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DaClyde

Clyde's Stale Cards on Kronozio.com

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As I haven't sold much on eCrater this year, I've decided to move a bunch of that inventory over to a relatively new site from Canada, Kronozio.com. You may have started seeing their ads popping up on sites like SportsCardForum.com or TradingCardDB.com. They are based in Montreal, and are all native French speakers, so if some of the English on the site seems a bit wonky, it is because of automatic translations. They have begun entering into partnerships with various hobby sites around the world, so the site language should clear up fairly soon.

Another reason I'm doing this is that for new listings, Kronozio's Kronocard software makes adding new cards to their site so much faster than manually inputting a card at a time to eCrater. Kronozio's software also offers an eBay connector for cross-listing cards to eBay.

When I first started listing cards on Kronozio, I actually sold a few right away, which surprised me, but then didn't sell much after that for awhile. Mostly that is due to my lack of promotion of my listings, and the limited nature of the listings themselves. Now with the eBay connector, I'm trying to take advantage of my monthly free eBay listings. Posting cards for sale on eBay is just as easy as posting to my Kronozio store. Once all the card details have been entered, it's just a drop down option as to whether I want to list it as an auction (with or without a Buy It Now) or a fixed price listing. Click here to see how the listings look on eBay.

Within a couple of hours of posting a certain MLB Showdown card of Ichiro, it had already sold. Yesterday I listed all of the cards from some Bandai Owners League boxes I'd recently bought and overnight the Dae Ho Lee card sold on eBay. I know, those two are likely special cases, and none of the other 30+ eBay listings have received a bid yet, but I'm happy to have so quickly unloaded two cards.

They make a big deal about how quickly you can scan and post cards for sale using their software. While they may overstate it a bit for people who don't have an automatic feed scanner, I can attest that they easily have the fastest system I have seen. Not having to scan and handle all of the images separately from the listing process is a huge time saver. They also have a service for identifying your cards for you, where you just scan them and post them to your account, and for a small service fee, they will handle all of the card identification for you. I guess that would be most useful if you had thousands upon thousands of cards to post. Doing batches of 50 or so at a time, I don't see the need, and considering how eclectic my listings tend to be, I'll just handle the card ID myself.

The scanning is very accurate with regard to finding the edges of the cards, and adds some buffer to make the edges easier to see. Anytime the scan is a bit crooked, it is very easy to adjust using little bull's-eyes to show Kronocard where the card's corners are. Here is are some sample scans:





The process is very simple. You place the cards face down on the scanner, and Kronocard makes a single sweep and picks out the cards. Flip the cards over and it makes another sweep and it catches the backs. The software also does a great job of matching the fronts and backs based on where the cards sit on the scanner platen. So basically always make sure when you flip the cards over that you leave them in the same place. Depending on the coloring of the cards I'm scanning, I will use a different backdrop or leave the scanner lid open so there is more contrast for the software to work with. Picking out white bordered cards against a white scanner lid background isn't easy for any image recognition software, and though Kronocard does a great job of it, why make the software work harder than necessary?

There are options as to what kind of scanner you are using, how you want to orient the cards on the scanner, how large the scanner area is, how you want to organize the scans for each session, as well as a way organize your cards by box, row and section, if you so choose. I really need to do that as my organizational skills are atrocious. The software scans everything at 300dpi, which is not configurable. If you are scanning lots of cards from a single set, you can even establish those details before you start scanning, and that information will be automatically tied to the cards you scan in that session, reducing identification time. Once you have your scans, you move on to the individual card identification process (setting card numbers, player names, team names, etc.), which ends with listing the cards in your Kronozio store.

Here is a video from their YouTube channel about the scanning and listing process:



They have also recently added an option to let you use your own scans if you already have a library of images, and don't want to re-scan everything. Kronocard Photo Import. To be perfectly honest, even if you chose not to list cards on the site, Kronocard is a fantastic bulk scanning tool. All of the images are stored locally in your C:\ProgramData\kronozio\Metacard\Images folder. The file naming scheme automatically pairs up fronts/backs, so if you sort the folder by name, everything lines up nicely, though all the images have names like 0b9a3411-473c-4340-bbca-cdcd5eca972ar.jpg.

When you get right down to it, I would say they fall somewhere between Sportlots.com and COMC.com. Like Sportlots, you still have to handle all the shipping and inventory management, but you get the visual benefits of COMC's interface with all the card details and front and back scans for every card. If I ever generate enough sales to actually provide some numbers, I'll do another post comparing the fee structures between the three sites. Kronozio takes a flat 10% of your sales, simple as that. Listing is free. Any eBay listing fees are between you and eBay. Kronozio imposes no extra fees on eBay sales.

For now, I'd definitely say go check them about and give the site a try. If you happened to try them last year, but didn't really get the hang of it, give them another look as they have made some substantial improvements to their Kronocard software since they launched. They offer a lot more options than what I have covered here. Check them out on Facebook, Twitter, and on their Kronozio Blog.

Updated 09-25-2016 at 01:56 AM by DaClyde

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