A Baseball Card Social Network & Vintage Card Encyclopedia

[Collect Equity]

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.

[FirstYearCards]

I checked out this site when you first posted. I'm impressed with the idea as I have my own site www.firstyearcards.com. Mine is more of a personal site for my collection but have begun to expand to other sports. Just checked back in, was wondering if you had any luck with membership or any other feedback? Have you been getting any traffic? Bill.

[Collect Equity]

Bill,

Thanks for asking about the site.

Things are progressing well. We had quite a number of users try out the site and received very positive feedback. However, we also found a number of bugs that needed fixing.

We are at the final stages of fixing these bugs. Once that is done (in the next week or so) we will do some promotions to try to help user adoption. We recently bought a T206 Cobb on eBay that we will be giving away as a prize to one lucky site user. We will release more details about that in the next week or so.

However, even as we fix the last of the bugs, the site is alive and working and open for people to try it out.

[jrenaut]

Have you explored other options for making money besides the buyer's fee? 13% is enough that I'd be very unlikely to buy or sell on the site unless it was a really impossible to find card. I realize that's kind of what the site is about, but I also suspect you don't want to limit the usefulness of the site.

One of the main reasons I buy on forums such as this one is the lack of extra fees - transactions are quick, efficient, and cheap. Your site definitely adds things that are often lacking from the process, but I'm not sure it adds enough to justify the cost for me.

[bn2cardz]

I am glad this got bumped as I missed this when it was first mentioned, and though I saw the banner at the top of the page I never bothered clicking to see what it was.

Do any other users have any reviews to give (with beta bugs being fixed in mind)? Has anyone completed a sale on the site?

[nolemmings]

My McAfee warns me that I've gone to a "suspicious site" when I click on the link. It gave me a red warning when I first went there some time ago and now gives me a yellow warning. I'm reluctant to proceed until I know what's up with that.

[Jlighter]

For searching cards in the for sale section a user should be able to search Price Highest First and Price Lowest First, as well as searching by Newest Additions.

[Collect Equity]

Originally Posted by jrenaut

Have you explored other options for making money besides the buyer's fee? 13% is enough that I'd be very unlikely to buy or sell on the site unless it was a really impossible to find card . . .

One of the main reasons I buy on forums such as this one is the lack of extra fees - transactions are quick, efficient, and cheap.

There is no way that WhiteWhaleCards can compete with the B/S/T on Net54, nor is that our goal. We are offering an additional avenue for showcasing and finding your favorite vintage cards.

13% was chosen because a) 3% of this covers the PayPal fees and b) 10% of this covers our development costs (which are significant since I'm not a programmer).

Regardless of whether you choose to buy/sell on the site, we hope you will use it to showcase your collection and contribute to the community encyclopedia of vintage baseball cards.

[jrenaut]

Originally Posted by Collect Equity

There is no way that WhiteWhaleCards can compete with the B/S/T on Net54, nor is that our goal. We are offering an additional avenue for showcasing and finding your favorite vintage cards.

13% was chosen because a) 3% of this covers the PayPal fees and b) 10% of this covers our development costs (which are significant since I'm not a programmer).

Regardless of whether you choose to buy/sell on the site, we hope you will use it to showcase your collection and contribute to the community encyclopedia of vintage baseball cards.

I get that. I just don't see how it's a sustainable business model. I don't mean to be rude - I'd love to see your site succeed, and there's definitely demand, but making it work is hard. I am a programmer, and I've toyed with the idea of a site something like yours. The programming is technically very challenging. Hundreds of thousands of cards, each site member has tens of thousands in his/her collection - it's very difficult to store that kind of data in a way that's easy to work with. And that's not even getting into image hosting.

And once you overcome all that, you have to figure out how to get it to pay for itself. I think the way ebay does it is smart - they hide the fees at the time of the transaction. At the moment of purchase, no one pays any fees. It's only later that the seller has the fee deducted. People are funny, and we as a species have a hard time accurately valuing events in the future. I bet that people would pay more for a card with a 13% fee charged in a week than a card with a 13% fee charged at time of purchase.

Anyway, best of luck with the site. I hope I'm wrong about your business model.