CardShark.com Site Blog

USPS Announces another round of shipping increases

noreply@blogger.com (CardShark) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:39:00 +0000

CardShark gives and the USPS takes away. After our recent shipping reductions we are sadly faced with another postal increase. Although they claim a 2.1% increase on average, the prices that relate to small parcels (which is what collectable cards are considered) have seen an increase of 10.9% or .24 across all weights.

We have also seen increases in international Priority mail by as much as 25%.

We have increased our shipping by approx .24 for all First Class mail and also adjusted Priority mail prices domestically and internationally to fit with any changes.

Insurance has gone up a modest .05 - .10 and that has been adjusted as well.

Looking for a silver lining? Our recent shipping reductions and quantity re-categorization efforts still leave a net reduction in our overall shipping prices.

We apologize for this shipping increase but we need to pass on this cost to buyers to adequately compensate sellers for their shipping costs.

Here's the new pricing info announcement from the USPS:
https://www.usps.com/new-prices.htm

Here's a summary of some of the new shipping prices:
http://www.cardshark.com/Info/Shipping-Prices.aspx
http://www.cardshark.com/Info/International-Shipping-Guidelines.aspx

Here's a great site that has tracked the USPS increases over the last several years.
http://www.nerdylorrin.net/jerry/postages/index.html

All of us at CardShark

New Lower Shipping Prices

noreply@blogger.com (CardShark) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 01:41:00 +0000

Nine months ago, CardShark faced the biggest postal rate hike we've ever seen, and at that time we raised our shipping rates accordingly. Since then, our loyal buyers have given us feedback that our shipping charges were too high. With the help of some diligent buyers, we have reviewed the real shipping costs paid by sellers on many orders of various sizes. We agree that shipping charges were adjusted to be a bit too high, and we have decided to lower them.

Our new, lower shipping charges include the creation of a 4 to 24-card category ($2.99 shipping), and a decrease of around .50 across the board on orders of 25 cards or more and Priority Mail. Review all revised shipping prices here: http://www.cardshark.com/Info/Shipping-Prices.aspx

Thanks and enjoy your Holidays!

All of us at CardShark

Small Priority Mail shipping reduction

noreply@blogger.com (CardShark) — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 02:55:00 +0000

We have reduced our shipping costs for priority mail and large orders that are cheaper to ship as priority mail small flat rate to $6.99. Orders over 400 cards have also been reduced to $12.69

Sellers will receive the same shipping allowances.

This reduction is based on feedback on actual shipping prices for very large orders.

Thanks,

CardShark Member Services

Reduced minimum amount needed to receive a payment

noreply@blogger.com (CardShark) — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 02:50:00 +0000

Recently we made some changes to our seller payment system. One of the changes was to require a $20 minimum before payments were issued to sellers. One of the reasons for this was to avoid having sellers who have chosen to receive weekly payments pay a fee on a very small payment amount.

In practice we realize this makes our smaller sellers have to wait too long to get paid and also most weekly payment sellers have larger amounts due.

Because of this we have removed all minimum amount restrictions on paying sellers.

This means that if you are due even .01 you will receive a PayPal payment.

Non weekly payment sellers are still paid only once a month for free and money will accrue until the next month.

Thanks,

CardShark Member Services

Important Seller Changes and Policy Updates

noreply@blogger.com (CardShark) — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 02:30:00 +0000

Important Upcoming Changes:

We have several new policies that will affect all sellers.

Payment frequency
1) You will be paid once a month (for free) instead of every Friday.
2) You may opt to be paid weekly still but there will be a $1 fee deducted from your payment (see reasoning below).

Activity
4) If you have not logged into your account in 3 months, your inventory will automatically be set to "On Vacation" mode for all games.
5) If you have not logged into your account in 6 months, any active cards for sale will be deleted. Your history, SharkShares and Account will always remain active.
6) Any accumulated seller level promotions (Great White, Hammer Head, LandShark) will be lost after 6 months of inactivity and will need to be re-applied for.
7) If you are unreachable by email your account may be placed On Vacation.

Email warnings will go out before and during all of these events. All of the activity changes should have no affect on regular sellers.

------
Reasonings

PayPal has recently increased their fees for us to pay you by 400%. As you know, CardShark pays all of the e-commerce fees related to your sales. In the past we have been able to also cover fees to send you weekly payments, but due to this large increase we can no longer absorb this cost.

If you wish to receive monthly payments, we will still absorb any fees, but if you prefer to continue to receive weekly payments, there will be a $1 fee deducted from your payment.

You must enable weekly payments via the Seller Preferences screen:
http://www.cardshark.com/Account/EditSellerPreferences.aspx

On this page you also now have the option to disable support for Delivery Confirmation if you do not wish to offer it.

Q: When in the month will I get paid? - Every Friday we will check if you have the weekly payments option selection. If yes, you will be paid all outstanding amounts and $1 will be deducted, if not, we will check if you have received a payment yet in this calendar month. If Not, you will receive a payment for all amounts pending.

When the next month rolls around, the same check is performed. Most likely people will see payments roll in on the first Friday of the month due to this setup, but it also has the added bonus of being able to get your money faster if you don't make regular sales. It also has the bonus of allowing you to get at your money at any time by simply checking the Weekly box and paying the $1. If you really need the money, just check the box and a payment will be made that Friday; You can always un-check it afterwards to go back to monthly free disbursements.

We have also set the minimum payment amount to be $20. This means that your account will accrue money due until $20 is reached before a payment is made. You will not be charged the $1 fee if a payment is not sent.

We are considering adding a "Credit" based system where you could spend any accrued money to purchase cards on CardShark. Let us know if anyone would find this useful.

Our reasoning for the vacation status changes and active inventory deletions should be obvious. They are to help us remind you of your account via email first and give you a chance to keep your inventory current. They will be used to detect bounced emails. They also serve to improve the overall quality of the cards listed by removing lapsed sellers or people that may have forgot they even have cards listed. This should benefit everyone by reducing cancellations, removing unreachable sellers, bringing active prices closer to true market and encouraging regular account maintenance by sellers.

One last thing: we have also increased SharkShares for buyers leaving feedback to 5 from 1. This will hopefully encourage more feedback to be left.

These policy changes are effective now but may take several weeks before full implementation.

If you have any comments, please email us or post it here for community input.

Thanks for your understanding of these changes.

All of us at CardShark.com!

Small shipping adjustment

noreply@blogger.com (CardShark) — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 01:15:00 +0000

In April we had to increase our shipping prices due to another large shipping increase by the USPS. A while back we had merged the 4-7 and 8-15 card categories for simplicity, but with the recent changes, this has forced the cost of shipping 4 cards (a very common number) up to $3.50

We have received a number of complaints on how expensive it is to buy a play set of 4 cards and we agree wholeheartedly.

We did some creative changes to the current shipping prices and the end result is the addition of a 4-7 card category at $2.99 This is the best we can do considering the current large price to ship rigid/non-uniform materials via the USPS.

Sellers will find that the 1-3 card shipping allowance has been expanded to 1-7 cards. The new USPS pricing supports similar pricing on 1-3 ounces, so we feel that sellers can absorb this change. Higher quantity orders still provide a generous shipping allowance and can help offset the tight margins on shipping 1-7 cards.

Hopefully this change will improve sellers ability to make sales in the 4-7 card range where previously it may have been price prohibitive. We also hope that buyers will be pleased by the shipping reduction.

As always all of us at CardShark appreciate your business.

April 20th Update to Shipping Prices on CardShark.com

noreply@blogger.com (CardShark) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:10:00 +0000

Greetings all,

It's been a long time since we have blogged about anything, but this one is major and we wanted to take a chance to communicate some big changes to shipping prices at CardShark.com this week.

The USPS has once again announced some huge increases while trying to pretend they are only increasing by a few pennies. New USPS Rates affective April 17, 2011. Sadly if mail is classified as rigid/non-uniform it is technically treated as a parcel. The last big increase brought this distinction and saw a massive increase to prices. This time around the USPS has combined the first 3 ounces of parcels and raised the rate by almost $.50

They have also finally gotten around to significantly raising international rates as well to be more in-line with domestic parcel increases. Our international users will note a small increase on small order sizes, but may notice a slight decrease on larger orders as we fine tuned some of the shipping prices to be in-line with current prices. Check out the new Buyer shipping prices.

How will this affect the single card buyer?
We had to increase the 1-3 card rate to $2.75 shipping. The 4-15 card rate has increased to $3.50. After that it evens out pretty much with no real increases.

We try as much as we can to keep our 1-3 card rate as low as possible, but with these huge increases it is very difficult to make this an affordable option. Some suggestions for our price conscious buyers are to try to purchase more cards from a single seller or to combine your orders into as few sellers as possible to help save on shipping charges.

How will this affect Sellers?

We have tried to maintain the same (adjusted) seller shipping allowances where possible. Sellers will notice they have extra materials costs in their international orders. The toughest part is the 1-3 card domestic orders. The materials costs is very low here and we expect sellers to be extra efficient in their packaging materials. As orders move into the 4-15 card range they will find a lot more flexibility in the materials costs.

As a company we have to support the lowest common denominator in shipping prices. Almost any rigid/non-uniform piece of mail could be classified as a parcel. Also using a bubble mailer will almost certainly get you classified as a parcel. Due to this and the heavy use of bubble mailers by many of our shippers we need to support parcel prices as the default. Some of our more clever shippers are still welcome to try to use letter sized envelopes with top loaders and pay non machinable surcharges which can yield a tidy profit on your shipping allowance or provide more money towards materials.

Check out the new Seller shipping allowances.

Insurance

Insurance rates have gone up $.05 to $.10 across the board and these prices have been adjusted accordingly on the site.

Please comment on any suggestions for improved shipping policies or feelings about the recent USPS postal increases and thanks for your continued support of CardShark!

Beta Site Preview

noreply@blogger.com (CardShark) — Wed, 19 May 2010 01:36:00 +0000

Well we finally have the new site up for a beta preview.

beta.cardshark.com

Please read the instructions at the top of the site. Our plan is to finish up a few last minute things and hopefully migrate to the new site in the upcoming week or two. We have an exciting list of new (and a few missing) features that we can finally get to work on at that point. We ask you to give the new site a test drive and let us know any bugs or problems you find. Also please be patient with us while we re-implement the last few features that may be missing from the original site.

Thanks,

All of us here at CardShark.com

Postage and Shipping Changes

noreply@blogger.com (CardShark) — Wed, 19 May 2010 01:32:00 +0000

We pride ourselves on having the lowest postage in the industry. At one point our postage was so low it was ridiculous, but then the USPS went and introduced the rigid sorting policy. This basically meant that any package that couldn't be machine sorted based on width or non-uniform rigidy (think top loaders or stacks of cards in an envelope) would not be sortable and would carry a surcharge.

At first we thought the sky was falling, but people have seemed to adjusted to the new postal rates fairly well in the last few years. We used to encourage two sets of packaging policies. The first is for the power sellers that can try to sneak by the system if they know what they are doing most of the time and shave a few cents off the total. The other is the more conservative model for everyone else. We had to adjust our prices for the more conservative model obviously.

With the new site launch our official shipping policies will be set to enforce the more conservative shipping model. This would include shipping in padded envelopes if appropriate or possibly bigger envelopes with top loaders or cardboard. We encourage people to package their item more as a parcel and not as an envelope since they are being paid for it anyway. They are still free to use envelopes if they know what they are doing.

We may do a Postal Service Tips series on this blog in the future for the hard core, but our standard shipping guidelines will no longer recommend or suggest any thing like this. Ultimately it is always up to the seller and they will be responsible for extra postage or possibly replacing damaged items if they try to cut corners.

Delivery Confirmation: Some think it's the bee's knees. Others hate it. It costs more and is harder for the average seller to get on their packages. Sadly CardShark.com is held to a higher power. Our e-commerce provider requires us to provide delivery confirmation sometimes and if the seller wasn't cautious enough to buy it, we get stuck holding the bag. Insurance is a poor substitute to prove that something was shipped and actually arrived. Delivery confirmation can actually be a great thing because it can prove an item was shipped, delivered or in limbo. This makes it much easier to figure out who gets a refund and who has to take responsibility for the loss.

With the launch of the new site we now offer the ability for buyers to purchase delivery confirmation. It is .70 which is the highest delivery confirmation charge at the post office. Power sellers can glean .15 extra
by using electronic delivery confirmation. We believe a large package is also required to support this. It cannot be purchased on envelopes probably. The buyer that purchases delivery confirmation will most likely receive a full refund at the sellers expense if the item isn't delivered or lost by the postal service. In the case that the seller shipped it, we will work with both parties for an equitable solution. If the buyer doesn't buy delivery confirmation, the seller isn't off the hook though. They are still responsible for delivering the promised product, but we will be more balanced in our resolution of any customer service complaints.

Check out CardShark.com for more information about packaging, shipping, and extra postal services.

Priority Mail: The USPS has created some good Priority Mail plans lately. They offer a fixed price plan for a reasonable price that let's you ship up to 4 lbs. This should cover just about any order and if the order is over 4lbs, you should be happy as a seller and pay the extra postage if any. You also get free packaging. Our new system will only provide sellers with the flat rate priority mail amount and expects them to use the free packaging (it's in your favor anyways) to qualify for the flat rates.

New Shipping Prices: We have simplified and revamped our shipping prices. We have fewer categories now (1-3, 4-16, etc) and have (slightly higher in some cases, and slightly lower in other cases) shipping charges. Our goal was to maintain overall similar shipping while giving sellers that extra boost in key areas where the previous shipping was inadequate or had changed over time. Check out our site for more information:

Seller Shipping Allowances

International shipping: We have revamped our internationl shipping prices. We have mostly added extra padding for sellers in this area and the buyers will be paying a bit more. This is to help defer the larger customer service expenses, shipping costs and ecommerce fees for overseas purchases. International Flat rate mail will be required at certain levels and the necessary (free) packaging from the USPS will also be needed, but once again it's in your favor. Check out the following pages for more information:

International Shipping Information

International Shipping Prices

Please let us know if you feel any changes are required to the shipping costs before we go live.

Seller sorting on card detail page.

noreply@blogger.com (CardShark) — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 01:43:00 +0000

Why is that seller with 4#@$#@$#@ xxxAwesomeDude 4#@$#@$#@ always first in the listings?

Well someone figured out how to game the system and we don't like it any more than you do. We have wanted to do something about this for a long time and are ready to address the problem after the new site launches.

The question: How do you sort listings?
The answer: By price silly.

The Next question: What if price is equal?
The answer: hmmm....

Alphabetical? By how long the seller has been a member? By their feedback rating? By their confirmation time? By their Premium seller level? Random? By divine inspiration? By a mystical unimplemented CardShark condifence score?

See why we never get anything done? It's tough to decide between all of these very viable options.

Let us know your thoughts. Give us your top 3 sorting preferences (in order). Once you get past the first option you find yourself in a recursive loop asking what to sort on next.

Another option is to let people buy top placement (hey we could use the cash). Maybe a bidding system. We like the sound of that....

A final option thinking outside of the box is to have a seller commendation system. This let's satisfied buyers give a hi-5 or a prop to a seller. We could sort on who has the most satisfied customers. This sounds like it would scale to get the best sellers on top too. This sounds interesting and would give those hard working sellers some warm fuzzies.... mmm fuzzy.

We could also let users choose their own sorting options as a preference. This would let each person pick what is most meaningful to them. This might even be extended to providing a list of favorite sellers and only include them or include them at the top.

Whatever we do it will probably be phase 2 after the site launches.

Send in those comments.

Notes and Seller Promotions

noreply@blogger.com (CardShark) — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:02:00 +0000

I am a power Ebay seller with 8 trillion ratings! Buy 1 get 1 free. Free shipping if you can find my character on World of Warcraft Bonechewer server near the fountain.

Notes, they are great for some things, but can start to look like spam real fast. Recently, they have been abused and turned into pure promotional vehicles for the sellers and are gumming up the cards for sale pages.

It's time for us to get tough on notes. A few months ago we did a big purge by deleting a bunch of these kinds of notes. When the new site launches it will become a major policy change.

All notes should only deal with something specific about a card. If it's about something else it is not a note, it is spam. We will be slowly cleaning up the old notes once the new site is live, but in the meantime, get in the habit of only entering notes for specific differences about a card. For example, if a card is a foreign language card you can say Chinese or Japanese in the notes field. If the card has a bite out of the corner from your dog, sure you should probably mention that. If you basement just had Noah's Ark pass through causing water damage to everything in sight including your awesome collection of power 9 then yes, if it's still remotely sell-able, mention it (and be sure to grade it as Heavy Play as well).

Special editions, or anything that doesn't have a checkbox on the seller page can be mentioned. We are attempting to add additional categorization for things like Foreign, Foil, Collector's edition, Signed, etc. Notes should rarely appear and if we feel you are abusing the notes field for better listing exposure your notes will be removed with a warning and possible suspension with multiple infringements.

Our new system removes the notes field from the bulk listing tools and even from single selling tools when listing more than one card. This should help prevent abuse and support the new policy.

With this change we can also improve the card selling pages by "rolling" up all items by price and condition. This will make these pages must easier to deal with and let buyers choose multiple quantities to add to cart from a drop down (similar to how MTGO is now). We are very excited about this change and we hope it will dramatically improve the buy process.

We see some frowning faces from the sellers asking "how will we promote ourselves?"
Answer: Run a member promotion and get that cute star next your name or become a premium seller and get a great Shark next to your name. Be awesome and get a 4.9 or 5.0 next to your name. If that isn't enough we are adding a more advanced Seller Profile page that gives all kinds of great stats on how awesome you are as a seller. This page will also in the future allow for a promotional message and even the ability to flag several (10?) cards you want to feature.

Let us know your comments on how to make the Seller Profile page better and anything related to notes. We are pretty firm on this change but will consider any ideas that makes the notes system or seller promotion abilities more viable.

Upcoming Password and Email Changes

noreply@blogger.com (CardShark) — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 00:51:00 +0000

Some new changes are coming to the user system with the new CardShark.com site which will be launching shortly.

We want to give a heads up to our users and make sure you understand these changes and how they will affect you.

1. Passwords
The first major change is resetting all passwords. Some people have passwords from over 9 years ago that have never been changed and were created with no length requirements. We are also moving to a new internally encrypted format and enforcing a password policy.

We will be randomly assigning new passwords to all users. When you attempt to access the new site (or Beta site) you will need to click the Forgot Password program from the Login screen instead of logging in with your old credentials. Your password will then be sent to your registered email address. At that point, you can then login to the system and either change your password or keep your new secure password.

Our new password policy will require passwords to be at least 6 characters long and contain 1 symbol. We know this is annoying, but with the rise in hacking attempts throughout the world, it is important. Note: All of this is described on the Login page as well.

If your email address on our system is wrong, you won't be able to login and you will need to write to us to sort this out. This leads us to our next big change...

2. Emails
Our new system will strongly enforce a few things for new users.

First, unique email addresses that support our policy of one account per user. Next, in order to access the site you will need to verify your email address. We currently only require sellers to verify. We are also improving the verification program to avoid some bugs with certain web-based email clients in the past. Having a valid email and being able to be contacted by our system is essential.

We have some other changes we will discuss in future blog posts, so stay tuned.

Major CardShark Site Upgrade

noreply@blogger.com (CardShark) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 18:51:00 +0000

First off, thanks to all our loyal customers for years of patronage. CardShark is in its ninth year, and its success is directly related to loyal users like you!
We often get requests for new features and small improvements to the site which we take very seriously but are frequently slow to move on. For this we apologize. One of the big problems is that our website was built in 2000 and the foundation is starting to show signs of age. You know that person on your block that never mows their lawn, never puts a fresh coat of paint on their house or never gets their sidewalk repaired? Well, we don't want to be that neighbor. We know our pages aren't all pretty CSS, we still use the occasional font tag, and the usability of the site leaves much to be desired.

Very shortly we will be introducing CardShark version 3.0 to address these issues and more. This upgrade will make it much easier in the future to build new tools for the site and APIs so our users can interact with the site exciting new ways. It will help us make bug fixes and add small user requested features quite easily. We will also be using this change to upgrade to new and improved servers for more capacity and speed. Most importantly the new site provides us with a foundation to expand.

The new site has been recoded with an eye towards better design and usability. Improvements include paging, sorting and better searching of all tables. The new code base is object-oriented and has a slick new CSS design. Our card detail pages now roll up similar items and let you select them in quantity, making it much easier to purchase multiple cards. We have thrown in a little ajax to make the site more fluid, and it is built for better performance and security.
We are adding some new features. A seller profile page and store front that will give sellers an opportunity to do some self promotion. We are also attempting to simplify our shipping charges. In addition, there will be a slight increase in these fees to keep up with the recent postal increases. There will also be an option for buyers to purchase delivery confirmation.

With any major change, there will be a few hiccups. New passwords will be required for enhanced security. We will be getting much tougher about member policies. Everyone will need to have a valid working email to use the site. The card notes field will have to be directly related to an item; promotional messages will no longer be allowed. Finally, we will institute a new policy that will put your inventory on vacation if you haven't logged in for a while. If you haven't made a sale in a year, your inventory will be deleted. Sellers will receive notifications via email if any of these things are going to happen so don't worry. Everyone should keep an eye on this blog for more specific details and notifications of future policy changes.

We know this update has been a long time coming, and we thank all of you for your patience. Our next goal is to get a working version of the site up for beta testing. We are about 95% done with the programming and will be extending a BETA invitation to some of our top users shortly. If you would like to participate, please let us know as well.

From all of us at Cardshark.com we wish you a Happy Holidays and look forward to launching the new site to you in early 2010.

All of us at CardShark.com

Welcome to the CardShark blog

noreply@blogger.com (CardShark) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:05:00 +0000

You might ask, "Why another blog?, Isn't there enough out there already?" Valid questions for sure. We often talk with many of our users one-on-one and the same questions or comments come up frequently. There are also various tips and techniques we have come up with over the years to make using http://www.cardshark.com/ a lot easier and more enjoyable. Additionally, there is a bit of a gap between our behind the scenes development of the site and our policies and a formal way to present this information to you the user so you can stay informed or even help contribute to the direction of the site.

Our aim with this blog is to bring some of this content to you. Here's a few things we have planned to talk about in the near future.

Tips and techniques
Frequent customer support questions and resolutions
Major site upgrades
Policy clarification, proposed changes and an open forum for user comments
User chosen topics.
New features and site news

Feel free to write to us with any questions you have about the direction of CardShark, behind the scenes questions or just general ideas you would like to see us pontificate on. Also don't forget to subscribe to our feed to keep up to date with new posts. We will probably only post 1-2 times a month although there may be a bit more early on.

All of us at CardShark.com