Site Forum

artistim1978,

That's a fair and genuine concern. As many of us have invested considerable time and money into purchasing/trading cards to accumulate our collections, the last thing any of us want to do is to degrade the "value" of our cards by our own hands. I see that you, like myself and others, have contributed significant time to reporting prices to flesh out the values of cards on the site.

I think the best way to rationalize reporting the "dirty truth" of actual sale prices for cards is that this site is not the end-all authority for what a card is "worth." As others have alluded, most people selling or trading a card will do their own independent research into what a card is worth before letting it go. That being said, if the card from your example is listed as $100, but I go online and see that the card has sold 6 times in the last week for $20 each time, should I not report those six sales (and thus maintain the site's median price at $100)? Should the concern for the value of my collection outweigh the concern for the integrity of the prices of cards on this site?

In other words, it comes down to the culture and values of this site. Is the "pricing tool" designed to idealize a collector's expectation of value (or future value) for their sunk costs (cards already purchased/acquired), or is it to capture the accuracy of the value of the card at the time based on the price point of the broader market.

In your example, the rationale for maintaining the $100 price point on the site is to preserve the card's value. But if the card lists for $100, but never sells, then is that the real value/price? If someone lists it for $50 and it sells instantly (priced too low), do they always have the means to list another one at a higher price? The rationale for listing the "honest price" (the price of observed and objective samples of sales---i.e. ALL sales in the last two weeks or ALL sales in the last month as opposed to HIGHEST sale of the last two weeks or HIGHEST sale of the last month) is that a seller can see whether the trend of sales is on the rise and list it higher, thus pushing future cost/price/value higher.

The "dirty truth" is that if all the cards in your collection are selling in lots of 100 for $5, all the cards in your collection ARE worthless (...or at least fairly priced at $.05/card). But if in the marketplace everybody suddenly wants to buy a particualr card, the card will sell, lowest price first, then higher prices of the same card, as supplies dwindle. The market is bigger than us or our desires for the value of our collections, let's record it objectively, so that our prices are reliable, and can be used objectively for trade value, investment, and all the other reasons mentioned in this thread.

And if we all agree on "accuracy" taking precedent over "preservation of value", then the question becomes how do we systemically repair the machine to ensure accuracy?

v/r,

another Bob

artistim1978 wrote:

if a card is listed at $100 on a site or in a book, people will sell/ buy it for $50.. if the site/book then adjusts the price to $50, people then will be selling/buying the card for $25.. and so on and so forth.. i feel it is our duty as collectors and people that love the hobby, to uphold solid value ..especially since there are sales that reflect this value.. if you are going to report your lot of 100 cards for $5 (rendering each card in the lot almost worthless) it is someone elses job to report  the 99 cent sales of the better cards in that lot before all the cards in your collection become worthless.. you know what i mean?

What's wild is how this guy always buys/sells/observes the sale of exactly three cards in one day every few weeks at really high prices, with the third highest price always being exactly the same as a few weeks before. Otherwise the card never sells...

This is exactly the kind of problem that needs to get fixed for pricing to become legitimate/reliable (which IMO should be everyone's goal, but I'm OK with operating in the minority for now).

I removed the faulty prices. I checked an auction site - ungraded cards are not selling for those prices but graded ones are, and he's reporting them in the wrong place.

I also sent the member a friendly note informing them of their error and the consequences on the database. Hopefully it helps.

If anyone sees prices that are incorrect (way out of line for want the card is, like $5 on a Mantle RC), just drop me a PM with a link to the card. I'll probably be able to figure out which price is whacked.

Dan, Way too much work to handle. Everytime somebody sees an errant price they will PM you. Crazy! I really think the Pricing feature needs to be shutdown, or lets say UNDER CONSTRUCTION until a fair and reasonable solution is met. If there is one. If I follow the many posts correctly, a majority of members would be pleased to make it a Personal Accounting for "members' eyes only". How difficult would that be for ADMIN to change and institute a revamped Personal Account only? If something like this is setup, then ADMIN could provide options, like Share Pricing for Trades etc. Leave the options open to each member to navigate around. We wouldn't have to deal with Bonds XRC, unless we wanted to. Make Pricing a Personal Account would interest me, I would then turn it back on. And 1 more thing, trying to make our pricing feature a "price guide" just wouldn't work in 2019.

I just submitted a Feature Tracker to revamp pricing.

Should appear under : CARD PRICING

Take a look, pretty much my above suggestion to Dan.

~BOB~

Original Bob,

I disagree that we have a concensus that all users want individualized prices (I personally want to see the public/shared price of the card), however, I think you are onto a really great idea for accurate pricing on the site.

The idea of each of us having a personal price for each card in our collection would be a huge burden to maintain for those of us with 100s of thousands of unique cards. Being able to rely on my fellow users that my Sid Bream card from 1989 is worth $.10 is something I’m OK accepting without further research, but for my top cards I need a far more precise price.

What if the site presented a hybrid of the two models? If each user listed/maintained 1 price for each card or no price for each card and the site could list the average user price, I think we’d get closer to an accurate public price. For instance if 100 users price the Bonds XRC at $5, but one user lists it as $20, the site’s “public price” would list as $5.15 ($520 / 101), and each user could see a “my price” and the “public price” and maybe even click to see the details of other user price listings for each card. This way if there is an abundance of old data, either there could be a manual report/delete function OR the site could automatically only compute the “public price” from the last 100 (or so listed prices). This way cards with a lot of user ownership/interest would have a more dynamic and current price, while rare and underowned cards would have maybe five or six users with listed prices, which would indicate to someone that they may need to do their own research and add an accurate price, and thus increase the accuracy of the price on the site. Thoughts?

v/r,

Another Bob

BOBSCARDZ wrote:

Dan, Way too much work to handle. Everytime somebody sees an errant price they will PM you. Crazy! I really think the Pricing feature needs to be shutdown, or lets say UNDER CONSTRUCTION until a fair and reasonable solution is met. If there is one. If I follow the many posts correctly, a majority of members would be pleased to make it a Personal Accounting for "members' eyes only". How difficult would that be for ADMIN to change and institute a revamped Personal Account only? If something like this is setup, then ADMIN could provide options, like Share Pricing for Trades etc. Leave the options open to each member to navigate around. We wouldn't have to deal with Bonds XRC, unless we wanted to. Make Pricing a Personal Account would interest me, I would then turn it back on. And 1 more thing, trying to make our pricing feature a "price guide" just wouldn't work in 2019.

K-Cards - Admin already revamped the pricing on here a while back. It used to be an average of all prices ever loaded, but the membership successfully pointed out that card values change over time, and in some cases drastically. Admin then changed it to only look at the last 5 entries. Please understand what has already happened here, and all that has already been considered before trying to change it back to how it was.

To me pricing on TCDB is a non-issue. Yes, it is a database for our collection and some want to place a value on it. I guess the problem with that is that there are many who have the mindset of trading cards as an investment as part of a financial portfolio despite having learned from the late '80s to mid-90s that they aren't going to finance our children's college education.

I use TCDB primarily to catalog my hobby and give it a semblance of organization. Truthfully when I die no one in my family will venture into the hobby to find out how much they can get. They're going to want to get rid of the thousands of cards I have as soon as possible. They've talked of burying me with the cards, but they'd need some strong pallbearers for that.

Here's what I'm talking about. I was at this NJ card shop and a young couple came in with a 3200 count box of late '60s and early '70s cards in at least EX condition, quite a few ready to be graded such as a Reggie Jackson RC and a '73 Nolan Ryan. It was a great collection that belonged to this couple's uncle who had just passed away. They said they'd looked on the internet and felt they had a goldmine - and that box easily had a value of a couple of thousand dollars. I looked though it eventually after the owner had pulled the cards he would send for grading. He offered $75 to the couple (and that after commenting negatively about the collection). The couple took it. If they hadn't I was going to chase them down and offer to help them sell it as a partnership because I didn't have the money to give them an honest offer. That's what my collection will probably garner once I'm gone, and no pricing plan on TCDB will help that.

Most of us collectors know certan cards are worth more than others and function without pricing. It's just not TCDB's primary purpose for me.

Understood, however the current sentiment of most users new and old is that the pricing is unreliable and people turn it off, and the purpose of my original post was to demonstrate how it is broken and to brainstorm potential solutions.

To expand on the “reversion” model, where the prices operate democratically, perhaps the feature that was missing was not to build a model that can change drastically in an up-to-the-minute fashion, but an alert/repair system to update and expel old/bad data. If wihin the old model, an active user could be notified that “their price” is deviant from the public price (perhaps even in order of most deviance), they could quickly update their prices for those cards based on their own ovservance of price/value. And for inactive users, there could be a method for the rest of us to flag/remove deviant data fron the site. I think that would get us closer to “better” pricing, which would then have more users “turn on”, rely upon, and utilize the pricing option, which would in turn exponentially increase the accuracy of prices on the site.

It might take more time to build the function up front, but on the back end would save admin/power-users considerable time having to maintain and monitor bad data, as Bob alluded to you receiving a PM every time a price on one card is way off because of one user’s bad data.

Hopefully I’m not stirring the pot or picking old wounds, I just want to help provide solutions where I can. It pains me to see that long-time users say they turn prices off. That indicates to me that something needs to change to motivate them to turn it back on, because “their prices” are the ones we probably need the most.