General Forum

Wow another thread I am just learning about. All I can say is it was not me and put my name down for a class action lawsuit.

OK, time to add after reading everyone's posts.

There are things I could add about this personally but its not really my place to do so, however I will state that this rings a few bells in my head. First thing is how do we not know that Admin has not already made a monatary agreement with this individual to use his data for a sales outlet for people to use. Let say at some point for X dollars we can move our entire collections over for the intent of selling? Both the third party and Admin profit by splitting the insertion fee as well as a percentage of all sales.

Maybe the fact that we use the term For Trade/For Sale on the one thread bank is all it took for the third party to say too bad so sad since you have people trying to profit all your data is fair game?

If this is something that is a legal battle it is only the data that can be truly sued over. The images are not watermarked and IMO should have been, however they are not so they are fair game. Now if Admin was able to tag all his data with digital watermarks that the other party knew nothing of maybe all of the images and checklists, etc will scream out in a court room that he is truly a thief.

Over my head but I have a vested interest in how all this turns out for sure.

Considering the legal vs illegal in copyright is up in the air....

How would a Plagerizam suit fair, since he claims he did the work.......

Regarding Beckett, in the past I found an obscure typo in  one of their checklists that also appeared in an identical fashion on the correspondig TCDb checklist, so wondering what happened there... 

I flagged it for correction so it's been corrected on this site at least

According to a thread on Blowout, the owner of BSC purchased cards from over 160+ sellers on Sportlots in order to get their mailing addresses and then sent them a letter trying to poach them to go over to BSC. The owner also apparently got banned from the Blowout forums for being a douche.

Great post

The best alternative to purchase or trade for low / mid value cards is right here.  The search features and matching aspects are far better than any I have seen.  

I agree TCDB has some awesome features.  I love TCDB, and I've made over 200 successful trades on it. 

But there are a number of inefficiencies about it that make it less than optimal in for some situations. 

I'm a set builder.  I've found it's easier to build several sets at one time using TCDB because you can use a shotgun type approach with multiple traders to pick up a bunch of cards from several sets.  With TCDB, I end up with several sets that are about 75 to 80% complete.

But when it comes time to close out a set, it's damn near impossible to efficiently finish it using TCDB.  If you need 20 more cards to finish a set, there might be 100 TCDBers who have some of those cards.  It's hard to find who has the most of those last 20 to pursue and if you find them, they may not have enough matches to trade or they don't sell or whatever.  For example, I need 6 cards to finish my 2021 Heritage base set.  I've identified at least 15 people who have all of those last six cards.  That took me a couple of hours.  I constructed trade offers to 3 of them and haven't completed one of those 3 trades for various reasons.  For six cards, that's just too much work.

I typically finish sets by getting the last batch of my wantlist on SportLots or COMC and that's not nearly as time-efficient or cost-efficient as I'd prefer.  TCDB has the capability to be better for my situations but those tools just haven't been built yet.  Maybe someday.  I'm not complaining, I believe there may be others who develop compelling tools to help me with some aspects of the way I collect just like TCDB helps me with other aspects of the way I collect. If a site manages to pull it off, I'll put that site in my toolbox, too.

I did some google cache searches and found the Blowout Forum threads that have since been deleted (and BSCConner subsequently banned). He went in and basically spammed at least 5 threads with his website announcement. That irritated the forum along with someone pointing out that he's being a little deceptive. He trumpets "no seller fees" but the fine print says that the site takes a 3.49% + $.30 payment processing charge because it uses Dwolla and Stripe (ACH only, no credit cards) to process payments. Which is why he wants your bank information. Looks like BSC makes money by charging more in payment processing fees than they are charged by the 3rd party payment processors. Additionally, the minimum price a card can be is $3 which means this is not a good place for people dealing in commons and junk wax. 
Additionally, someone called him out nearly a month ago for taking TCDB data but the cache doesn't appear to capture any responses by him.

The more I learn, the more sketchy this guy seems. 

Where are you seeing $3 per card?  I see in FAQs under "Minimum Order Value" it says the following:

"When buying on BSC, a buyer must spend above the $3 minimum order value per Seller or they will be unable to checkout.

BSC has instituted this policy to ensure our Sellers are able to avoid small orders that become unprofitable due to the time, payment processing and shipping cost associated with fulfilling the order."

It looks like there are many cards listed well below $3 for sale on the site.

Also, Stripe appears to be a credit card processor for buyers to checkout.  Dwolla appears to be the ACH company for sellers to receive payouts.  These two must serve the two parts of transaction that PayPal does on other sites I guess.  I also looked on Stripe's sites at fees and saw under saw https://stripe.com/pricing they have an add-on called Stripe Tax to help site charge sales tax so the 2.9% + $0.30 + 0.5%.  That may be how they get to the 3.4% + $0.30 processing 

Yes, you're right on the $3 thing. My bad, I read minimum order and then it translated in my head to $3 for a card. But that's still not going to be a big draw for dealing with cheap cards unless the seller has a large inventory listed to facilitate a $3 order. I mean, if I find a card I've been looking for and it's $1, I'm going to be ticked off if I have to go buy something else from the same seller to reach $3, especially if they don't have anything else I want. If it's a card I've been hunting for a while and I haven't found it anywhere else, $3 isn't a dealbreaker, but still... go digging for something I don't even want just to get what I do.

Right BUYERS can use a credit card, but sellers have to do the ACH payout. This isn't that big of a deal I suppose, although they hold your payout for 14 days. This whole thing still sounds fishy to me though, as the guy said on Blowout (cached image):
"Our site doesn't make a penny off the sale; which is why we say 0% BSC Seller Fees. We are spending five figures a month to run the site, with nothing coming back to us. If the worst thing you can say is we also don't eat the 3.49% payment processing charge (same as PayPal Goods & Services) than I'd say that we are doing a good job"
He makes no money? and he's spending five figures a month on the site with no income stream? What am I not getting here?

Plus, there's this from the guy's LinkedIn page:
"This project is by far my biggest personal achievement. I began in Dec. 2020 with an idea & no idea how to bring it to fruition. I have no technical expertise & didn’t know anyone who did. This, just like many things along the way forced me to go well beyond my comfort zone and truly put myself out there to chase my dream.
I have self-funded this project with my life savings and dedicated 80+ hours a week for over a year to get to this point but it wouldn’t have been possible without the support I received from others. After sending literally 1200+ emails/messages, setting up hundreds of interviews, hiring 27 people (15 of which I had to let go), I came to have a team of 12 amazing people. Their dedication to helping bring my dream to fruition will never be forgotten. Neither will the support of my wife, mom, family & friends who have been there for me during the ups & downs. This project has given me some of the best/worst days of my life but ultimately I pushed through the adversity and have had huge personal growth. I’m a better person today because I’ve pushed myself to be by chasing my goals despite the fact it would have been easier to not."

The guy is like 25 years old. His work experience looks to be just several website businesses that either he started or his family run. 

Maybe this is absolutely legit, but there are too many red flags here for me.