First post on here! Woot! Couple friends and I are starting our own magic shop online: http://www.tinstreet.market!
It's a modern interface, with live chat, make offers, and uses Paypal Express (so no private or sensitive information is kept).
Right now we have a limited selection of cards up but will be expanding that greatly in the weeks and months ahead.
We're just testing it out but most of the site is up and working. If you'd like to pay a visit we'd be much obliged! We're offering a 5% discount to you for our beta launch
(use the coupon '5percent' at checkout)and we always offer free shipping over $200.
First post on here! Woot! Couple friends and I are starting our own magic shop online: http://www.tinstreet.market!
It's a modern interface, with live chat, make offers, and uses Paypal Express (so no private or sensitive information is kept).
Right now we have a limited selection of cards up but will be expanding that greatly in the weeks and months ahead.
We're just testing it out but most of the site is up and working. If you'd like to pay a visit we'd be much obliged! We're offering a 5% discount to you for our beta launch
(use the coupon '5percent' at checkout)and we always offer free shipping over $200.
Hope to see you over there!
Cheers!
Adam
If you'll allow some laser-blast criticism ..
Your prices seem high. For example, you're selling the GP promo Griselbrand for $40, when it's available in the teens (shipped) from eBay. You're asking $99 for an Overgrown Tomb expedition, when TCG has it at $89 mid, and there are several NM copies available for $75. The big question is, why should I buy cards from your store when I can get them elsewhere for (sometimes much) less money? If the prices are just a placeholder, that's fine, but as of right now, they're too high for me to consider.
Also, free shipping at $200? That's a pretty high threshold.
You might want to specify somewhere on the site that you're in PA, or at least the US - it helps to set expectations on shipping. A lot of countries use English and the dollar.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Along with many mods, I've moved shop over to MTGNexus. Come check us out!
First post on here! Woot! Couple friends and I are starting our own magic shop online: http://www.tinstreet.market!
It's a modern interface, with live chat, make offers, and uses Paypal Express (so no private or sensitive information is kept).
Right now we have a limited selection of cards up but will be expanding that greatly in the weeks and months ahead.
We're just testing it out but most of the site is up and working. If you'd like to pay a visit we'd be much obliged! We're offering a 5% discount to you for our beta launch
(use the coupon '5percent' at checkout)and we always offer free shipping over $200.
Hope to see you over there!
Cheers!
Adam
If you'll allow some laser-blast criticism ..
Your prices seem high. For example, you're selling the GP promo Griselbrand for $40, when it's available in the teens (shipped) from eBay. You're asking $99 for an Overgrown Tomb expedition, when TCG has it at $89 mid, and there are several NM copies available for $75. The big question is, why should I buy cards from your store when I can get them elsewhere for (sometimes much) less money? If the prices are just a placeholder, that's fine, but as of right now, they're too high for me to consider.
Also, free shipping at $200? That's a pretty high threshold.
You might want to specify somewhere on the site that you're in PA, or at least the US - it helps to set expectations on shipping. A lot of countries use English and the dollar.
I didn't check the prices, but playing off of what KnickM said, when you are dealing with online sales its important to make sure your prices are competitive with other available online prices. If your prices are too high, no one is going to even consider buying from you vs. choosing to buy from other established online stores, or sites like tcgplayer, or ebay for that matter. As for free shipping, honestly as mentioned $200 is far too high there. Many online stores will offer free shipping at say $50 for singles, or $99 for singles for that matter, so you may want to lower that as well if you are hoping to get people to consider spending more in order to get to the free shipping threshold. In general for a new site starting out, if you want to attract people to your site, you are going to have to build a decent sized collection to buy from, have competitive prices, and reasonable shipping and related costs and a setup to be able to quickly answer customer questions and provide as good of customer service as possible (including being very careful about condition judgments on your cards) to once again try to help provide something that is going to separate you from the competition to bring the customers to you vs. one of the many other places online to buy cards that has already been established for a while.
Thank you for the great and productive criticsm. Yes, the prices were too high and have since been adjusted to better reflect the "global" market. I apologize about that. In addition, we've added a make offer option that allows users to suggest a price regardless of what we have listed.
I appreciate the comments about shipping. Since we're only selling sought after singles our threshold is a little higher. However, we've talked or over and feel somewhere between $100-$175 would work better.
I'll chime in with some (hopefully) constructive criticism:
The site is slow as molasses to load; I almost thought it was going to time out. Tried from both my computer and my phone, and it was abysmally slow on both, almost 15 seconds just to render.
The banner at the top of the page is unnecessarily large and takes up too much real estate.
You don't list the condition of any of the cards. Condition matters.
There's a huge amount of wasted whitespace in all of the pictures; I don't understand why.
I clicked on the first Force of Will, and when I zoom in, I get a huge image, but I'm not able to scroll horizontally. I had to either open the image in a new browser tab, or copy the picture and paste it into Paintbrush to view the image properly.
That said, the Force of Will says "NM" from the link, but I guarantee that's not NM. I can see whitening on the bottom left corner, the top left corner, and wear on the left and right side in the middle. Maybe a nice SP+, but not NM. Nothing bugs me more than improperly graded cards.
I have no idea what the reviews are for. The Temple Garden Expedition has a five-star review that says "Awesome". That's awesomely not helpful.
It's nice to see friends get together and try and start a business, but I see no reason to use over eBay Buy-It-Now or TCG Player.
Having pictures of the actual cards is good, and it's the thing that would make me consider this over TCG Player, but when you don't grade the cards correctly, and you still overprice (consider I can get a NM Griselbrand GP Promo for $11.40 on TCG Player with free shipping right now, versus your $15 plus shipping), it's not a very compelling argument to try and order something.
I'll chime in with some (hopefully) constructive criticism:
The site is slow as molasses to load; I almost thought it was going to time out. Tried from both my computer and my phone, and it was abysmally slow on both, almost 15 seconds just to render.
The banner at the top of the page is unnecessarily large and takes up too much real estate.
You don't list the condition of any of the cards. Condition matters.
There's a huge amount of wasted whitespace in all of the pictures; I don't understand why.
I clicked on the first Force of Will, and when I zoom in, I get a huge image, but I'm not able to scroll horizontally. I had to either open the image in a new browser tab, or copy the picture and paste it into Paintbrush to view the image properly.
That said, the Force of Will says "NM" from the link, but I guarantee that's not NM. I can see whitening on the bottom left corner, the top left corner, and wear on the left and right side in the middle. Maybe a nice SP+, but not NM. Nothing bugs me more than improperly graded cards.
I have no idea what the reviews are for. The Temple Garden Expedition has a five-star review that says "Awesome". That's awesomely not helpful.
It's nice to see friends get together and try and start a business, but I see no reason to use over eBay Buy-It-Now or TCG Player.
Having pictures of the actual cards is good, and it's the thing that would make me consider this over TCG Player, but when you don't grade the cards correctly, and you still overprice (consider I can get a NM Griselbrand GP Promo for $11.40 on TCG Player with free shipping right now, versus your $15 plus shipping), it's not a very compelling argument to try and order something.
I'd thought that I just had a bad connection at home, but I just tried it at work and Token is right - it's a bear to load. It's not even that it takes a while to load secondary images - the whole thing takes over 20 seconds to first paint. I don't work for a benchmark company anymore, so I can't tell you exactly what to fix (I don't have access to my old tools), but you really want everything above the fold to load in less than 2 seconds (and that's six years ago). Here's a link to some general good advice: http://www.keynote.com/resources/white-papers/best-practices-mobile-website-design It focuses on mobile, but many of the same lessons apply to desktop sites as well.
Okay, I'm done dispensing advice from an industry that I left. Here's what I do like about the site:
1) Pictures. You have pictures of the actual cards. That's a really good idea, and something that's probably necessary when you're dealing with higher-end cards.
2) The offer button. eBay allows for some haggling, but that's about it. Now, this could come back to bite you if you're not flexible about accepting offers. I'm going to use Dan Bock as an example here. All of his items allow offers, but of all the offers I've made, he usually only accepts ones that are within a dollar of the asking price, even when I point out examples of other sellers who have the card for $5 or $10 less. That turns the offer experience from "Oh, he's willing to negotiate" to "Oh, he's wasting my time".
I'm curious about how you're going to source your cards going forward, and whether this is a method of getting out of the game, or just getting off of some high priced cards, or whether you're going to be grinding trades at GPs to get more stock for the site. That's more a matter of personal curiosity, though, and vision of the future.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Along with many mods, I've moved shop over to MTGNexus. Come check us out!
First post on here! Woot! Couple friends and I are starting our own magic shop online: http://www.tinstreet.market !
It's a modern interface, with live chat, make offers, and uses Paypal Express (so no private or sensitive information is kept).
Right now we have a limited selection of cards up but will be expanding that greatly in the weeks and months ahead.
We're just testing it out but most of the site is up and working. If you'd like to pay a visit we'd be much obliged! We're offering a 5% discount to you for our beta launch
(use the coupon '5percent' at checkout)and we always offer free shipping over $200.
Hope to see you over there!
Cheers!
Adam
If you'll allow some laser-blast criticism ..
Your prices seem high. For example, you're selling the GP promo Griselbrand for $40, when it's available in the teens (shipped) from eBay. You're asking $99 for an Overgrown Tomb expedition, when TCG has it at $89 mid, and there are several NM copies available for $75. The big question is, why should I buy cards from your store when I can get them elsewhere for (sometimes much) less money? If the prices are just a placeholder, that's fine, but as of right now, they're too high for me to consider.
Also, free shipping at $200? That's a pretty high threshold.
You might want to specify somewhere on the site that you're in PA, or at least the US - it helps to set expectations on shipping. A lot of countries use English and the dollar.
I didn't check the prices, but playing off of what KnickM said, when you are dealing with online sales its important to make sure your prices are competitive with other available online prices. If your prices are too high, no one is going to even consider buying from you vs. choosing to buy from other established online stores, or sites like tcgplayer, or ebay for that matter. As for free shipping, honestly as mentioned $200 is far too high there. Many online stores will offer free shipping at say $50 for singles, or $99 for singles for that matter, so you may want to lower that as well if you are hoping to get people to consider spending more in order to get to the free shipping threshold. In general for a new site starting out, if you want to attract people to your site, you are going to have to build a decent sized collection to buy from, have competitive prices, and reasonable shipping and related costs and a setup to be able to quickly answer customer questions and provide as good of customer service as possible (including being very careful about condition judgments on your cards) to once again try to help provide something that is going to separate you from the competition to bring the customers to you vs. one of the many other places online to buy cards that has already been established for a while.
Anyhow, good luck :).
Thank you for the great and productive criticsm. Yes, the prices were too high and have since been adjusted to better reflect the "global" market. I apologize about that. In addition, we've added a make offer option that allows users to suggest a price regardless of what we have listed.
I appreciate the comments about shipping. Since we're only selling sought after singles our threshold is a little higher. However, we've talked or over and feel somewhere between $100-$175 would work better.
It's nice to see friends get together and try and start a business, but I see no reason to use over eBay Buy-It-Now or TCG Player.
Having pictures of the actual cards is good, and it's the thing that would make me consider this over TCG Player, but when you don't grade the cards correctly, and you still overprice (consider I can get a NM Griselbrand GP Promo for $11.40 on TCG Player with free shipping right now, versus your $15 plus shipping), it's not a very compelling argument to try and order something.
I'd thought that I just had a bad connection at home, but I just tried it at work and Token is right - it's a bear to load. It's not even that it takes a while to load secondary images - the whole thing takes over 20 seconds to first paint. I don't work for a benchmark company anymore, so I can't tell you exactly what to fix (I don't have access to my old tools), but you really want everything above the fold to load in less than 2 seconds (and that's six years ago). Here's a link to some general good advice: http://www.keynote.com/resources/white-papers/best-practices-mobile-website-design It focuses on mobile, but many of the same lessons apply to desktop sites as well.
Okay, I'm done dispensing advice from an industry that I left. Here's what I do like about the site:
1) Pictures. You have pictures of the actual cards. That's a really good idea, and something that's probably necessary when you're dealing with higher-end cards.
2) The offer button. eBay allows for some haggling, but that's about it. Now, this could come back to bite you if you're not flexible about accepting offers. I'm going to use Dan Bock as an example here. All of his items allow offers, but of all the offers I've made, he usually only accepts ones that are within a dollar of the asking price, even when I point out examples of other sellers who have the card for $5 or $10 less. That turns the offer experience from "Oh, he's willing to negotiate" to "Oh, he's wasting my time".
I'm curious about how you're going to source your cards going forward, and whether this is a method of getting out of the game, or just getting off of some high priced cards, or whether you're going to be grinding trades at GPs to get more stock for the site. That's more a matter of personal curiosity, though, and vision of the future.