Hot Hot Summer – Updates into Q3

Wow, it’s been hot during the day and thunderstorms with flash rain storms each evening the past few days in Utah. I hope your summer has been as great as ours has been here at C1G headquarters. I have two teenagers and a ten-year-old that have kept me going in and out of the office with many different summer activities already. From a leadership camp, music camp, religious camps, baseball camp, helping kids to read through our local library’s literacy center’s summer reading camps, early driver’s ed courses, helping at the homeless shelter, etc. my kids are keeping my wife and myself plenty busy and we are only through June. When does school start again? There is an interesting opportunity that has presented itself and I’ve spent a lot of time investing in seeing if it’s something that we will be able to pursue. Look for more details on this in the future if things pan out.

July is always a fun month with the start of NBA free agency and lots of fireworks on the 4th of July. The NBA free agency bonanza has not been disappointing. I’m a huge Phoenix Suns fan while my oldest son is a huge Warriors fan (my wife’s family is from the Bay Area). I’m sitting here hoping that we can pull off a trade for Kevin Durant and depending on when you read this, he will have ended up somewhere in the league. I always enjoy the 4th for the time with family and friends. I’ve got a long-time friend that is moving back to Utah from Colorado and I’m excited to spend time with his family this fourth.

Then there is CategoryOneGames. I’d like to give thanks for all the support the site has received and for the growth we have been able to experience because of our great customers. We are currently selling singles for over 65 games and have over 100 different games on the site with a mixture of sealed products, singles, etc. We couldn’t have gotten here without the support of our great customers and all the regulars that have been supporting us for years. We continue to be family-run with many staff members that are helping to speed along the pulling of orders and adding of new products to the site. Thank You!

I wanted to share some of the things we have planned coming up as we end Q2 and head into Q3. Some of the new games and updates to games I talk about later in this post were planned in Q2 and moved back to Q3. I hope they don’t show up as being moved back to Q4 when we get to that post. I’m keeping an eye on a few things and am excited about others and wanted to share that with you.

  • We just received some new merchandise, shirts, and hats, related to our recent rebranding and new logo. There will be a new category added for these where you can pick up some of this merch from the site and we are giving away either a hat or shirt to each customer that hits the 10% tier on the customer Reward Points program. Just an extra bonus for being such a great customer!
  • There will be a short period at the start of August when the site will continue to take orders but will not be shipping for a week because of some travel plans. The great thing about traveling is that I’m always stopping at card/game/comic stores along the way to see if I can find any new or unique products to bring back for the site. Last year I visited South Dakota and stopped at every hobby store along our path through Wyoming and Rapid City, SD. Rapid City has two comic/gaming stores right next to each other and a sports card store right around the corner in their downtown area. I highly recommend each of these stores and give yourself some time to enjoy the downtown there. It’s great for family and really a beautiful part of the US to visit. This year we are visiting Dillon Reservoir in Colorado. The only store I’ve been able to find along the drive or in that area is Eagle Valley Music and Comics. Grand Junction, CO used to have a typical game store in the mall there but I’m no longer finding it through Google searches. If you know of any places to visit or eat in this area, please let me know.
  • If you aren’t listening to or watching the Booster Pack podcast on Youtube through CCG History with Rands, then you need to get on it. Rands is interviewing many of the top game designers from the 90s through today and giving history and backstories to companies that have never been released.
  • Shipping rates have continued to increase. The USPS is increasing Priority Mail shipping options in mid-July and they continue to increase all other shipping options in January of each year. The packing supplies we use have increased 20% over the past six months. The USPS started a “Holiday Peak” increase starting in October and lasting until the day after Christmas. I’m watching this closely to see if we need to increase our free and discount tears on shipping. My guess is that on October 1st we will be increasing the minimum for free USPS First Class Shipping from $35 to $40 and increasing Priority Mail and international shipping discounts accordingly.
  • Buylists have two updates:

    We are often asked how much of the shipping will we cover when sending in items. I wanted to help clarify that.
    • On buylists over $100 we will cover 100% of USPS Priority Mail and/or USPS First Class shipping as an adjustment to the order within reason. We will not cover extra expenses like insurance or delivery confirmation.
    • On buylists over $40, we will cover 100% of what it would cost to ship First Class as an adjustment to the order within reason. We will not cover extra expenses like insurance or delivery confirmation.
    • International orders, we will follow something similar to the information above for you. We know it is more expensive to ship internationally but we also do not want to be covering the cost of extra shipping if the buylist does not actually contain value above the extra cost of shipping the items.
    • Orders under $40, we will help offset some of the cost based on the items sent in and the need for those items. Sending in $6 worth of cards and spending $5.50 on shipping doesn’t make a lot of sense and we would only cover around $1-2 dollars of that amount.  
    • If you have multiple open buylists, please send them all together in the same package to save on shipping costs. If you choose to send each buylist separately when they could have all fit in the same package, we will only cover the shipping costs of one of the packages.  
    • We send payments for buylists and collections through PayPal and Venmo without it costing you anything. We are returning to charging $3.00 for check payments as an adjustment to the buylist or collection purchase. This helps cover the cost of checks, postage and extra resources that go into a check payment. PayPal and Venmo payments are instantaneous; check payments can sometimes take weeks to be received and clear.  
  • A big balance we play with is filling orders, restocking current games, and adding new out-of-print “Classic” card games to the site. Just this week we have restocked, Illuminati, WWE Raw Deal, VS System (A LOT) Babylon 5, Star Wars CCG, Star Wars Desinty, Legend of the Five Rings, WARS, Star Trek 1E, and 2E. There will continue to be plenty of restocks coming as we have over 40+ expected buylists that are open right now as well as a large collection of WWE Raw Deal that we are working on sorting out to get added to the site.

  • If you haven’t taken a look at the new Disney Plus set for Heroclix, you should give it a shot. The figures look great, it adds a lot of new flavor to the game and really are enjoyable. I filmed a video opening our first brick with my daughter Millie on our YouTube channel and someone has already picked up the Agatha Harkness from our brick break.  Look for another three bricks worth of Disney Plus to be hitting the site soon as well as many other Heroclix improvements. We have so many Heroclix sets and figures we need to add. It’s a bit overwhelming.
  • There are a few categories that I keep looking at on the site that I know need a massive update with the rest of the sets for the game. The first game from this list that I’ll be doing something about is Naruto. This is something I started working on a few weeks back but got into the bigger games I’m going to discuss below. Just about every other category for the game is ready to go and we have inventory for most of them. I’m excited to finally get more than just the first set, Path of Hokage, onto the site and help out the fanbase for the show and game. This update should be completed in the next week. Look for similar updates hopefully by the end of the year for a few other games.  
  • So that leads to “New” out-of-print games on the site. What does that look like?
    There are four games that are lined up as our larger additions to the site through the end of the year. The first two of these I expect to add to the site in the next couple of weeks and I’ll start teasing these a little more through our social media channels. One of these was very popular in the early 2000s and still has a huge following to this day. I’m really excited for this one, but it’s been a lot of work behind the scenes on getting it sorted and images scanned for each card.  The other game really grew in popularity when WWE Raw Deal lost popularity with the Revolution sets. It’s got a lot of licenses as part of the game, and it will be really fun to have it on the site.

    The other two larger games will most likely come near the end of Q3 or into Q4. There is a fifth larger game that I’m already planning for a Q1 2023 launch which has me already excited looking into next year.
  • Talking about these larger games doesn’t mean I’m not working on adding a lot of other smaller games to the site. Right now, I’m working on a total of seven other smaller CCGs to add to the site. This includes a few NFL Football related games, some games that ended in the past few years, and some that still have a large following. Sometimes we are adding games to the site that we don’t have any inventory for and open it up to our buylist to help get inventory for the game. We’ve already seen results from this with Call of Cthulhu. Arcadia, Blood Wars, City of Heroes, Conan, Hercules, and Quest for the Grail are all games where we don’t have any inventory currently, but they are on the buylist, so if you have extra, trade/sell them in and help out other players/collectors of these games.

Have a safe and happy 4th of July and keep a lookout, there could be a big sale on the site.

Comments

comments

You must be logged in to post a comment.