First, let me assure you, the ProgRuin readers, that the Big Sidewalk Sale I mentioned last week was a success! I cleared out lots of comics from the backroom, giving me the space I needed to start revising/expanding my back issue section. That…will be lots of work, but at least now I can do it!
Also, I didn’t realize my passing reference to the online comic selling portal Hipcomic last week would generate commentary, but let me try to address a point or two you folks brought up.
adrian asked
“Is hipcomic disappointing because of the pricing, or the traffic? or the completed sales? or is it just too obscure a site to make it useful?”
To be fair, it may have been one of those “it’s not you, baby, it’s me” situations, as I was primarily using Hipcomic to sell leftover stock from the new comics shelf that I didn’t put into the back issue bins. It wasn’t necessarily High Demand Items, it was just largely low demand recent back issues. (Though every once in a while some random back issue would suddenly sell out from my listings and I’d discover the property had just been optioned as a movie or something.)
I suspect sales on the platform seem to lean toward the CGC-graded items, which as regular readers of this site know I prefer to avoid. That said, I haven’t given up on Hipcomic entirely, but I think I’m going to be a little more judicious in what I list there.
I don’t know how much traffic they get, but I think they’re doing plenty of sales on there. As to how obscure they are, I will say that whenever I mention “Hipcomic,” the response is invariably “what’s that?” I should note that when I search out specific comics on Google, I do get Hipcomic listings as results most of the time, so its footprint may be expanding at least a little.
And just to wrap up this particular set of inquiries, I’ve never had any problem with completed sales. Everyone there who purchased items from me paid up quickly, and I can’t recall having any problems with any transactions. At least, no problems that weren’t my fault (some kind of listing error that I didn’t catch, for example).
John relates…well, his experiences on Hipcomic, which to sum up, were disappointing.
I was pulled into Hipcomic with the offer of a free iPad and a free table-with-an-easel-bit that you can use to quickly take photos of comics for sale. The caveat is that in exchange for these goodies, I had to list thousands of books on the platform in a short period of time. I forget exactly how many, but it was a lot, which required spending an hour or two a day just plowing through stacks of back issues and getting them uploaded. The end result is that I had to list a lot of, like I said before, recent back issues that would not be fast movers.
It sounds like it would be an oppressive process, but it was actually fairly easy, especially once you got into the groove. You’d use the iPad, logged into the Hipcomic site, to take a picture of the comic (conveniently placed on the easel for easy photographin’), the Hipcomic database would, usually, identify the comic and fill in several of the particulars for the listing, you add in your quantities and prices, and submit the info to start selling. Prices and quantities can carry over from entry to entry, so you can list a bunch in short order without having to change those options, as long as the database recognizes the book.
And that was the issue that would slow me up, unfortunately. When I started on Hipcomic, the only covers in the database would be the main “A” cover, and variants wouldn’t be identified. Which would be a problem, since most publishers are heavily leaning on variants nowadays. If I wanted to list a variant, I’d have to enter all the information myself, which would take me a little extra time slowly typing out the letters on the iPad screen keyboard.
As time wore on, more variants started being entered in the database, so the autofill function would kick in, but still, not every variant. And not every comic, even from the big publishers, at least not right away. My process was, after pulling old issues off the shelf, attempting to list my extras on the service, but the month sales window I guess wasn’t long enough for these newer comics to get into their system. I’d have to enter those details manually, which isn’t a huge inconvenience but doesn’t facilite a quick and smooth stream of listings.
Plus, there’s the occasional qlitch where Hipcomic’s comic identifying software would misidentify the photo you took and enter the wrong informtion into the listing. And if you’re going a little too quickly processing these comics, it can be easy to miss, resulting in the listing errors I mentioned above.
And there were plenty of comics just not in the database at all, mostly the smaller indie titles. I would try specifically to enter those manually in the hopes that I’d be one of the few retailers on there selling those comics, which…worked occasionally.
Like John, I didn’t have a lot of sales, but again, I was trying to blow out extra recent stock, not offering items of more note. I had a few sales a month, usually at low price points, sometimes enough to pay the monthly fee but not always. Occasionally I’d get a good-sized sale but this wasn’t a major source of income, sadly.
I’m not giving up on Hipcomic…I do think their fee structure is a little better than eBay’s, and their listing function does, for the most part, makes things pretty easy. I’ve got a project or two to finish at the store first, but I’m going to try listing slightly higher-end and older comics, and see if that improves my listings-to-sales ratio. We’ll see how it goes. I think it’s a good platform overall, but I have to see if I can exploit it properly.
I noticed a lot of discussion on 
