Goldin’s acquisition of Sell My Comic Books (SMCB) seems like an attractive, classic play here. Assuming Collectors is taken public again in the next 2-3 years, which is my guess, the company will have to be more open and explicit about these business dealings, which will provide greater transparency to the hobby. Of course as a private company, it is faced with less scrutiny than as a public company. I have no reason to believe Collectors isn’t telling the truth. One question that a lot of hobbyists have brought up to me is, “what about conflict of interest?” What they mean by that is, for example, since the Goldin marketplace will generate increasingly more revenue as more valuable cards are sold, couldn’t they hypothetically ensure cards on the grade-to-marketplace path attain the highest possible grade in order to drive higher sale prices? Since PSA is owned by Collectors, isn’t there an inherent conflict of interest issue? In theory, yes, but as Collectors has stated multiple times, each division maintains its independence and this funny business doesn’t occur. If one thing is for certain, the feedback loop within the hobby is short and Goldin will know quickly after launch whether users enjoy their new offerings. A few other platforms, like Alt, have introduced similar concepts, though reviews across the hobby have been mixed.

It will be interesting to see how the actual rollout and performance of the marketplace and weekly auction goes. This announcement is just another link to that chain. As I’ve stated before, the longer a company can keep cards in its ecosystem, the more valuable and revenue-generating that card and collector will be for them. As CEO Ross Hoffman stated on LinkedIn, Goldin is looking to build a “ unified grade-to-vault-to-marketplace platform experience ” in order to save users both time and money. All of this is to say that Collectors, among other companies like Fanatics, are looking to build an ecosystem for collectors. This is more efficient and scalable than a startup looking to build clout from scratch. Because Goldin already has a vast base of users of its auction services and as part of the larger Collectors umbrella, it is more likely an existing user of other Collectors / Goldin services will simply add on use of the marketplace rather than a collector adopting an entirely new company’s marketplace. Someone like Goldin inherently has a higher probability of being successful in what I suspect is an attempt to dethrone or steal share from eBay. Goldin launches new marketplace and weekly auction, along with acquiring of Sell My Comic BooksĪlthough several recent startups have launched business models with a marketplace dynamic, I’ve been waiting for a larger, established player to try its hand at this idea. This edition of Mint Condition will be a ‘quick hitters’ of sorts where I give my take on each of them. Over the last few weeks, there have been a couple of big announcements from key companies across the hobby.

Mint condition 2022