HOORAY! Our First eCrater Order!

Walkin' Willie's Comix is proud to announce that we received our first eCrater order this month. Just in case you were living on some remote island or just completely out of touch with reality, you can get to our eCrater store just by cruising to this URL: http://walkinwilliescomix.ecrater.com

The Walkin' Willie's Comix eCrater Store mainly will serve up trade paperbacks, graphic novels, hardcovers and bargin bin comics from Silver Age to present. Almost all of the trades, graphic novels and hardcovers are at least 35% off and all of the DC and Marvel books are 38% off of the normal retail price - and they are brand spanking new to boot!

The single issues are WELL below guide, most of the time at 30% of graded guide or less!

The bad news is that it will take awhile to build traffic. eCrater was started in 2004 and while that is a million lifetimes internet-wise, it is still young. Most folks that sell on eBay stay in a tunnel vision mode - i.e. they just don't look around for other venues to sell their stuff. Walkin' Willie's Comix has been on eBay since 1997 and we only found out about eCrater this year - so we were in tunnel vision mode ourselves. Here is an interesting article called "eBay's Death By A Thousand Cuts" which provides a few alternatives to eBay.

The good news is that eCrater is totally FREE for buyers AND sellers!! The only fees a seller will incur are PayPal fees and/or Google Checkout fees. eCrater makes money two ways: 1) If you want preferred placement for your products, you can do so for modest fees and 2) eCrater gets a kickback from Google Checkout.

The other good news is that sellers can offer products at a substantial discount as there are no listing fees or final value fees. THAT in and of itself is wonderful!

Finally, the eCrater forums harken back to the early days of eBay when there was a much more communal feel. There are several posts where one eCrater store will advertise for links for other eCrater stores to include on their own store website (not eCrater). We will be doing that type of cross linking soon. In fact, our first eCrater order was from another eCrater seller - living in Japan no less. Sure, eBay still has the most eyeballs but selling there is becoming a drag - in fact the next article on our blog will focus on our problems with selling on eBay and we'll promise not to whine.... too much....

Heroes-Con Hangover.....

Well, it has been over a week since Heroes-Con 2008 and I am still trying to get my act together. We might be in a recession but I had by far my best Heroes-Con with only one 10'x10' booth! My previous high watermark was Heroes-Con 2006 in which a) we had four 10'x10' booths and b) the comics creative community rallied behind Shelton Drum and Heroes-Con when those dillweeds from Wizard tried to put Heroes-Con out of business by trying to schedule a Wizard World convention in Atlanta the same weekend.

Now we had the usual array of trades and hardcovers but also scored a nice Marvel Silver Age lot and a really, really nice collection of high grade DC giants from the Silver and Bronze Ages. What I learned is that folks will part with their money if you have what they want. By the way, this was all cash and checks as I don't have a merchant account to take credit cards (don't want one either...). In fact, we were so busy that I really didn't get out and see the convention.

My girlfriend, Melissa, was really working the crowd. It was her first comic convention and she acted like she had done it all her life. Melissa was and is a tremendous asset not to mention fun as all get out. She was like "Hey, we gotta do more of these... you need to start scheduling some cons!!!" .... whatta gal!

All in all, it was a great show - dealers and collectors were both buying like crazy. If you want a great blow-by-blow report, check out the Heroes-Con blog. It is a fun read if nothing else - the inimitable Dusty Harbin scribes in his usual entertaining, witty style.

Can't wait until next year....