James Laws, the owner and operator of The HIVE Comics, stayed away from auctioning items online.
He said he didn’t want to deal with packaging, shipping and a lack of customer interaction.
That was until Laws completed his first Whatnot auction on June 25 where he sold 54 action figures.
About a week after his first Whatnot auction, Laws held a second auction on June 30 where he said he sold 150 comics.
“I really haven’t done any online sales,” Laws said. “I didn’t really want to ship stuff out. I didn’t want to do it, but I had five or six people tell me about Whatnot and I went on the app. I loved the layout. I loved the interaction ability. It felt like I was in my store selling to people in my store, even though I wasn’t.
“The experience of it was completely different than just having an online store where people buy stuff and you ship it out to them.”
Whatnot is a live auction platform that allows buyers and sellers to interact with each other.
Items that can be sold on Whatnot range from trading cards to comics to clothing to autographs to NFTs.
Laws said he has found items go for less than market value on Whatnot, which he said that he’s a fan of.
“Over the past years, everything has really gone up in value,” Laws said. “… The collectable market has seen a great upturn in value. The Whatnot app is giving it a little bit more level playing field.”
Not only has Whatnot allowed Laws to clear out inventory of comics and action figures, but it has also helped him garner a wider audience.
Laws said his number of followers from the first auction to the second auction jumped from 36 to 103. Laws can also see buyer locations and he said after the comic book auction there were 24 different buyers and seven of those were from outside Texas.
“It was pretty eye opening to see that many people buying from outside Texas, but it was also humbling to see our local customers getting on Whatnot and buying from us,” Laws said.
Laws said to start he’s going to average one auction a week, but he said the goal is to eventually do five auctions per week with each of the five days being its own category, so one day will be comics, another will be action figures, another will be graded comics, another day will be trading cards.
“I want to end up doing five a week with five different themes,” Laws said.
The HIVE Comics opened in 2016 and Laws bought the store in November of 2019.
In addition to selling comics, trading cards and action figures, Laws said the comic bookstore hosts weekly “Magic: The Gathering” and “Yu-Gi-Oh!” tournaments. Laws said about 12 to 18 people show up on Fridays while eight to 12 people come during Monday and Tuesday.
“We have comic supplies and card supplies to protect your cards and comics,” Laws said. “… We have high end comics. We have weekly comics.”
