NSE1 is a small catchy name that easily recognized. It also works in websites like ebay as "nseone" as they require a larger name for their sellers.
In 1992 NSE was founded which is the National Stock Exchange of India, not to be confused with NSE1. We have no stock, aren't in India, and have no plans on being publically traded.
In 2004, the 1st of May. NSE1.com as a domain was created. What it did then is anyone's guess. We figured from the history we can gather it has been cash parked since then.
2020, NSE1.com's domain was purchased and placed in cash parking by our parent company. There it sat, and surprising get's decent traffic. Mostly people looking for the Stock Exchange...
2022, March. A friend brought over a huge box of collectible items that she no longer wanted. NSE1 was born. We started with Diecast Cars, Hot Wheels, Matchbox, and Comics. We also had a stack of Magic The Gathering cards. In doing this collection, my enthusiam for cards collecting was rekindled. I used eBay to sell all the items off and learned alot about the site and how it's auctions work.
April of the year 2022, with a portion of the collection sold off and my understanding of the auction world I began building out a more robust system to drive sales, at least that was the plan.
May completely overhauled the plan. Dropped what was left of the starter box items. Focused on shipping, noting that a 1/3rd of our sales went there. Could always be a 1/3rd better.
July 2022. Launch NSE1.com with it's intial design that had all the items on eBay with a focus of creating content outside the auctions. Small Inventory made this process easy but soon trying to manage a large load would prove flaws in the intial design.
Begin Grading Company Rant [Skip this if you already know]
Had enough cards at this time to break ground with grading companies. Sent in grading to PSA, GMA, and Beckett. GMA had a amazing turnaround speed, however had over 40 cards of a 200 card order with the slabs scratched. They were totally unsaleable and I wouldn't pass them on to any customers of mine. To their credit, they did refund me for all and then some. [ GMA Quality ]
Now I had a bunch of cards that I had some grader's opinion, but they weren't slabbed. I started enclosing my own. Created my own flip, my own certification database, and replaced the GMA scratched slabs. A lot of learning involved here, but they turned out well for our first go out of the gate.
Beckett was our next customer. I'm not sure what to say. They are a tough grader. The internet opinion is true. Good luck getting anything better than a 9.5. I love their slabs out of all the graders. I have I feel they look the slickest. But again, there were flaws in their process. Got a Patrick Mahomes back with the label/flip misprinted, the "C" on the "centering" sub grade is half visible. Sadly they cost the most and there is still quality issues. [C Beckett]
PSA, boy did I not want to use these folks. In the beginning I was hoping for some underdog company to do right. At best the long-lived Beckett, to knock it out the park. But again what they say is true. PSA is amazing at what they do. Their turn around is the longest by far, but it's like the saying goes; Cheap, Good, or Fast - Choose Two.
High quality communication, you know what your order is doing, when it will get to you. It goes through 2 quality checks. There are no scratches here folks. Their grading, seems dead on as well. It comes shipped in a nice custom box, with well insulated packing. If I would to do this over I would of skipped the other two and stuck with what the prevailing wisdom of the 'net.
/rant
September. Created a skeleton of the original design, automated inventory control and building of site. Driving content by building information pages on all the Hall of Famers along with their listings on our site. At this time I was using a mixture of AuctionNudge and Puppeteer to download eBay information into my system. The eBay's Developer's API was a little daunting to setup and was skipped.
Selling mostly cards now, with a other items and collectibles trying to find a focus on what our place in the market would finally look like.
October. We are here, sports cards and memorabilia focused. At this time we have the need to turnkey our setup. This means for our customers a much more unified and efficent setup. The website, the auctions, and everything are going to become uniform in a effort to provide better service as well as allow for our staff to not have to work so hard to make progress.
New site. New Auctions Formats. New Images. New Business Cards. New Mailings.
![[ GMA Quality ]](https://nse1.com/gfx/gmaquality.jpg){kind=link}
![[C Beckett]](https://nse1.com/gfx/beckett_c.jpg){kind=link}