Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Feedback on the new CardTarget website; Remaining 08 Baseball Ready for Shipping

I was fortunate enough to get a sneak peek preview from Mike for the new CardTarget website yesterday. He asked me to look it over and provide feedback on its overall appearance, navigation and in-hand market capabilities.

You're going to like the way this looks. The biggest and most significant change is the division two sections on the homepage. One for in-port and one for in-hand. As it does now for in-port, you will see a parallel listing of best sellers for in-hands and in-ports.

So with this parallel data, how will you tell one from the other? It'll be obvious on the homepage because they will have a title for each listing (in-port on the left and in-hand on the right). But what about a page for a player's card. How will you know, especially for the newbies once the etopps integration will kick in? If you are on an in-port card page, you will see a briefcase symbol that you won't miss. And if you are on an in-hand card page, a nice picture of a hand on that page.

Besides moving a few of the pull-down menus around, the overall navigation will be similar to how you currently navigate on CT. For the newbies, there will be informational sections on what is etopps and what is cardtarget and how they will be working together. I assume there will be quite a few people getting on CT for the first time after etopps makes the announcement that the integration is a go.

Setting up your in-hand portfolio will be quite easy. It's actually like being on Cloud 9. (Keep in mind, you're going to have to build it card-by-card since there's no XML file to transfer what you have in your collection to CT.)

For each card you will have a search box to type in the player's name. If you type in Griffey, you get to see gallery photos of all of the Griffey card produced by etopps as in-hands. You simply select which one you want by clicking on the select button below the photo.

At first I thought they had scanned each in-hand but that didn't make sense. Brilliantly, they doctored each in-port card to look like the in-hand version. And this works.

They also will give you the option to include other photos for your in-hand in case you're not happy with what they provide, but I don't see how you would not want their photo image for your in-hand. I just can't believe no one cooked this up before for making an in-port look like an in-hand.

If the card is graded or autographed, you can pick these options for the card you select and this is when adding your own image comes in handy.

For graded etopps, you will enter the company that graded the card, the grade, the qualifiers and the serial number for the graded card.

In summary, it's great to see how much cardtarget has been working on this while keeping up with the quality website they continue to provide for us.

* * *

Subject:Production Update: Cards Available For Delivery for 10/9/08
Date:10/08/08

The following cards are available for delivery on Thursday, October 9, 2008:

2008 BASEBALL

Albert Pujols 2008
Ken Griffey Jr. 2008
Jed Lowrie 2008
Denard Span 2008
Hanley Ramirez 2008
Chase Utley 2008
Ian Kennedy 2008
Justin Masterson 2008
Brandon Webb 2008
Chipper Jones 2008
Hiroki Kuroda 2008
Jeff Clement 2008
Derek Jeter 2008
Ryan Church 2008
Max Scherzer 2008
Joey Votto 2008
David Wright 2008
Edinson Volquez 2008
Luke Hochevar 2008
Matt Joyce 2008
Alex Rodriguez 2008
Evan Longoria 2008
Nate McLouth 2008
Greg Smith 2008
Geovany Soto 2008
Jay Bruce 2008
John Bowker 2008
Nick Evans 2008

We appreciate your patience. Please continue to check eTopps Updates for additional information.

Sincerely,
The eTopps Team

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