Hello, this post is directed mostly for non US residents. I hope it’s not against any guidelines to promote a completely disconnected website but i’ve read a lot of posts about complaints of shipping costs being very high from US to other parts of the world, mainly Europe. I’ve used a site called https://www.comc.com/ and their mailbox service as a middleman and i’ve had very good experience with it. I’ll add a link to their mailbox info, but in short it’s a huge, mainly sports card, marketplace where you can send your cards or purchases for storage (or if you decide to part with them list them up for sale). How it works is you make an account in their website and with that username you’ll get an address you can for example add in ebay to make purchases.
They first provide you a photo of the cards in the package they received and scans after they’ve processed them. The cards added to your account that way have no time limits regarding storage so there’s no rush sending them home. There are fees when they receive a package (2$ for each package and 1$ for each card in package as a basic rule) and when they send the package from their storage to you but the storage time is free, so how i’ve used the site is i’ve bought cards in the mailbox for about a year and after i’ve wanted all the cards home i’ve combined my package and got them home by paying for shipping costs for one package. There are few options for shipping methods and some can cost quite a bit but still for me it has been way cheaper than shipping all the individual cards from ebay straight to Finland. Also regarding import fees, when you request your package to be shipped in your home address you mark the value of the cards yourself (which also affects the shipping costs) so it’s basically up to you what you want to put there.
Here’s their own info of the service Mailbox service info with further detail. I don’t feel completely comfortable promoting a website that has little to do with E4 or pokemon (even though there are lots of pokemon cards for sale too) so i’ll leave the further details to be read themselves for those interested. You can ofc ask me more about the site if you want as i’ve already used it for few years. I hope this will ease it for some non US collectors since i know it can sometimes be a bit painful for example in Europe.
Maybe, other E4 members have more experience with this or other services? Indeed, you raise an important point here that I can second as German collector.
I can understand the rewievs about slow shipping times, during and some time after covid times it was indeed super slow and you could barely get any answers from their customer service, after that it’s gotten a lot better. It still has taken over a week for them to process my cards for shipping after covid times too but when i’ve held the cards there for a year it hardly matters for me. Besides some cheap extras i’ve sold there i’ve only used the site as middleman service so can’t say anything real myself about the marketplace business and valuable cards. My sports card friends tho have been happy with the site both selling and buying but they usually only deal with cards worth few bucks or max double digit value.
Thanks, do you have any experience with them? I noticed that Ship My cards has an address in Oregon (no tax), this may be a benefit.
I have used shipito in the past and it worked well (quick and good online interface), also with 1k+ shippings. They are just charging you for everything and not sure whether I would send vintage booster boxes to them…
Good to hear other options too and experiences with them, i feel like these kind of sites are still relatively unknown by a lot of people! I’ve used shipito few times myself too but with cheap single card purchases i mostly do it’s not an option. Big positives with comc for me have been relatively low costs for multiple low value purchases and unlimited storage time, but i’m sure other similar sites have other positive features for people with different priorities (as posts above show already).
I have to speak against my own thread since i’m not sure anymore about their shipping methods, my package has now travelled for a month with a very slow update speed and it still hasn’t left US. I really hope everything is okay with my package since it has basically all my grimer/muk purchases from time that japan didn’t send mail in finland as well as big chunk of other stuff that’s very hard to replace. Maybe be a bit cautious if you are using this kind of service and plan on shipping your cards.
Sorry to hear and hope they will arrive. For my part, I sticked to shipito and parcels arrive within 7-10 days with UPS. Very responsive, will use them again
Yeah, shipito has been good for bigger single purchases, most of my purchases are just some niche grimer/muk stuff that nobody else cares about so shipito isn’t the best option for those
Updating the situation that my package finally arrived safe and sound but man was the waiting stressful, probably will be my last consolidation this big since my blood pressure can’t handle another case like this, but eventually all good!
