Competition **Giveaway** How can we make the hobby better and attract new people post Covid boom?

[Matt26]

GI Joe.....

 

[SharpysSports]

All good man, it's actually heartbreaking for me (and probably most of the old school peeps like yourself) to see where the hobby is at in 2022. I was luckily one of those 'big breakers' in the early days and loved every minute of it. Felt so lucky that I could afford to buy a 'med-high end $200 box' and if I got $20 worth of cards in it, I really didn't care. Just wanted the cards to add to the collection. Now with collectors getting absolutely reamed with the prices of boxes these days, even I can't justify buying that same box for 10 times the amount it used to be only to end up with $40 worth of cards. A $180 loss is tolerable (and fun with the right attitude), a $1960 loss is just outright stupidity. You have to draw the line somewhere. Lost in all of this is the fact that we actually engage in what was a 'kids hobby', which is why many of us who are on here are more than likely in the 40-45 year age group. We enjoy it because it brings back awesome memories of the golden age of collecting and we love the game. There's no way now I would encourage my kids into collecting and it's the saddest thing ever. They can't enjoy what we used to. Anyway, I'm happy to put my money where my mouth is and contribute to an Australian version of COMC but I'm thinking that it would need $300K easy to get a storage area that is suitable for cards plus all the other costs mentioned above. Only problem is I wouldn't know the first thing about how they scan so many cards so fast LOL

I got to page 3 of the thread and couldn't continue reading until I replied to this!

Many of you know I have built a trading card website called MERQARY. The site allows you to not only keep track of what cards you have but also buy and sell on the purpose built trading card marketplace.

I have been speaking to my website developers about this idea for a few months now and they needed some feedback from others within the community (not just me) to back the idea before they would add some very minor tweaks to the current website to cater for this. This means the software side of it is incredibly easy and could possibly be live in 4-6 weeks!

MERQARY would still allow members to upload their own cards but we would also have the option of sending cards to MERQARY for scanning and uploading straight into your Trophy Room. From there you can put them in a PC list or sell them on the marketplace.

We have identified that the majority of our current members are Australian and as such one of the other tweaks to the site will be to introduce AUD as opposed to just having everything in USD. We will also explore adding PayPal as a payment option as this has been mentioned a couple of times.

Storing the cards is another challenge but one I am willing to tackle and I have had some discussions with some people around this. I already have a cataloguing system in place for my own cards which will work perfectly for millions of cards.

If anyone wants to discuss this I am happy to create another thread to discuss how this could work, pricing etc. as well as provide updates on progress.