Pros and Cons Of E-Pack - Let's discuss!

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TMacfreak91

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I'm sure a thread like this exists but figured I'd start one just in case.

E-Pack has been met by many with mixed reactions. Some love it while other HATE it.

Here's my 2 cents on it first, and then I'd love to hear from all you guys on what your perspective is.

Pros:

For me, now that I live in West Virginia, the closest shops besides Walmart that carry hockey cards are over an hour drive away. E-Pack is a convenient way for me to "scratch the itch" from the comfort of home. In other words it's very convenient.

E-pack exclusive inserts and parallels - this offers collectors additional cards to acquire of PC players who might otherwise only have a standard base card. It also finally creates some real value for a standard base card. Parallels like the silver and gold foils that require many copies of a base card, encourages base for base trades. Tell me realistically, when is the last time you actually had the motivation to "chase" base cards - for me, it's been years since I've been willing to put any effort into that sort of thing.

Ease of trading - For me, trading for cards has always been a bit of a hassle. You have to make a post, exchange PMs and then ship the cards hoping the other party holds their end of the bargain and that it doesn't get lost in the mail. Trading on e-pack is instantaneous, so very easy to get stuff you want in a short amount of time or to flip unwanted cards (even base).



Cons:

Addictive - e-pack, while very convenient, is VERY addictive and makes it way too easy to spend hundreds of dollars on cards.

Over-saturation of market - because of the COMC transfer feature, the market on cards from products available on e-pack gets flooded very quickly once a product hits e-pack.


Negative impact on brick and mortar stores - while e-pack is great for someone like me who doesn't live reasonably close to a hobby shop, many users do have stores in their area who get significantly less customers due to the convenience of e-pack.



There's plenty of other pros and cons and I'd love to hear what you all think. So let's have it!
 
cremona71 said:
You know. Mom said if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it at all. E-pack is overall horrible for the hobby
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Feel free to elaborate and be as positive or negative as you see fit!

I mean for this thread to be an open forum for those who love it to explain why and for those who hate it to say their peace :)
 
Pro: ease of access no matter where you are. Easy trading of cards you don't want for cards you do want with no up front mailing fees until you decide to ship a bulk order.

Cons: Price is the same even though many cards cannot be physical until "leveling up". You are paying as much or more as a hobby shop charges and you still have to pay to have your hits mailed to you. If UD is charging full retail for something they don't have to ship to a distributor and then split with a B&M store, they should be offering free shipping.

Derek k.
 
I've got mixed feelings about ePack.

On the downside - holy cow their site sucks today. It was always pretty slow, but with the release of Compendium S2 it is practically unusable right now. In my day job I build online servers that support some of the biggest video games in the world, I know it's not a trivial task to design services that scale or load test them properly, but man the performance of the ePack site at present is downright embarrassing.

Even when the ePack site is only "normal slow" and not "#@!&*ing slow", it's still a pain to use. If you need 310 Compendium base cards of your player to finish the gold rainbow, your options are either constantly spam the forums trying to find someone to trade with you, or very tediously proposing trades 1 at a time to the hundreds of people who have a copy.

On the plus side, compared to physical box breaking, there are probably a lot of cards out there that someone is just dying to add to their PC, but never get listed as the effort to scan and post cards on ebay leads to a lot of cards just languishing in basements. When everything is available, and there's no friction from ebay fees, shipping fees, etc., it's feasible to make trades that just wouldn't happen otherwise.

Ultimately I think it will succeed or fail based on how much of a social platform it becomes. They could certainly improve the tooling to automate things to the point where you could say "I want 300 Sedin compendium base, auto-accept any trades for scrubs through to stars at 1:1, or 3 Sedins for a Toews, 5 for a McDavid" or something along those lines, and then you just click buy to purchase enough trade bait boxes, and watch the Sedins roll in, but I'm not sure many people would see the fun in that. I think they need to grow their community features beyond the utterly primitive Sports and Entertainment forums that they have now.
 
I never buy physical boxes and I bought 1 box of Compendium and 1 box of Series 1 to use as trade bait for cards I wanted versus hoping they found their way off the ePack site. Overall, I found it enjoyable. I think it could be the way of the future and a huge pro, as was earlier mentioned, is seeing tons of cards and multiple copies out there for trade. It prevents people from just burying things and never taking the effort to sell them even though there might be a market out there.

I would like to see a cash trade option, similar to COMC, instead of only being able to trade for other cards. That might entice more people to use it and UD could probably bake in some service fees and earn a few extra bucks themselves.
 
tkachukfan said:
I would like to see a cash trade option, similar to COMC, instead of only being able to trade for other cards. That might entice more people to use it and UD could probably bake in some service fees and earn a few extra bucks themselves.
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Yes x1000!

I was buying McDavids from people on there when it first started. UD sent me an email not to do it.

Everytime I bought a card the person would turn around and buy more packs. On more then one occasion the person would hit another McDavid and sell it to me again lol. It was a win win for UD.

Still can't figure out why they don't do it...

For anyone saying you can buy on COMC, the problem is it is now out of epack and therefore can't be used to trade.
 
e pack buying is not for me, but if others like it fair enough......i do open my free pack every day so I can build up some inventory to get my epack exclusive bobby ryan's if and when he is released in compendium series 3 ( the length of time between series 1 and 2 was a little on the long side!!!) I to wish there was some sort of buying option....there are 3 pc cards of mine on the epack site right now that I would gladly make reasonable offers on, unfortunately they may never become available to me
 
Just been trying it out (trading and free pack of the day) for a couple of days since I've been toying around starting a new collection of either Korpisalo or Vrana. Thought I'd try for a rainbow at least.

I do like the idea, but the platform for trading and everything is terrible. Not exactly user friendly, thus far.
 
As mentioned earlier, one thing I like is how easy it is to get some otherwise very hard to find cards. For example, I've been able to get a Fasching SPGU Rookie Blends patch /15 and was able to acquire 6 Fasching Draft Day marks all in one deal. The odds of being able to pull off a deal like that off of e-pack are slim and next to none from my experience.

I agree on the interface. The sometimes unbearably slow speed of the site can be maddening. I think the changes they made recently have actually made the number of steps to get a deal done even worse lol.
 
The interface is pretty terrible and its technically a banable offense to purchase cards via e-pack. Which really doesn't make any sense at all. Either way the card eventually ends up going to COMC or one of the participants pays to receive a card.
 
Without ePack, it would've been borderline impossible for me to acquire 2 Marner Canvas and 3 Matthews young guns while trading ~3 boxes worth of cards.
 
I've finally dipped into ePack. From a collector perspective, I have an easy way to get rid of base cards I don't care about, while simultaneously using them to upgrade to the foil parallel versions. I've also been able to swing deals for cards I'd normally have to buy on eBay because I'd have zero chance of pulling them.

The downsides are numerous. The pricing is higher (which I'm good with - because it keeps collectors going to LCSs). Paying to have cards shipped to you is asinine and should be build into that higher price. The people on there swinging deals are either lazy (I'm proposing a trade with nothing coming back to you), or the standard issue keyboard jockeys who've just chosen ePack to as their outlets to be pricks instead of World of Warcraft. And of course, the interface is just terrible. It defies any and all logic in UI design. Perish the thought, but they'd have been better off trying to work with COMC and/or Beckett to get APIs designed for easy integration.

Given that it's not even their first foray into an "eCard" idea, it's something you'd hope they'd have approached it a bit more responsibly.

Right now, it's more bad than good no matter which perspective you work from. But if their brainstems ever grow into full-fledged brains, they might be able to put something together that works for collectors without further undermining their LCS relationships.
 
geschrocks33 said:
What's this? Steve posting a thread!? :stare:
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LOL I figured if I'm going to start selling and trading on here again I might as well show my face around town a bit first :laugh:


For me, I see both sides of it. The UI is pretty awful. However, I don't see the argument for why you shouldn't be allowed to send blank trades. Isn't that essentially what people on here who ask people what they want or to check their bucket do but in a surprisingly more efficient way?


The shipping fees are to me, the worst part of epack. I basically need to sell a bunch of stuff just to be able to ship the cards home which sucks. That said though, I can also just leave them there and it's basically free storage haha.
 


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