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Over the last several years, sports card collecting and the hobby in general has grown and evolved to make collecting financially viable for some, and just easier to get into for others.
At fivecardguys.com we’re always interested in how different segments of the sports card industry are working together to make collecting more relevant again.
To kick things off, we asked David Lafond of Kronozio.com five questions to get to know more about their business and what they have to offer (Q and A edited for length).
1. When did Kronozio.com first launch and how much has it grown since then?
Kronozio started in the summer of 2013. Me and Jonathan (co-founder of Kronozio.com) were together for dinner when we started discussing the topic of sports cards. Jonathan says that he would like to sell part of his sports card collection. At that time he owned about 300,000 cards. But it’s not easy to put cards on sale on the internet in large quantities. Digitization, documentation, classification is a rather time consuming process. So I decided to look at what I could do to help him. Finally, after two weeks of development I returned with a way to put up for sale 2,500 cards per week on eBay. He is convinced that this is a good idea to continue and we decided to start Kronozio to buy and sell cards. I continued development and six months later we are at 25,000 cards a week! We buy all the lots of cards available in our area and we sell them on eBay from 300 to 800 cards per week and end up in 3 to 4 months with 85,000 cards on eBay selling for more than $10K per month.
2. What service does Kronozio.com offer?
In the Summer of 2014, we decided to start finding investors so that we can hire experienced programmers. In January 2015 after finding our investors, the new Kronozio started. After eight months of intensive development, the result was an easy, efficient and very robust product. Kronocard is born! We have a few clients now who list about 5,000 cards a week and one that works full time and lists about 25,000 cards a week on eBay. Selling more is great but when you have to ship 500 to 800 cards a week – that is a big problem. What did we do? We found a way to go from 50 cards per day to 50 cards per hour for shipping. With Kronocard, you can scan more quickly and easily, document cards, indicate selling prices, search your inventory and find out where each card is in each box, ship more easily, and manage customers. We have also developed a website where a seller can create his own card store that works in symbiosis with Kronocard software. Further, to help collectors, we also had to be able to sell on eBay with Kronocard. We now believe that this was the best corporate decision we took. A seller can take Kronocard (free) to build his database inventory, sell on Kronozio and on eBay at the same time. What does not sell on eBay can be left for sale on Kronozio.com there is no listing fee.
Here are some video links of the services offered.
- Scanning cards with auto-feeder scanner: https://vimeo.com/141212620
- Card documentation: https://vimeo.com/141208493
- Doing consignment with Kronocard: https://vimeo.com/190924362
- Image rotation: https://vimeo.com/180636745
3. Are there any costs associated with the services offered?
There’s a 10% selling fee on the Kronozio.com site and a monthly price for the eBay connector if the seller uses it.
Here are some additional statistics.
- 1700 registered users
- 300 user stores
- 35,000 page views per month
- 4M cards on the site
- 10,000 – 20,000 new and more cards per week listed on Kronozio.com by sellers
4. What do you hope customers discover when they visit Kronozio.com?
In summary, Kronozio is:
- Kronocard software (FREE!) www.kronocard.com
- High performance and easy scanning
- Documentation in super efficient grid mode
- We can also ask that Kronozio document the cards for us to go faster (fees apply)
- Advanced search in your cards inventory
- Sell on Kronozio.com
- Sale on eBay.com .ca .fr .uk .sp etc.
- Invoice and customer management
- Unique shipping module
- A web portal where you can sell your cards with your own configurable store
- Very effective customer support done by collectors
– A forum http://forum.kronozio.com
– A blog http://blog.kronozio.com
5. What are your thoughts on the card collecting hobby?
We think that it was time for the hobby to have a good product like this. We hope our ideas and software can ease up the process for collectors to create a cards database and sell their card collection.
** If you like to feature your business on our website, contact us at fivecardguys.com and we’ll have five questions ready for you!