COMC's Mailbox Service and Washington State Sales Tax

Tonight I made my first card purchases off Ebay in a couple of years. I've been wanting to get into collecting soccer cards, and with Bundesliga the only team sport playing right now, I figured this is as good a time as any to really get into soccer.

I like soccer a lot. The Toronto FC are popular in my home city (Toronto, of course). I regret that I have never been to a game. Toronto specifically, but also Canada generally are home to a lot of newcomers from countries where soccer is the most popular sport. About a fifth of Canada and more than half of Toronto consist of people born outside of Canada, and these people have brought their love of soccer over here. It's easy to make friends here who love soccer.

I got into watching it about a year ago, and have watched a ton of European soccer since then. So, after doing a bit of market research, I decided to get into soccer collecting. It's impossible to find boxes of anything to break for a reasonable price right now, so I took to Ebay to make a watch list of auctions I wanted to buy. 

I bought two rookie card from 2018-19 Donruss. First was Kai Havertz. Havertz plays for Leverkusen of the Bundesliga, and is considered one of Germany's many top prospects (and that league has a lot of great young players). I grabbed his card for $7.50

Second, from the same set I bought a rookie of Phil Foden. Foden plays for Manchester City, one of the best teams in the Premier League. I paid $5.24. With English soccer starting back up in a few weeks, I think interest in Foden and other young Premier League ballers will increase. And that is just short term increase in value, not including the long-term upwards trend of interest in soccer card collecting.

My total for the two cards came to $12.74 shipped to the US. They were both from the same seller. I used my shipping address with COMC, otherwise if I were to have the cards shipped to my home in Canada, then the charge would have been $15 shipping. Shipping was free within the US.

Well, not entirely free. When I got the invoice I saw there was $1.27 charged in sales tax. I've never paid sales tax on Ebay that I can recall, except maybe if I purchased from a seller who had a physical storefront in the same province where I lived.

But I Googled this Ebay sales tax thing, and I guess Washington state is one of many state governments requiring Ebay to remit sales taxes. COMC is located in Washington state. Thus I paid sales tax to Washington state.

This is death by a thousand cuts. Let's look at the list of fees I paid to have two base rookie cards mailed to me:

$12.74 for the cards

$1.27 sales tax

$3.00 COMC mailbox processing fee

$1.20 COMC per-item fee (60 cents for each card)

$6.86 difference in exchange rate when converting from USD to CAD

$25.07 Canadian for two base rookie cards

$25.07!! And that still does not include the cost of COMC shipping those cards to my home, which will also have to be converted into Canadian dollars. So, we're talking about thirty dollars Canadian to get these two cards. The cards themselves were only $17.54 when converted from US to Canadian dollars. 

That means the cost buying these two cards nearly doubled simply because I live in Canada. If I bypassed COMC and had them shipped directly to my home, the cost would have been even more than that.

I prefer to buy cards from other Canadians, which keeps all of these extra costs low or non-existent. But there are not that many Canadian sellers on Ebay, and nearly all of them focus on hockey cards.

There are so many fingers in the pot here. Ebay, Washington state, COMC, and Paypal all make money from this transaction. The seller probably sold the cards at a loss, or paid more for the box he broke them from and will only get a fraction of that box cost back. I paid nearly double the list price of these cards. 

So, during this hobby boom, it's not just the card companies and individual sellers making money, it's all of these peripheral companies and governments that are taking a small slice of every transaction that are making money. It's gross.

I prefer to be positive about the hobby, but I honestly find it difficult sometimes when it can get so expensive so quickly. Think about all of the other stuff that I could have spent $25 on that would provide me with more entertainment. I often feel that this hobby is only worth participating in if you spend big dollars on cards, and thus all of the little transaction fees add up to a smaller percentage of your overall cost. 

Like, if I bought two cards for $120 instead of $12, all of my other fees would have stayed the same, except the difference in exchange rate. There's really no such thing as being a budget collector in the hobby anymore, because those collectors have been priced right out of it, not just by the rising card values, but the rising fees associated with buying cards.