General Forum

Im sure this has been covered before. But does anyone else hate having to go to ebay to find prices? I miss the days of actually knowing what something worth. My son who is 12 asked me if the people from antiques roadshow run to ebay and check for comps before they give a price. 

Well, the days of knowing what something was worth was back when Beckett's was the price bible, yes? I swore by that and Wizard magazine (comic books) when I was younger, thinking I was rolling in the dough. Now, it's probably good that Ebay and other sales sites give different opinions as to what something is actually going for. It is certainly more work, but as a buyer I at least feel a lot more informed about not getting fleeced on an overpriced card.

I second that. Beckett will show you what a suggested price may be. To me, as far as assigning a monetary values goes, something's "worth" is what someone will pay for it. With so many places to purchase things (I.e. eBay, Sportlots, COMC, ect) you will have more places to gather "real world" data from. 

What they said!!

Along with huge volatility factors(athletic achievements& performances, behavorial incidents, health etc)  that can further confuse an estimated pricing process.

Then you have the battle inflated prices where 2 or more will upbid prices to unreal standards based on timing where either you have a hot item or just the must win/have mindset.

What someone paid for something last week, will not necessarily be the same this week or the next, kind of like stocks many of our cardboard likenesses fluctuate.

This is pretty much what I want to say every time someone complains about the pricing on this site.

These days there is no one place you can go to get "the price" for a card. It is like asking "how long is a piece of string?".

Nothing like having eBay, SportLots, COMC, Card Barrel and others open at the same time trying to compare while also keeping in your head what you are comfortable with....

I honestly miss the days when you could just compare the prices of Beckett and Tuff Stuff and try to sell for 50% of the Hi BV or buy for 30% of the Hi BV. It was much more simple back then. Alas, Tuff Stuff is no more and Beckett completely sucks now. Everything today is either over-exaggerated or under-whelming. Commons get jumped up in "value" due to minimum listing-prices on all the selling sites, but they also don't get listed as often for the same reason. Cards with a low print run get highly exaggerated (graded or not) due to these sites as well. Once the sell price settles down, they become hard to find and it's not because people are hoarding them, but the sellers don't want to sell it for what becomes about 10% of what it used to sell for when it was new. I don't even bother pricing ANY of my cards anymore. I know the ballpark of what they are "worth" and I always ask for people to make an offer on my cards. I don't care if it is one card or hundreds of cards. If the price seems fair to me AND them, I'll take it.

Someone should develop an app that pulls recent sales from all those sites and compares them for the user. Similar to Trivago for hotel rates or The Zebra for car insurance rates.

And a Shazam for cards where one can hold phone over image, and it id's it and creates a listing ready to be uploaded to the platform of your choice. And adds an accumulated average of their sales

I loved it when a dealer would pick up a Beckett when he was selling but pick up a Tuff Stuff when he was buying.  As Tuff Stuff prices were on the most part lower.

I'm with you about letting buyer set the price.    I have post here about why I want the buyer to set the price.  

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