pay a monthly fee to be part of CardShark and then have adjusted shipping rates or create minimum purchase sizes.
Hey guys:
Glad that I finally have a line to talk to you, because I'd love to buy a lot more on Cardshark!
Virtually every gateway site I've seen (FindMagicCard, AllMagicCards, TCGPlayer, Ebay) charges their sellers either a flat fee per transaction, a percentage of the ending price of the transaction, or both. IMO with lowered shipping costs, there'd be a lot more sales on Cardshark, and I believe that the increased volume each vendor would see would balance out a lot against you guys taking out some percentage (1%-5%) off the top of every transaction (pre-shipping totals).
You cannot ship anything for 88 cents that includes delivery conformation, which paypal REQUIRES from all sellers if they want to be protected under paypal's seller protection. I dont mean this to be rude, but people who ship without delivery conformation arent very smart insomuch as they are taking 100% of the risk if the cards dont arrive or if the buyer simply says the cards wont arrive. I as a seller and business person would never ship anything of value to someone without at the very least delivery conformation on the package to assure that it arrived safely.
As far as the paypal fees and such, the sellers should have to eat those, its called a cost of doing business. The higher the shipping cost is to the buyer the less buyers you will have willing to pay the money to buy cards there. If I can go to other reputable sellers and purchase from them for the same prices and pay less shipping, then Ill do that, and would often be the case for customers in general. If the shipping was more reasonable, then Im sure you would find your sales ramping up a good amount as people now find that the good prices are coupled with good shipping prices and thus are more willing to shop there over other places.
As for bubble mailers, I can get the ones I use that Ive always found to work perfectly, for 8 cents each, and you can get slightly larger ones for about 10 cents each. Label paper is about 10 cents per label or so. Decent Toploaders are around 8 cents each, and then 2 cents for little stuff like an interior envelope to wrap the cards in/soft sleeves/etc. So you are looking at about 30 cents more for those supplies, plus the cost of shipping/delivery conformation on a package, so about $2.05 or so in full cost for up to 4 cards (1 oz) (one sleeve/toploader/etc), about $2.15 for up to 12 cards (2 oz) (two sleeves/two toploaders/etc), and then up small amounts at a time for additional ounces accordingly.
Thats the math I came up with (and use for my shipping). I personally charge $1.75 for the first playset and .25 for each additional playset (which I upgrade to priority mail above a certain amount of cards) and I include free shipping if the value of the purchase is $40 or more. Do I lose a little money on shipping some of the time? Sure. Are my customers always 100% happy because their cards are never damaged and the shipping is reasonable (you bet).
If businesses want to charge more, then thats up to them, but the higher your shipping + item cost is vs the shipping + item cost from your competitors, then the less business youll find yourself getting comparitively.
Sorry I wasn't very clear with my post, i was posting from my phone so i was very general about the subject, to elaborate on my post he didn't say whether that includes DC or any other things, just a flat rate. With DC# and bubble mailers as a small package/parcel it does come out to minimum $2.51, but since he said $1.71 (which i'm pretty sure if what i'm charged either for large envelope or when sending more than 2-4 cards) i assumed he wasn't referring to that service anyway, so the point remains valid.
There's been a few different ideas suggested to the store at this point, either they will reconsider their policies and business plan, or their site will continue. Cardshark.com has not discussed their traffic or their volume of sales, so it's purely speculation if it's even a problem for them. The only word is many prospective buyers not dealing with the site due to shipping costs, but i'm sure many of the people in this forum who buy cards from these sites are very frugal and more than willing to take the time to find the best price they can + shipping.
It's not even the shipping that's the problem, most stores ballpark the shipping and probably grind a few pennies each transaction over time, no big deal. It's just usually bad PR to say "we charge more for shipping because we charge fees." - fees should be the responsibility of the individual sellers and at their discretion how they want to pass them to the buyers, be it by raising the card's prices to cover the difference, or just eat the cost for smaller profit margins while keeping their prices low.
We have reduced our shipping costs by about .50-.60 in the last week. This is the lowest we can go at this point due to our business model as well as the fact that some seller's will get charged full prices at the post office.
Our business is unique in that we do not handle the actual shipping and thousands of other sellers actual do this. We have to go lowest common denominator to make sure everyone receives enough to ship items EVERY time.
Hopefully the lower shipping will help encourage more people to try CardShark again. We wish we could get it lower, but at this time that's the best we can do.
They should make a media mail category for trading cards.
I would never sell using them because they have 15% fees, but I've bought things before and everything has been great really, even with the slightly annoying $2.50 shipping costs for just a single card.
Does anyone know what happens when a buyer claims there are missing cards? I sent the cards to them but they are claiming that several high value cards are missing.
Does Cardshark have a way to buy sealed product? I was looking for Duel Decks or premium deck series, and I found the singles, but not the product itself.
Im actually going to disagree here I started using a few weeks ago and while 15% is high, you just put it on the costs of cards. And there's a reason shipping out of the US is bad. Cardshark doesn't want to deal with it and rightfully so. But yeam MCM isnt going to absorb that makret since MCM isn't going to be in that market. SHipping to other countries is way worse than the 15%.
I don't get it like how do you not understand the difference between US and Europe markets. Like MCM isn't going to be in the american market due to the fact the shipping costs will be way over that 15% of cardshark making it unmanageable. I also love the I dont know TCGplayer fees but they're too high. MCM isn't absorbing anything in the US.
Hey guys just figured I'd let you know that cardshark has 2 different promotions going on one for a $5 gift certificate for an order $20+ and one for a drawing for 5 planeswalkers. Here's a link and stuff http://www.cardshark.com/Promotions/Default.aspx
Just reached Hammerhead Status on Cardshark (wooo!)
So, I've been selling on Cardshark for what seems like forever now, and I have some thoughts.
Cardshark would be infinitely more popular and do 100x+ the business if the fees to sell were lower, and they would end up making more money in the process, I'm just not sure why they don't do this?
Also, the shipping fee's are kind of ridiculous too. When a buyer pays $2.99 to ship one card the seller only see's $2.40 of that, where did the other $0.60 go? Don't tell me it went to fees because that is what the 15% is for.
I don't know maybe it's me, but Cardshark would be a much bigger player in the game if they just made a few changes.
How is this site for a buyer? It seems like you can get cards at really good prices but they likely have to come from 2-3 different sellers. Will all of the cards arrive at the same time? How reliable is it?
How is this site for a buyer? It seems like you can get cards at really good prices but they likely have to come from 2-3 different sellers. Will all of the cards arrive at the same time? How reliable is it?
I buy from cardshark occasionally, but it's primarily for single cards, generally played single copies of hard to find EDH stuff like Guardian Beast and Invoke Prejudice. The price you can find is sometimes better than TCGPlayer and eBay for harder to find stuff, but they're also more likely to not have the card in question at all.
Since TCGplayer has opened up to individual sellers, they've generally been the best option. They charge lower fees, so sellers can list the cards lower for the same profit, plus shipping is generally lower (usually $.99, and if you go over $50 it's free). If you want to buy a lot of cards, and ideally from a smaller number of sellers, TCGplayer is the way to go, in my experience.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
My Moderator Helpdesk
Currently Playing:
Legacy: Something U/W Controlish EDH Cube
Hypercube! A New EDH Deck Every Week(ish)!
Cardshark is pricing themselves out of the market, the fees they charge sellers is almost 15%
I've pretty much stopped using it. eBay reaches more buyers, at a higher selling price and less fee's.
The only advantage cardshark has is they your inventory is online all the time.
eBay has its issues - you'll face listing fees sometimes for putting cards up, it's pretty much impossible to sell small cards profitably as you're competing against $.99 plus free shipping in a lot of cases, and you have to put things up for a limited time frame.
The real death knell of CardShark is tcgplayer's recent change to allowing anyone to sell cards, not just stores. They charge lower fees, lower shipping, and have a better interface and lots of features cardshark lacks like the cart optimizer. They also have a lot larger stock, and thus can more accurately display pricing trends.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
My Moderator Helpdesk
Currently Playing:
Legacy: Something U/W Controlish EDH Cube
Hypercube! A New EDH Deck Every Week(ish)!
I've used the site a few times before for when I wasn't able to trade cards within a time constraint. The only thing I have to say is that there's usually a lack of buyers which makes sellers have to lower the price to considerably MSRP so that current buyers of the site will actually make transactions.
From what I've seen of Card Shark, their prices on the actual cards aren't bad (I recall Vorel of the Hull Clade, for instance, being half what he was on other sites)...it's their shipping system that's the problem. You end up paying ~$4.00 shipping for each seller you buy from on there (funny, that was never a problem with tcgplayer), and of course, good luck trying to find all the cards you want from the same seller to get around that. Frankly, I don't find them worth the trouble. I will say, though, that I actually contacted a specific seller about the cards he had, and long story short, we ended up doing business quite effectively outside of the main site; I ended up getting the cards cheaper, and he didn't have to pay fees.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
First of all we have been in business for over 10 years and serving the Magic community with great prices and service. Our goal is to keep costs as low as possible for buyers.
In the last few years, the US post office has raised their prices a huge amount. You used to be able to ship cards in a plain white envelope with a top loader for less than .40
A few years back the USPS has created a new rule that if the contents of the package are non-uniform or rigid that they cannot be processed by a machine and have a surcharge added. They just raised their prices again in April and it costs $1.71 (before materials costs) to ship a single card legally. Sometimes you can get away with shipping for less, but we have to support the worst common denominator as we support thousands of sellers.
The second issue is that our business model (like half.com which Ebay owns) uses part of the buyer shipping as part of our revenue stream. PayPal charges .30 on every transaction + their fee which we do NOT pass through to our sellers. We need to make enough on each order so that neither us nor the seller loses money. Otherwise we would need to have a very high minimum order size. Some sales we make only a few pennies on and need to run a company, customer service personnel, etc.
Recently we have listened to the community and lowered our 4-7 card rates by over .50 on shipping. We feel that if you buy a large amount of cards the shipping increases just a little bit and becomes a very small part of the order. Our goal is to keep the 1-7 card rates as low as possible so you can buy that extra 1 card and not have it be insanely expensive on shipping.
We are curious if any of you smart people out there can offer a creative solution to this. The only option we see is to charge back some of this to the sellers, setup some sort of subscription system for buyers or sellers, where you pay a monthly fee to be part of CardShark and then have adjusted shipping rates or create minimum purchase sizes.
Thanks for your understanding and please know that we are very concerned about keeping shipping costs as low as possible.
All of us at CardShark.com
I understand the business perspective but doesn't it make more sense to pass on a percentage of monthly sales as fees to your sellers? Similar to ebay or tcgplayer systems. Sellers can still charge what they want to cover costs. With shipping a seller should also decide the rates that is right for them rather than a system like the one outlined.
As far as the paypal fees and such, the sellers should have to eat those, its called a cost of doing business. The higher the shipping cost is to the buyer the less buyers you will have willing to pay the money to buy cards there. If I can go to other reputable sellers and purchase from them for the same prices and pay less shipping, then Ill do that, and would often be the case for customers in general. If the shipping was more reasonable, then Im sure you would find your sales ramping up a good amount as people now find that the good prices are coupled with good shipping prices and thus are more willing to shop there over other places.
As for bubble mailers, I can get the ones I use that Ive always found to work perfectly, for 8 cents each, and you can get slightly larger ones for about 10 cents each. Label paper is about 10 cents per label or so. Decent Toploaders are around 8 cents each, and then 2 cents for little stuff like an interior envelope to wrap the cards in/soft sleeves/etc. So you are looking at about 30 cents more for those supplies, plus the cost of shipping/delivery conformation on a package, so about $2.05 or so in full cost for up to 4 cards (1 oz) (one sleeve/toploader/etc), about $2.15 for up to 12 cards (2 oz) (two sleeves/two toploaders/etc), and then up small amounts at a time for additional ounces accordingly.
Thats the math I came up with (and use for my shipping). I personally charge $1.75 for the first playset and .25 for each additional playset (which I upgrade to priority mail above a certain amount of cards) and I include free shipping if the value of the purchase is $40 or more. Do I lose a little money on shipping some of the time? Sure. Are my customers always 100% happy because their cards are never damaged and the shipping is reasonable (you bet).
If businesses want to charge more, then thats up to them, but the higher your shipping + item cost is vs the shipping + item cost from your competitors, then the less business youll find yourself getting comparitively.
Hey guys:
Glad that I finally have a line to talk to you, because I'd love to buy a lot more on Cardshark!
Virtually every gateway site I've seen (FindMagicCard, AllMagicCards, TCGPlayer, Ebay) charges their sellers either a flat fee per transaction, a percentage of the ending price of the transaction, or both. IMO with lowered shipping costs, there'd be a lot more sales on Cardshark, and I believe that the increased volume each vendor would see would balance out a lot against you guys taking out some percentage (1%-5%) off the top of every transaction (pre-shipping totals).
Just my $0.02!
- Ben
Sorry I wasn't very clear with my post, i was posting from my phone so i was very general about the subject, to elaborate on my post he didn't say whether that includes DC or any other things, just a flat rate. With DC# and bubble mailers as a small package/parcel it does come out to minimum $2.51, but since he said $1.71 (which i'm pretty sure if what i'm charged either for large envelope or when sending more than 2-4 cards) i assumed he wasn't referring to that service anyway, so the point remains valid.
There's been a few different ideas suggested to the store at this point, either they will reconsider their policies and business plan, or their site will continue. Cardshark.com has not discussed their traffic or their volume of sales, so it's purely speculation if it's even a problem for them. The only word is many prospective buyers not dealing with the site due to shipping costs, but i'm sure many of the people in this forum who buy cards from these sites are very frugal and more than willing to take the time to find the best price they can + shipping.
It's not even the shipping that's the problem, most stores ballpark the shipping and probably grind a few pennies each transaction over time, no big deal. It's just usually bad PR to say "we charge more for shipping because we charge fees." - fees should be the responsibility of the individual sellers and at their discretion how they want to pass them to the buyers, be it by raising the card's prices to cover the difference, or just eat the cost for smaller profit margins while keeping their prices low.
We have reduced our shipping costs by about .50-.60 in the last week. This is the lowest we can go at this point due to our business model as well as the fact that some seller's will get charged full prices at the post office.
Our business is unique in that we do not handle the actual shipping and thousands of other sellers actual do this. We have to go lowest common denominator to make sure everyone receives enough to ship items EVERY time.
Hopefully the lower shipping will help encourage more people to try CardShark again. We wish we could get it lower, but at this time that's the best we can do.
They should make a media mail category for trading cards.
You can't beat the selection, though. If you need a oddball common from Antiquities or a Rare from Planashift, then it's the place to go.
Any reasons why people don't use it?
FWIW, there's a stickied thread to discuss Card Shark on the Store Discussion subforum - you can find it here! http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=240970
- Ben
Lands WUBG
EDH:
Doran WBG
http://www.cardshark.com/Promotions/Default.aspx
So, I've been selling on Cardshark for what seems like forever now, and I have some thoughts.
Cardshark would be infinitely more popular and do 100x+ the business if the fees to sell were lower, and they would end up making more money in the process, I'm just not sure why they don't do this?
Also, the shipping fee's are kind of ridiculous too. When a buyer pays $2.99 to ship one card the seller only see's $2.40 of that, where did the other $0.60 go? Don't tell me it went to fees because that is what the 15% is for.
I don't know maybe it's me, but Cardshark would be a much bigger player in the game if they just made a few changes.
I buy from cardshark occasionally, but it's primarily for single cards, generally played single copies of hard to find EDH stuff like Guardian Beast and Invoke Prejudice. The price you can find is sometimes better than TCGPlayer and eBay for harder to find stuff, but they're also more likely to not have the card in question at all.
Since TCGplayer has opened up to individual sellers, they've generally been the best option. They charge lower fees, so sellers can list the cards lower for the same profit, plus shipping is generally lower (usually $.99, and if you go over $50 it's free). If you want to buy a lot of cards, and ideally from a smaller number of sellers, TCGplayer is the way to go, in my experience.
Currently Playing:
Legacy: Something U/W Controlish
EDH Cube
Hypercube! A New EDH Deck Every Week(ish)!
I've pretty much stopped using it. eBay reaches more buyers, at a higher selling price and less fee's.
The only advantage cardshark has is they your inventory is online all the time.
eBay has its issues - you'll face listing fees sometimes for putting cards up, it's pretty much impossible to sell small cards profitably as you're competing against $.99 plus free shipping in a lot of cases, and you have to put things up for a limited time frame.
The real death knell of CardShark is tcgplayer's recent change to allowing anyone to sell cards, not just stores. They charge lower fees, lower shipping, and have a better interface and lots of features cardshark lacks like the cart optimizer. They also have a lot larger stock, and thus can more accurately display pricing trends.
Currently Playing:
Legacy: Something U/W Controlish
EDH Cube
Hypercube! A New EDH Deck Every Week(ish)!
(Last Edited 11/03/2015)