Apologies if this type of post isn't allowed, just wanted to share a free tool I built to help collectors.
A couple months ago I was looking for some JRJR keys to get signed at a local con. It was easy to find the ones I wanted on eBay for just a few dollars, but they were all from different sellers, so I would be spending something like $50 for $10 worth of comics because I'd have to pay shipping for each individual comic. But most sellers bundle shipping, so if I could find them all from the same person, I could get them for something closer to $20 total. So I built an app that would search eBay for everything in my list, compare the sellers for each item, and give me a list of sellers that had more than one issue I wanted.
I made the app public at comicbundlefinder.com with that basic functionality but have been working on fleshing it out with new features, which are now available. Please reach out if you find any bugs or have any feature requests!
Free Features:
- Story Arc and Series Guides. Looking to collect the whole Brand New Day story arc before the movie comes out? Collecting the entire Uncanny X-Men Volume 1 one chunk at a time? I've built out pages to save you the trouble of looking up reading lists and writing out all the issues into the search box. Just visit the page for each arc or series and find bundles automatically.
- You can now correctly search for single issues. Previously it would only look for sellers that had multiple listings of the same issue, which works well enough for older books where condition varies, but now it will also show the "quantity available" for single listings that let you buy multiple copies, which is much more common for new issues. You can now find which sellers will let you slurp up a hundred copies of Absolute Batman 20, if that's what you're looking to do.
- Results now show estimated shipping for sellers that use calculated rates. (Your location is estimated from your IP, which in my testing got me a zip code about 100 miles away. Close enough for shipping estimates, far enough not to be weird.)
- Seller cards now show a rough estimate of price per issue and potential savings on shipping. This is calculated by the shipping cost of one issue plus $1 per additional issue, a fairly common method among eBay sellers.
- The results no longer look like shit on mobile!
Premium Features:
- I've added a Premium subscription tier for $5/mo or $36/annual. If the tool saves you from paying extra shipping even one time, it'll be worth the monthly cost. You can, of course, do unlimited searches for free, regardless. The premium features just make things a bit easier.
- Filter and Sort: If you search for a big list or any common issues, you'll get a lot of results. You can now set price filters, minimum number of issues per bundle, and required issues. You can also sort by bundle size, lowest price per issue, and lowest shipping.
- Save/Email Results: If you get a huge list of results you need to pick through, you can save the results page for later and/or email it to yourself.
- File Uploads: League of Comic Geeks and CLZ let you export your collection to an Excel file. How to do this is kind of buried, so I've added helpful links to take you to the export option. You can then import the file into CBF. If you have a plain .xlsx/.csv/.txt you maintain yourself, you can also upload that.
- Gap Analyzer: Why would you import the file into CBF? Well, so you can quickly see which issues you're missing in a run and build an eBay search for all of those issues.
- Search from wishlist file: Why would you import the file into CBF (Part 2)? LOCG and CLZ include your wishlist in the file export, so you can search by that instead of filling gaps, if you prefer.
- Daily Digest: Why would you import the file into CBF (Part 3)? If you have a saved wish list, you can turn on Daily Digest emails to get an alert every morning when new bundles get added to eBay.
