Welcome to new members

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Posted By: National Sportscards

Thank you to those of you who have taken the time to join as members of our site and begin to use it. I would like to take a moment to address some of the messages that have popped up in response to the initial message we left on the forum.

The seeds for this site are rooted in a deep enjoyment in sports card collecting, an enjoyment for the art of web-programming, and a desire to build an alternative and more sports card orientated format for individuals and dealers to use to sell and buy cards than is available elsewhere while also trying to avoid the non stop escalation of fees one experiences with ebay and paypal.

The costs of running the website are minimal and are not a signifigant barrier to keeping the website growing. We made some comments here about a desire to turn the members to owners and have established a reward point system to keep track of those who signifigantly participate in the growth of the membership and card offerings. It is said that most successful sites have areas for revenues and/or profits, with advertising being an example of this. If any meaningful revenues should ever materialize, we would like to have some formula in place to convert the reward points to some form of ownership and profit sharing. Obviously, whether any revenue will ever materialize is unknown and certainly not possible in the immediate future. We will not, however, charge members these listing fees and final value fees the way ebay so discouragingly does to its members to list cards for sale.

As on ebay and all other websites of this nature, we are not involved in the transactions and do not and cannot give warrany to any members. We are simply trying to create a venue for people to offer their cards for sale and for purchases of those cards to have a forum to view these offerings in a central place. Hopefully as transactions take place a feedback system will develop which will be similar to that of ebay and trust will grow among users. we are thinking of adding some sort of network similar to that seen on www.linkedin.com where members can "informally vouch" for each other and creating some sort of point system there also and are open to feedback and suggestions on that.

The goal is to create a great, very focused site on our hobby. We ask anyone with good ideas to forward them to the email at the site. We have already made some changes and additions to the site based on feedback from members of this forum.

We started with a very pointed and focused search function which is great for a site with thousands and thousands of cards to sift through, but yeilded no search results for a new site like ours. We have since added more broad search capabilities using 10 year time periods as well as the American Card Catalog (ACC) classifications to search an entire 'type' such as 'T' for 20th Century Tobacco cards. Thank you to Jay Behrens for that great suggestion.

We feel the want list is a great feature and as the site grows, and as cards are offered for sale, though who use the want list will get an automatic email each time a card on their list is offered for sale. This is something not available on ebay and other similar sites. If we can reach a critical mass, we may also add auctions.

I hope this answered some questions that have been appearing.

If you like the site we have built, please spread the word! We are getting many new members but thus far most are there to buy. Please take the time to join the site and post your cards for sale. There is nothing to lose, your cards get more exposure, and it costs nothing! Enjoy!