we're back tori can you believe it is episode twenty of the staging area we have been wow doing this for quite some time celebrating our twentieth anniversary with all of the loyal listeners how are you feeling about twenty episodes in the can yep that that's a milestone of sorts i'm kinda surprised i didn't realize when we were at ten or twenty or anything but yeah it it makes me feel a little old because i feel like we've been doing this for like two months and that means we've been doing it for quite a lot longer than that but no it's it's been fun and you know here's to many more yes here's to many more and i will anytime i do have a submission and it goes through and we're recording this i always like to bring it up and tory before we hit record i was looking in my app and i didn't realize this because i had a big i had several cards that ended and what was fun about it was instantly after the sales all the big cards that sold in my submission i they instantly got paid for and right like i had the money to my disposal and that was awesome and then i there was like a lingering you know couple hundred bucks that were out there and i i was like oh yeah i forgot about that and i just looked at the app and i have two hundred and eighty dollars and i just have to hit request payout and that that money's get going right into my account so shout out the app man definitely i've i've used a lot of companies to consign my cards with the app is my favorite for sure yeah it's it it's funny because you know we had so many things we were working on for so long that was just more like the getting things shipped and keeping our inventory organized and all that that the app waited probably way longer than any of us wanted it to but it was inevitable but it's been super cool i think you know especially in these days of people want like urgent fast at your fingertips pop it open and i can't it's the funny the little thing so to a customer the great thing is they'll sit there and you can watch your number you know live update like awesome i've got more money for us the wonderful thing is we used to get these messages every day like did you get my package did you get my package did you my package did you get my package and now it's like one app push notification hey package arrived here's the date that's going on ebay we got it here's the service level and so it is wonderful wonderful for us just like it is our customers so customers so glad you're enjoying it hope others are as well and if anyone hasn't they should download it because it's a much easier way to track things than using the website i don't know how you feel about this but one of the underrated parts that i really enjoy is the fact that i don't have to go into ebay and then go find all my auctions and heart them and then look at them through ebay i can just look at them through the app and that's like the consolidation of like what i'm trying to buy as a collector on ebay is in one place and then what i'm selling is in another place and i i enjoy the separation of those two things yeah it's it's funny we have two like very distinct camps of our customers we've got these people who like they are ebay people through and through and they wanna live there so really all they do is open the app to see their balance they click the view all your listings on ebay bridge over to ebay and just watch everything there and then we've got the other camp who's like you who's like if i can just stay in one place and see everything i'm happy and so they just sit there they watch the you know top auctions at the bottom of the screen they go to their listings page in our app and they never touch ebay so you know you do you everybody whatever whatever works for you we we're behind it of course you know i'm i'm gassing up dc sports a seven because you know we're partners and i'm using the platform but one more thing and as i'm thinking about this last submission that i really like i like the seamless nature of but i sent in my box and it was i think it was like a a friday it was i was told that it was processed and it was listed on i think it was like a tuesday and the cards were up it was a five day auction and my cards ended on saturday night night and my money was available and it's like i can't remember a time where i sent in something and in like a week's time frame not only had the auctions ended but then i was paid out and to me because typically my if i'm sending cards to you like my why i'm doing that is because i'm trying to pay off a card that i just bought and so like i don't know that that whole process like the seamless nature of it like i just i just love and really appreciate what you guys are doing yeah and i i love that you're like so many of us you didn't say i'm getting the money to go buy a card i want you're like i already bought it i need to pay it off now yes that's that's the honest version yeah i'll i'll say overall when it comes to consignment stuff like the the app has been great i mean when when we look at like where we're at right now i think you know the app has been a big win the the biggest difference with us and most people is our payouts are also automated so like if you hit that request payout button it just processes it to your bank right that second and deposits it a lot of the consignment companies are we do it once a week or we do it twice a week or we do it you know every thursday or whatever where we really feel like we're not doing great right now just while we're doing the full state of the consignment business here is is just wait time and and it's just you know the hobby is just booming right there are so many new people everybody wants to sell and as one of the bigger names in the consignment space we're just flooded with volume so you know while i think the app is great we are fast to get people paid we wanna be faster to list people's cards and for anybody who doesn't know just you know shouting out what we offer that's good you can always send in premium it costs you five bucks a card but they go up the very next day they run five days and your money's immediately available so like you said you're paid within seven days which is gonna beat anywhere else or you can do the twenty card or less express send us any cards as long as there's twenty or fewer of them we list them within three days you don't wait long what we need to address is our standard you know bulk service level which right now is a eighteen nineteen business day wait time and we know that's just too long and so you know for us right now it's trying to hire more people extend our hours we're adding weekend shifts things like that because that's kind of the one place when we look at where we're at we're like man so many things are going so great but it's also not cool to wait three to four weeks to have your cards listed and we wanna be sure that we're not just catering to kind of that express premium stuff our ideal is that that bulk standard submission comes down to about two weeks and then pairs well with everything else so that's our mission here over the next month or so is just drive that weight back down to around two weeks and then we'll feel really good about where we're at do you feel like at this point in seeing the ebbs and flows of like submissions that you as the kind of operator looking at everything and trying to make things more efficient you have a good pulse on like the different levers you need to pull and i know like hiring you said hiring and it's like you can't just like snap your fingers and someone's there doing it like yeah is it but do you feel like at this point just when you see something explode like the the mail coming in on a regular basis like you know how to solution it in order to get the wait times lower just based on previous experience yeah for the most part and honestly a big part of it is just adding bodies and adding hours you know our our operation is really built where like we've talked about this before we talked about this a little bit we talked about like what psa has done versus what we've done like you know we never really compromise on the express and premium services because those have to be there so if somebody wants something listed fast there's always a path to have card you know delivered to us sold and you paid within a week like we have to keep offering that but on the bulk stuff you know we just have so much coming in it really is like we've got the tech we've got the systems it's it's very easy to scale it just takes people and it just isn't like you said you can't snap your fingers and have ten quality rock stars in your building working for you if anybody in the world could do that like a lot of companies would just be thriving even more than they are so for us it's just yeah working with like shops we know in the area talking to our employees like who knows somebody who might be looking you know we'll probably start using social media a little bit more like just try to find people we have a lot of people who wanna work remotely for us but unfortunately really the help we need is like you gotta be within the four walls here so yeah as we as we focus on that it'll definitely help bring weight down and and that's just you know that's mission number one right now by by far awesome i'm excited about this chat i feel like there's more stuff i wanna dig into about current state consignment i wanna talk about a trend i've been seeing just people posting not dc sports eighty seven specific but just in general with different platforms on like the non nonpayer front we've touched on it we wanna get your perspective on that but before we do there were some interesting sales that came through from the past week and the first one is a oldie but goodie a nineteen fifty four bowman mickey mantle psa eight sold for twenty three thousand seven hundred dollars and this card is a pop eighty eight and what's interesting about the sale is this is the all time high of a psa eight mickey mantle bowman selling february twenty fourth twenty twenty six through dc sports eighty seven obviously mantle stuff is just yeah the hobby loves it but like what what like how do you react to that to see like a card like this sell for an all time high right now yeah yeah i mean i think you know it's just we've talked about this a little bit before but like the iconic cards the iconic names the goat stuff it just continues to perform and i and i think it's just as we get more and more people in the hobby and especially as we see you know it's a it's a weird mix because you've got people coming back into the hobby after years away who are now getting older they've got more disposable income you've got you know kids who are just kinda getting into it early on but there's a lot of people kind of who you know treat these as investments now right and we see the kevin o'leary wearing dual logo mans around his neck on the red carpet and stuff it's like it's that kind of thing where it's we know mantle is as blue chip and safe an investment as exists in baseball cards it's you know the jordan of of baseball and so it doesn't surprise me that the stuff continues to appreciate and i think as you get more people who buy to hold or buy as an investment supply dries up and you know like you said there's what eighty eight of these so it's it's not like other cards where there's gonna be a hundred more coming out of psa next week like it's probably gonna take us months or a year to get eighty eight to go to eighty nine if we see another one that soon so you know just laws of supply and demand here is what i think drives sales like this you said a lot there about mantle being blue chip like comparing them to you know being like the jordan of baseball and i think definitely from a collectability perspective and i know you have you know as a primary baseball card collector focusing on a baseball like what like how would you summarize just like your like observations of mantle and the mantle market like over the last you know several years or since the hobby has gotten into this new tier and exploded like obviously these cards are selling for a ton of money and people want them but like what what have just in terms of mantle like has it always been this way are we seeing like acceleration on collectors wanting mantle like any observations there you have i i think it's always been this way it just goes up and up and up you know i laugh when we see like the videos from card shows in the nineties and what fifty two mantles were doing so i i think the boom of people joining the hobby at all different levels and with all different budgets like i said definitely accelerates some of the appreciation in this market but at the end of the day it's you know the premier name from kind of the like you know what some people probably consider the heyday of the sport at least you know vintage wise it was back at fifties and sixties and he was the guy he played for new york and and he's just always been the guy in cards which is interesting because even when you look at you know mantle up against like the mays or aaron or ted williams similar cards similar years like he's always just been head and shoulders above those guys and so it's kinda like all his cards you know you you look at some players like take a more modern example like griffey and it's like okay the the eighty nine upper deck griffey is an iconic card and that's the one to own of him and he's got a he's probably the most collectible modern guy i think but with mantle it's like every card feels iconic because they're just all known so well and so i think as people look at hey i wanna get into vintage i wanna own one of the iconic cards in the hobby it's just he's such a draw in a unique way that other players aren't you know save maybe ruth if you're you know playing in the the weight class of buying you know thirty three gaudis and things like that but most people aren't we move over to a current yeah in year fifty four bowman to a two thousand thirteen bbm ohtani first first version stadium event promo mind you sorry yeah let me get all the details right don't worry those were all in the listing so we did our job here so this card i i had just heard some individuals talk about ohtani cards in market and somebody was talking about these bbm cards and i was preparing for this episode and i saw oh there's a card and then i saw the sale and i i dude i couldn't believe it so that is that comma in the right place that was my question and then yeah i guess nothing with ohtani should surprise me at this point but this card sold on march first for nineteen thousand six hundred and one dollars and i asked you ahead of this i said did this get paid for and you said it did and what's crazy about it is the last public sale was in january of this at psa nine and it sold for thirty five hundred dollars so i mean ohtani like what do you it's ohtani mania yeah i mean the the the two things that jump out to me here are one the price i will minor caveat disclaimer just call attention to something the thirty five hundred dollar sale was a fixed price so i will say lesson learned to some good call i know there are those out there who say hey fixed price means i know what i'm gonna get for it and i don't have to worry about an auction not doing as well as i want if you're working with somebody like us or or any any ebay account that's got a big platform and a lot of followers we've got like a hundred and fifty thousand followers on ebay now you're gonna get eyes on your auctions and so sometimes the fixed price theory is you know i've got a super factor i don't know what's gonna sell for i wanna put it up a hundred grand or best offer and kinda figure out what the market says but in this case it's like everybody wants ohtani no ohtani's underperformed when it comes to sales so i think the lesson here is sometimes just trust the market and know the demands there and let people fight it out for your card because this is a five x difference in two months and i guarantee you this means yes the ohtani market is heating up as baseball season rolls around but it also means that you know thirty five hundred dollar card could have fetched a lot more if listed differently you mentioned griffey earlier and i think when you think about nineties and early two thousand it's like you think about griffey and obviously him being kind of the top of the mountain undeniably ohtani is the top of the mountain right now but i mean the the the fervor the excitement the exuberance around his cards feels like when i was a kid and people were chasing griffey cards do you does do you think it it is similar or different like how do you absorb like what is happening with ohtani's cards right now yeah i mean obviously it's you know ohtani big gap everybody else when it comes to baseball cards right now you know maybe the next tier is like a judge right now you know i know skeens has chased and some other guys but it's funny because you know the last couple weeks obviously spring training has now started for baseball you watch like some of these young guys you know connor griffin is getting all this praise and all this attention he's got three home runs already this spring his cards it's like everyone that sells beast is the last one and it's just this hockey stick appreciation of connor griffin cards and it's like that's ohtani but we've been seeing this play out for like five straight years now and and so yeah i think the you know griffey being like the guy in collecting them yes that's otani now but it's just like i would say on steroids but i wanna be careful there you know rip in profar's career but you know it's like the international element right so the fact that he's a global guy was a star in japan before he came here the fact that he pitches any hits the fact that we've got the first fifty fifty home you know season the fact that we've got back to back world series it's like it is griffy with all this other stuff going on top of it at a time when the hobby is ten x what it was so you know i i think ohtani is a unicorn in that way i don't think we'll see another one but it's just that question of like will it ever stop and where will it stop and i don't think we all know that answer right now you segued into the next one which is aaron judge's twenty thirteen bowman draft picks and prospects psa ten population three hundred of this selling for seventy five hundred dollars which is a awfully strong sale baseball's heating up like when i went through this i didn't intentionally pick all baseball cards initially but that's where we ended up and i know you're a baseball guy and i think judge will probably always live in the shadow of ohtani collecting but it seems like this time of the year people don't forget about judge and start buying cards like this to him yeah for sure and it and it is wild that you know we look at this sale and we're like alright great sale it did you know almost eight thousand dollars and then you know of course the first thought in my mind when i see this sale is like but i know notani would do thirty five forty you know and so it it is crazy but yeah i mean he's i think he's option number two you know in baseball right now you know massive market performs year over year you know he's had his mom's injury but overall stays healthy he's always phenomenal he's on the field there's already you you know when you go to the season it's like he's the mvp favorite okay we just start there so yeah another market that'll be interesting to watch because it's it's some of the ohtani hype with you know there hasn't been the deep playoff run you know at least to a world series title they've been deep in the playoffs but you know i think that maybe matters less in baseball than other sports but it's almost like you know nobody's gonna stack up to the ohtani resume so but you know he's he's gonna get to five hundred home runs you know barring some catastrophic injury and so it'd be interesting to see as the career kinda is on the back half here where judge ends up when it's all said and done but yeah if you're holding judge stuff you're in you're in good shape still for sure i wanna make sure to give you a little bit of space just to talk baseball since you know we're round in the corner and we're you know getting that conversation going like what's on your mind with this baseball year ahead like what what are you seeing obviously i know you're a big fan but like what excites you about going into this year yeah i mean i'm excited about the orioles because i think we'll be better but you know maybe i'm just a fan who puts on his homer you know rose colored glasses and sees everything that way but no i it's gonna be interesting so i i don't like the abs that is that has nothing to do with the hobby that's just a sports comment but i hate it i i think framing pitches and you know learning to have strategy around an umpire strike zone and all that is a big part of the game and i'm not a fan of this tap my head take a pause spin around look what the camera said so we'll see how it goes but yeah there's just so much going on in baseball i'm i'm worried about you know all the labor league agreement stuff that we end up with a weird strike situation or the salary cap stuff gets ugly or whatever but you know we'll we'll see more than anything i'm just excited because when baseball season starts it means an influx of cool baseball cards here and my favorite thing about baseball is i think more than any other sport you have the most guys to kinda chase because you've got your and judges who are the elites of the game today but we're also chasing seventeen year old international guys who have their first card out eighteen year olds just drafted out of high school and college pitchers we think might be up this you know this summer and so there's just so many levels to it so i i'm just thrilled that it's baseball season we get to talk a lot about baseball cards and know that in the coming months we will be heavily talking baseball when it comes to the hobby goings on of it all yes help me understand this because this is a question i've been waiting for to it's been in my mind as i consume data i look at baseball card market and i see what you see in ohtani and judge going nuts and then there's a prospecting people are going nuts about them obviously paul skeens right you got a pitcher that's commanding a lot of value or a lot of money in his cards but then i like dig some layers deeper and i look at like a player like mookie betts and i'm just like and this guy has had just like an outstanding career like is a winner is proven and i look at like his cards and his sales and i'm like they he doesn't have like the big the as much of excitement or fervor as like you know maybe a tier or two tiers ahead of him so i don't know to me it just seems like i don't know if that tran what that translates to long term but it seems like to me baseball more than any other sport it's one of those where you can just like go buy into a guy like mookie betts and have a really fun time and it probably a pretty decently affordable time collecting one of the era this era's greats for you know maybe pennies on the dollar as com or to otani yeah for sure no it's it's interesting you know a guy like him i think there's a couple things there you know for one i think when you're on a team and you're not the guy i think the hobby does react to that a little bit so you know he's gonna live in ohtani's shadow and honestly even in ohtani's shadow it's like the crowd of elite names in baseball that are not ohtani on that team so freddie freeman now kyle tucker yamamoto rookie sasaki like there's just there's all these players there and i think it can be challenging to stand out a little bit because you've got ohtani and then he's kinda like option b he hasn't been you know maybe as elite last year and the last couple years quite where he was before so that probably doesn't help and i think with baseball maybe this is true of every sport but like you kinda have to be ascending and it's it's the hype and the buzz machine that drives your hobby market or you have to be the guy and just playing out of your mind and making everybody else look like you know they're high schoolers playing against you like ohtani does sometimes and so like with bets it's like you know we obviously saw a better market for him when he was in boston he was peak of his career they were winning championships and it's kind of like you know if you see a prospect who's his market climbs from say a hundred dollars chrome auto to a five hundred dollar chrome auto and then he debuts and he goes you know one for twelve in his first three games the the acute drop off is just so fast and i think we just live in this what have you done for me lately world that it's like has betz been a top five player in baseball for the last year or two no is he a guy who's kind of on the rise well not anymore he's established and so it's just kinda like we're very unfairly i'm picking things off here that aren't fair because he's gonna be a hall of famer he's gonna have a phenomenal career stat line when it's all said and done but yeah i think some of those things maybe explain why it's yeah he's still valuable but not what you would think if i just put the stats on paper and i said look at what this guy has done you know and then you compare them to somebody else this is i'm i wanna maybe keep grabbing ahold of this because i feel like there's a lot of fun things that we can dig into and i let's just like maybe we'll do more on it later but i wanna hit the prospecting side and the bowman stuff i saw someone post earlier this week about jason dominguez and like basically it was like referencing the dominguez sales and then referencing like his struggle to make the opening day roster for right the yankees and i just want like i know baseball prospecting is fun it's a big cornerstone of the market i get interested in the passion and people and the discovery and the prices it's just fun to follow like how like what is your mindset in that flavor of baseball card collecting like how many winners do you really have like what do you need to do to be successful to me it just seems like the ultimate crapshoot of people like in game of risk but i'd love to get kinda your understanding of just like bowman prospecting and like how you think about it yeah i mean that's a there's two hours of us recording right there if we really open this can open it up man and it and it's funny because like some of the things that i think people who maybe aren't people who are in the hobby probably get this but like people who aren't wouldn't understand it just it's not intuitive like dominguez is twenty three now so he is officially like too old to be exciting now like that's the way prospecting works right if you look at it any year of bowman bowman chrome bowman draft products coming out age is super critical to value like we we want the person to be young with as high a ceiling as possible and that's what we chase and i think that's the way everybody works you know if you get these college bats say coming out and they're twenty one twenty two twenty maybe twenty three years old already like that's one knock against them right there because they're not young enough to be the next guy whereas we can look at a jesus made the way we looked at ronald acuna junior you know eight years ago and say oh my gosh this guy's eighteen performing against competition way above his age and that's what we wanna see same thing with connor griffin he's nineteen he could be an opening day starting teenager and we haven't seen that in forever you know that's like griffey stuff you know you just don't see it that often and so i think every time a prospect heavy product comes out the first things people are looking at is what team are they on how old are they what's their ceiling and what kind of talent are they you know you look at guys who are like elite defensively not exciting you look at guys who are phenomenal players but don't really have power not that exciting you know it's all about kind of that projectability and so it's i think it's different just because these guys start having cards so much earlier than you see in the other sports where you know you don't have the same thing quite as early with nba and nfl kind of stuff but it is wild you know and then that's just unlike the we all wanna pretend we're scouts when we're not and pretend we know everything about baseball when we don't and that's before you even get into like the weirdness of prospecting guys and bowman prospect collectors and like our true colors versus others and the market for those kind of things which is you know also just become so different than it used to be oh wow this is a can of worms and we'll we'll we'll reserve a time to dig into it further but i i wanna like i understand the age i understand like the yankees of it all but like you help me deconstruct like how we got to the like i just remember some of these like sales of like the dominguez super fracture like i don't know was a half million dollars or something it was wild but like his sales just went nuts without him doing anything how did we get here with him as a player and is he like the most egregious case of this that we've seen in this era or is there somebody else that i'm missing pro probably just because his stuff was so so valuable and he was you know the number one guy and back in twenty twenty when his auto first came out and he was only you know seventeen or eighteen years old and and all this like it it was unique he was a yankees prospect to five to a player like all this stuff and then just hasn't lived up to it kinda gotten passed by other guys so yeah i you know how we got here i i think is just what we see with a lot of the hobby like if you go back to twenty fifteen twenty sixteen you know go ten years ago you were buying bowman chromeboxes for you know a hundred and twenty bucks hundred and forty probably something like that and even the elite names like think at twenty sixteen so that was when you know so to and vlad so to wasn't huge initially but like vlad was a big name and he was probably a hundred dollar auto if a guy like vlad rolled around today that's a thousand dollar auto right and the the wax is gonna cost you five six hundred a box instead of one hundred a box and so i think some of it is just as the hobby look at repacks look at the price of wax look at the grading game look at everything has become more expensive and the overall appreciation of values there's just so much more speculation and in doing that people are looking for what can i speculate on to make money and what is more ripe for speculation than young young unproven guys with undefined but incredibly high ceilings where you can just kinda go play that game and so in the kinda gambler attitude that the hobbyist picked up in a lot of segments like nothing is as aligned with that as bowman prospecting and and that's why you see that happen but with dominguez i i hope he figures that out of you know best for any player got nothing against him but i think at this point it's like man it would be awful hard to turn that around and somehow reignite the the hype machine that was once there since we're you know six years after the fact now it hasn't happened that's good context well i'm excited to dig into more of these prospecting and baseball chats with you i i wanna talk about that i wanna spend time on this like nonpaying topic that i've been just seeing on on instagram let's just dive into that so i saw a couple posts that triggered me wanting to talk to you about this and one of the posts i i'm not gonna mention any names because i don't know even though they posted it i don't know if they wanted me to like reiterate because it's not necessarily fun but i saw a collector post something about letting go of some cards that they absolutely love and they sold those cards up for those cards went to for auction because then they were in the same instance as me like a card popped up we can't control when they come and a big card popped up that they needed they made the decision to buy them and then on the back end they consigned cards to you know pay for the card that they had already bought and in the post they put like this sucks these these two cards or whatever are gonna have to be relisted because they fell victim of a nonpayer and i like i'm feel very fortunate that in my instances where i have to sacrifice cards that i really love because there's a big card that i just bought like i feel very fortunate that i've never gone through the pain of like nonpayment on like those cards sure i've nonpayment has been a part of cards that i've sent and used relist them and whatever but i think about that instance when you're just like preparing you made a big decision preparing for something to be clean and you can move on enjoy your card and say goodbye to your other ones but it's almost like this reminder of like oh god my card again and may like people are questioning like why is this being relisted what's wrong with it and it's this whole thing so i wanted to just get into that like with you and like how i know we've talked about like nonpayers being a thorn in your side but you know you build things to like try to alleviate the process but i guess starting here like do you think the nonpaying element is getting better the same different like how how are you looking at that at tc sports eighty seven yeah so i'll say for us it has gotten better and i'll i'll give you know credit where it's due to to ebay on that one is it still an issue absolutely do they still need to do more about it yes and i know they're looking at some of those things those are things like we need better controls on ebay and i'll say every platform but just because ebay is our world that's what i speak to of just like vetting buyer accounts you know we need some kind of like identity confirmation so that nobody can have multiple accounts and create a burner to go buy something and then not pay for it all the kinda you know shenanigans we see pulled in a marketplace like that but i'll say that since ebay rolled out the autopay feature what we've seen just if you take our overall trends is fewer unpaid items but more time from auction close to payment so you know as somebody who consigns you know i guess that's a you know a question i can even post to you and i think we usually know the answer of you know what matters to you more that you have to wait a little longer that doesn't get paid and it's kind of a stupid sounding question because obviously the most important thing is that you get paid because so many accounts now since we do combined shipping so we sell so many items you know we'll have say a seven day auto pay so they win an item on saturday night it automatically is triggered for automatic payment the next saturday night and so we see a lot of buyers who aren't anymore going in and like manually completing checkout it's i'll let it sit if i buy something else from dc sports over the next week it'll get combined with that great saturday my card gets charged move on and so what we've seen from that is fewer people who are you know i'm gonna air quote the word forgetting here because i don't think you're always forgetting to pay sometimes you're choosing not to you got overextended whatever but we are seeing more people completing checkout following through their purchases but often with a couple extra days that didn't used to be there or maybe before it was you shop over the weekend on monday morning you open your app you pay on ebay now it's more of that alright i know payment's automatic i'm just gonna keep shopping and it happens when it happens so that's kind of the overall trend we've seen but of course that that doesn't fix everything and we absolutely still have items we have to relist things that don't get paid and you know to your point that is very circumstantial around like how much that stings you know if you're selling a player and somebody buys it and then the guy gets hurt and so they don't fall through with payment and now you're holding the card when his market tanks that's not okay you know if you have the same situation where it's that you were buying for another thing you were gonna pick up or put money into or you already bought and now that money's not coming into you that's a big problem and so that's why it's one of those things that no matter what ebay or we dc sports as a seller do or anybody like you always have to be thinking what more could we do how do we better protect this things like that because it is just truly flat out unfair obviously to the owner of those cards what what is more of a challenge is it more of a challenge to try to reason and understand like why someone is bidding and nonpaying or is a bigger challenge like having to communicate to the seller that an item didn't get paid and i'm sure there's a million questions and you ultimately have to say like we've just gotta relist it because that's like our only option like which which one of those is is more challenging for for your business i mean to to be honest at at the size we're at now neither of them are really challenging the the challenge is secret number three which is how do we work with ebay and leverage our own systems and our listing process and when we send payment reminders and what you know buying criteria we put in for who we allow to bid on our items like that is what really matters because while those things you brought up are super important and i'm not trying to trivialize them and say they don't matter like it doesn't matter to our customers who sell through us why the person didn't pay it matters that they didn't pay whether they overspend or they maxed their card out or they just decided they didn't want it or they found one for cheaper like there's all these excuses the you know the kid gave the phone to the dog who opened the app you wouldn't i know we've talked about this and one day i will dig up some of the gems of ebay messages to share with everyone but like that doesn't matter your card didn't get paid that's a problem so i always say it's not challenging so it's kinda like nobody's gonna care why they just care that it happened and when it comes to communicating it back to the owner of the card who consigned with us it's not a lot we can do right because it's hey the buyer didn't pay i can't go into their account and cause them to pay i can block them from any future purchases i can relist your card as quickly as possible i can put in tighter criteria to try to be sure that type of person doesn't do it again and we do that subactively but it's figuring out what levers we can pull there that's the challenge there's just you know the customers get it it it's a part of selling it would happen to them the same as if they sold through us and so it's just kinda something we have to roll with and be proactive about the kinda reactive nature of like why did it happen and how do i tell this to somebody it's like yeah it's bad news but you know we don't stop and have deep heart to hearts about everyone it's just get it relisted try to get them paid and and kinda onto the next i think about things that stink in the auction format nonpaying stinks last night right before i like got in my bed i was brushing my teeth and there was a card i don't know why but it was ending at like five thirty in the morning and i decided to i'm usually like last minute last second put in my bid but i'm like i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna either be in bed or i'll be up and groggy and forget about this so i'm gonna put in my bid so i put in my bid which i felt like was a strong bid and it instantly got a notification like you have been outbid i was like you gotta be kidding me and i looked at it and i clicked into the bid history and i had been outbid by a zero feedback right bidder and so i was like welp i want this card but there's no way and then i looked at the bid history i was like yeah this looks suspicious so i guess like what it what is a bigger issue is is right now like in twenty twenty six in an operation that is is high volume as dc sports is it the show bidder or is it the nonpayer or or is it just both yeah i mean it's it's both i i guess if i could eliminate one from the world i would eliminate the shill bidder because a lot of shill bidders are nonpayers i think it i think it's more often that a shill bidder is a nonpayer than a nonpayer is a shill bidder and that sentence sounds weird but you know and the problem is shill bidders both create problems with cards that sell to other people and they end up winning cards they're not gonna pay for so that's that's the bigger problem to me and that's why i say i think the last like huge domino to fall on ebay with addressing this like as a as a macro problem is just buyer integrity it's we can we can do a lot around who can bid and who can't but you kinda have to take it a step further and say who has an account that's able to bid and if we can limit that so you don't get those zero feedbacks you're talking about or make that person submit photo id to prove who they are to sign up for an account so you know if they already have an account why do you need a second one and like getting out ahead of some of that stuff i think is the case because yeah it is frustrating and you know we run into those cases where a zero feedback will win something and the owner of the card will tell us hey can we do a second chance offer to this person you know that second place like you in this scenario and we'll do it for them sometimes but it's also tricky because then you're gonna get in your shoes you're gonna say well yeah i know i was second but i don't know if my second place bid was right because of x y z i saw in the bid history and so we try to offer some of those kinda creative solutions of hey if you want us to try a second chance we can sometimes it does get accepted sometimes it doesn't if you want us to cancel on the zero feedback person and relist as a buy it now because with buy it now like ebay you can require immediate payment where they don't even win the item until they pay that's the only thing that kinda completes the sale that's great i will say that's one interesting element of live selling like with live selling the the charge happens automatically there during the stream so you win something to pay for it so if i want the day after the stream if i got five cards that didn't get payment cancel the orders relist them on core auction go from there because i know that person didn't pay barring it being a hundred thousand dollar sale worth you know wire transfers and all that kind of mess but so yeah it's just you know we we can try to be as nuanced as we as we can but the whole reason we're talking about it is this whole problem right it's just about trying to do what we can to minimize it until it gets more of a you know a broad platform wide solution so i love this this is a good discussion i think the you've you've the theme i picked up on is that there are improvements throughout and these things though they'll likely always be thorns in our sides at some level when you look at maybe like this time next year and just like auction platforms ebay's things that they're doing things that are working like do you like i i don't want i think it'd be naive to say like we'll get to this point where they'll never be a nonpayer they'll never be a show bidder bidder but do you feel like steps are being taken in the right direction to protect the kind of both buyers and sellers just in in this era as new people are entering more money is being spent than ever before like how do you feel about where we're headed yeah i mean i feel better now than i did a year ago you know i think autopay has helped and things like that i think the plethora of resources out there to understand market value market trends comps things like that you know people using cardladder and using everything else to understand this stuff like that's helpful and some of it is like just you have to be smart like i can't tell you how many people i've told you know they'll say hey i want a card for this i think it should have only sold for this but a two feedback person did this with a couple minutes left and it's it's tricky right because i'm aware enough and i'm not so naive as to not realize that somebody could've put in a bid for malicious reasons but at the same time it's like only put in what you were willing to pay there are so many people who okay i really want this card i think it's worth two hundred bucks i gotta be sure i don't lose it so the last second i'm gonna bid three thousand i get it i think we've all probably used similar strategy strategies before but you also have to be smart enough to say okay give yourself a cushion where you're still willing to pay because you could also have two people thinking that way and don't get me wrong if you're selling a card you love it when it's a a buyer's war at the end and you get a ton for it but but yeah i we're in better shape than we were resources help things ebay has done help and i think just across all platforms it's you know the same stuff we're talking about you just have to look at it and say how do we continue to chip away at the problem it's it's not an overnight fix you know some some things are hey you wanna be able to offer sixty day auctions instead of thirty day okay that's probably a click of a button for a product person and it's easy how you weed out everyone who doesn't pay for something and how you control their buying limits and what they can do it's just a it's a lot you know more tangled web there but but i definitely feel better and i'm optimistic that going forward because i know with how close we work with ebay i know it's a huge priority i know there are things coming this year that will continue to help so as those get closer i know we'll hear more about them those add more confidence as as we go you know piece by piece awesome good context before we get out of here i gotta ask you i know we had talked about january being a massive month for tc sports have you reconciled february yet is is the hobby still alive the hobby is still alive yeah huge huge months for us to start the year i think we talked after january closed and we had done fourteen million in sales in january we ended up doing seventeen in february so big big month you know obviously we're you know we're we're kind of the the volume guys we've definitely seen a massive skyrocket in the high end stuff we're selling which came from our rate change you know we changed to where one to five thousand went out ninety six percent now five thousand up ninety seven so that's really brought a lot of high end stuff in and as we've seen more success with getting those paid and having really good results on those auctions that's helped a ton but yeah huge huge months back to back we had our first week the other week where we listed it was a hundred and one thousand new auctions in one week that was a record for us so yeah volume is wild so i am not kidding when i say number one priority is find some good people get them trained bring them into the team and and do everything we can just to push the weight down so we can just keep the keep the machine humming along those numbers really put all of that into context good lord yeah when you ask me you know how i feel about having conversations about somebody when their card doesn't get paid look when three hundred and fifty four hundred thousand auctions a month go up i wish i lived in a world where i could stop pull up each one give them a phone call have a little chat about it but that is not the world i live in certainly not appreciate everyone out there for tuning in and listening to twenty episodes of the staging area here we've got more on the other side tory appreciate it man looking forward to the next one always thanks