The Tip Of The Iceberg

If you've noticed I kinda went quiet after announcing my foray into TCDB trading, you are correct.  From the feedback I received, it's apparent that right now is prime time to be trading on the Database site.  Commenters on here as well as my other trading group are all diving in on entering their stuff at the same time.  

Which is great, since that generates trades among avid collectors.  I will say that TCDB is doing a lot more than my COMC listings are this month, which is nothing....

But there's a slight problem.  I took several hours last weekend to enter my first box of available cards into the site.  (It was about 6-7 hours total spread over the two days.)  And it wasn't even a large box.

It was this three row thing that houses my dupes from the tail end of 1997 up through 2000 Topps.  That's all.  Now there are a lot of different sets/products in there, so it takes a lot of clicks to enter even a few cards.  The monster boxes are going to take a little longer than I expected, though some of them, especially on the football side, will go a bit quicker since they have big chunks of one set.

The rest of the week, I've been busy fielding TEN ~ count 'em ~ TEN trade offers I got from just that one box.  Most of them have been PWE size - a half dozen to ten cards on each side.  Though a few times, the offerer had a lot on their wantlists that I could fill, so I dug through the rest of my stock and filled out lopsided trades in their favor whenever I could.  That's my favorite way to trade - move a lot of stuff and still get a decent return for my collection - value and volume matching be damned.

I had previously entered two chunks of SP Top Prospects from the box after I found a trader that needed some.  Not sure who it was, but I figured instead of just putting in the few cards I was sending out, I'd check off the whole batch to try and move them, since at least to me, they are the least desirable of any brand I have.  There are a few star players among them, but the bulk is just no-name prospects that I wouldn't think would be in demand.  This was right before I decided to put everything in eventually.  I imagined I'd do the same thing to my football stock with stuff like SAGE HIT etc, but I'll probably just put it all in together now.  The card on the left is Donruss Collections - Leaf.  Those are shiny and popular so far too.

So anyway, I have the pictures, ideas etc. for three different posts at this point, but have spent the entire week pulling, packing, and posting all these trades.  And I got four more over the weekend.  The unfortunate part is when I get offers for the odd card I put on my trade list that is already spoken for.  Had to refuse a trade for that already.  I'm still getting the hang of the proper sequence to managing trades.  I'll send messages and then change status and it will prompt for a message again in some cases and not in others.  I've also accepted trades that I wanted to go back and edit after the fact, but just worked it out and changed my inventory manually.

On top of that, I went to a show yesterday (one of the pending posts you'll see later).  So now I have to cross off my website, and also take what I got off my want list on the database.  It wasn't a whole lot, but it is extra work.  Luckily I didn't buy anthing that I already had coming in trade.  More on that later.

I also decided to spice things up by entering some smaller batches of special cards I have separate from my bulk extras.  1976 SSPC, two Pacific Senior league sets, and some other unusual batches are now among my listings.  Haven't finished all you see here, but it will be soon.  There's even a few racing cards tucked in the back there.

If after I enter a couple more of the bigger boxes, I get even more offers at once, I'll have to suspend trades until I can get everything entered and don't spend time digging through people's huge want lists, I can just approve what matches up automatically. 

And this is just the beginning...