Hello everyone,
Leon was gracious enough to let me post today. For the last year and a half I've been working on a vintage baseball card site and it's finally ready. So I'd like to introduce
http://whitewhalecards.com/, the first social network for vintage baseball card collectors. You can take a home-made video tour at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LyAJa_0mMU
The site has three primary features:
1) A wiki-based vintage baseball card encyclopedia - I'm a huge fan of Wikipedia and always thought it would be cool to have a community editable encyclopedia for cards. So we built one for the site. The Card Wiki allows users to add sets, cards, photos and information about any vintage set/card ever released. We've strived to make the Card Wiki feature rich, including allowing card variations to be created and cross-referencing players and teams with the Lahman Baseball Database.
2) A place for users to post pictures of cards in their collection - I find Picassa, PhotoBucket, and other photo sharing sites to be a poor way to share cards. Instead, in this day and age where I can see your resume on LinkedIn and what you ate for breakfast on FaceBook, there should be a single social networking site for baseball cards, where everyone in the community can post cards from their collection and all of these cards are searchable. That's what we've tried to do with White Whale, create a true social network for vintage card collectors.
3) Post your want list and find your White Whales - It's also frustating that I have to wait for cards I really want to buy to come up for auction. I've always thought there should be a centralized location for every collector to post their want list for all to see. The White Whale site, lets you do just that. You can post the cards you want and even put a 'bounty' or price that you'd pay for the card, in order to attract those who have one to sell.
Buying and Selling on WhiteWhaleCards.com
Via WhiteWhaleCards.com you can buy and sell cards from other users. There are no listing fees or store costs on the site. Instead, in order to cover our costs, we charge a buyer's premium of 13% (just like an auction house). We use part of this 13% to cover PayPal costs. This means that as a seller, you get 100% of the money you ask for on every item you sell on the site.
White Whale lets sellers ship cards directly to buyers. To protect buyers we use PayPal's Chained Payments API, which lets the buyer purchase a card and then the payment waits in a PayPal account (similar to escrow) until after the card is shipped and approved by the buyer, at which time funds are released to the seller. This protects the buyer and seller from fraud.
Try It Out Today
I invite you to register and try out
WhiteWhaleCards.com. After signing up, you will immediately be able to create and share a virtual collection of cards you own and want. To protect the community we verify the identity of users before they can edit the wiki or sell cards, so if you are interested in doing this we'll reach out to you after you register.
I hope you enjoy the site,
Jonathan Ryskamp
PS - Putting this site together has been a team effort. I'd like to thank all those who helped including those who provided information on cards for the Card Wiki, Bill Goodwin and Robert Lifson for letting us use photos from their auctions, and Sean Lahman for letting us use players and teams from his Baseball Card Database.