Buying Comics
Whenever I have purchased comics online, I have always simply purchased from a small handful of online shops. Today I got a press release in my email about a shop that has apparently been in business for almost twenty years and is kind of local to me. Looks like they are strictly online, which sucks, because I prefer to buy my comics in person whenever possible. With the demise of my local comic shop I am forced to look elsewhere for my books and that includes shopping online.
The store is NewKadia.com. Like I said, I had never heard of them before, but apparently they will be hitting the 15 millionth customer soon. Looks like they have a HUGE inventory. Prices are high, but if you have been looking for a certain book to fill the gap in your collection you’ll pay the extra cost.
Here is the press release I got today:
[insert headline from the future here] World’s Largest Comic Book Store – NewKadia.com – Welcomes Shopper #15,000,000 on July 31st
Norristown, Pa. – July 25, 2018 – The world’s largest online-only comic book store, NewKadia.com, expects to welcome its 15 millionth shopper on Tuesday, July 31, according to its founder and CEO, Jim Drucker, who cited data provided by Google Analytics, a service provided by Google and Alexa.com, an internet measurement company owned by Amazon.com.
In total, the 15 million customers have spent over 129 years browsing 100 million web pages at NewKadia.com, based in suburban Philadelphia [actually it’s 20 miles outside of the city in Norristown, not that it matters since you can’t go there].
“Over 5,000 shoppers visit our website every day and at our current rate, the fifteenth millionth shopper should click to us between 8 and 9 p.m. Eastern time on July 31. The back-issue comic book business is booming, and our web traffic verifies it,” said Drucker.
The privately held NewKadia.com, Inc. opened on January 1, 2000. The site, NewKadia.com, is the most trafficked online-only comic book store in the world, with the average customer viewing 6.7 pages per visit and spending over four minutes at the store, according to Google.
“We’re attracting a half-million new shoppers each year to NewKadia.com,” said Drucker,
NewKadia.com inventory is 743,872 back-issue comic books and over 10,000 additional are added each week.
The best-selling comic book at NewKadia.com is “Amazing Spider-Man,” which has topped the store’s best seller list every year for the past 18 years. X-Men comics, Fantastic Four, Batman, Daredevil, Incredible Hulk, the Avengers, Justice League of America, Superman, Iron Man and Thor round out NewKadia.com’s Top 10.
Drucker started NewKadia.com with his own collection of 850 comic books in 2000, and today NewKadia.com is the world’s largest online comic book retailer, selling over 250,000 comics in 2017.
Before launching NewKadia.com, Drucker earned sports industry plaudits for his tenure as Commissioner of the Continental Basketball Association (1978-1989), the precursor to the NBA’s G-League. He also served as Commissioner of the Arena Football League (1994-1996), Drucker was ESPN’s on-camera legal correspondent from 1989 to 1994.
Additional information is available at http://www.NewKadia.com.
Selling Them Your Comics
I have a few boxes of comics laying about in storage so I was interested in their buying format. A quick look at their payouts and it looks like I would only get 10-20 cents per book. On books I paid $2-$4 for? I don’t think so.
Further reading and I came across this quote, “In 1999, I was looking to sell my own collection. I sent my inventory list of 800 comics to 27 comic book store owners. The price guide said they were worth $10,400, but the only offer I got was $325. So I started selling my comics myself online.”
Looks to me like the owner is telling you to start your own business or at the very least sell it yourself on eBay or maybe facebook yard sale sites. Even though their site does go on to counter that with them you don’t have to grade the books, make up descriptions, or take photos — still seems like selling them yourself is the better deal.
Personally, the books I have that I want to get rid of, I just want them gone. I don’t want to wait months to sell the books one at a time (on NewKadia.com or eBay or even Amazon). So I will take your low ball offer and give you a box of books just to say goodbye.
Reviews
NewKadia.com touts a half million new customers each year (in other words tons of sales and loads of money rolling in), yet their site only has 5 Google reviews. (I know, I know. Google reviews are for local businesses and since they don’t have a brick and mortar store who really cares, right.) One of which is suspect as it includes photos so it must be an employee since they are an online store only. TrustPilot has a few more reviews, eleven at least they offer a good mix of good and bad reviews to give you a better idea of what to expect. Their own site doesn’t even have any reviews on their reviews page! (Most likely they just need to fix the BizRate widget, but seriously a web company that has been in business since 2000 and they can’t keep their webpage updated!)
Perhaps they should link to their eBay store from their own website since it really is the best review site out there for them. Followed by their Facebook page.
The Site
If I were to be expecting my 15 millionth online visitor this week, I would have prepared a little more for it. you know, besides sending a press release out. The site needs some work. As I pointed out earlier, broken widgets, broken code (have a look at their affiliate program), simple pop-ups not working as they intended them (print function engaging but for a blank page — at least in chrome [the most popular browse these days], and most importantly not responsive in page design. Looks like this design as been around for the past 5 years or so (with similar designs used prior to this one). Just check the Wayback Machine to see for yourself. Even a five year old design would have been during the beginning stages of responsive design, so why wasn’t it done then? This site would be horrible on a mobile device or even a tablet. Sadly, these 18+ years of good SERPs might well plummet since Google switched on the mobile first indexing. At least the entire site is secure. HTTPS is a biggie for Google these days too. Google pretty much wants all websites to have a SSL certificate in place sitewide so that’s good.
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