eBay reference Price tool Trading Card Market

[gauzef42]

Hi All! Beginning an Important discussion thread here. My intent is to have other sellers weigh in on their experience to ascertain whether or not this situation is having a widespread negative impact or if it is only a misunderstanding steeped in my limited mastery of eBay.

Why is eBay shoving inaccurate reference data for recent sold cards into transactions and offers? From what I can observe as both a card seller and buyer, is that (an average of cards sold based on keywords) is being used to "guide" pricing and negotiations in the trading card market. This blunt and inaccurate reference data is NOT useful and serves only to "muddy" the waters of an otherwise (free market) voluntary transaction by two legally sound individuals seeking to meet their needs/wants through the trade. I have directly experienced a negative impact from this "skewed incomplete data" as BOTH a buyer and a seller of trading cards. As a buyer, I have questioned and felt bad about eBay saying i overpayed for a card that I know I did not. Buyers dissonance/remorse was injected improperly by the reference data and it took my market specialized knowledge to overcome the urge to assume that data was reliable. As a seller, I have had to field nasty comments that insinuated I was overcharging by large margins, when I clearly was not. I have lost sales directly due to "bad reference data" provided by the platform that charges me to post and sell upon. That seems counterintuitive for all parties, higher sales price more fees taken.

These are a but a glimpse into my personal experiences in the past six months, please share yours so we may overcome the enemy that is bad data.

[mr_lincoln]

@gauzef42   In a nutshell, its hard to trust all Sold Search research one does on eBay, especially since the shuffling of categories (last November-ish).  Even prior to that I would see the exact items I was looking for, and some with higher sold prices, further down the returned list and after other non-similar items.

I've also had search results return ONLY items I have sold and not the item I am looking for.  So, it begs the question, intentional or simply poor algorithm programming?  I'm thinking the latter ...

Mr. L

[onefootflipper]

I have not seen what you are specifically referencing in action. But I see you specialize in sports and I specialize in gaming. I keep buying sports cards when people offer them to me but I rarely get around to listing them as I don't really know the market and have no clue what is and isn't good and keep going back to the boxes of gaming cards when I go to list and ignore the sports ones.

However I hope and pray ebay would just leave trading cards alone. The standard envelope was great, however everything else is really just worse. My nightmare is that they roll out requirements for a condition rating and then a database of every card in the universe so customers can see every example of the card on the site and prices can race directly to money losing territory like they tend to on the sites that specialize in various cards. That would be horrible for gaming, but probably wouldn't effect sports as much since everything is a parallel autograph with a serial number these days and not likely to have more than a few examples ever available.

Having to compete against amateur card sellers who can't do math is already bad enough, like the guys who will sell a card for 99 cents shipped and even include a top loader.

Costs them 30 cents for the listing, 53 cents for the postage, 13 cents for final value fee, 4 cents for the envelope and 25 cents for the top loader. They lose 25 cents on the transaction before even accounting for the value of the card.

[valueaddedresource]

@gauzef42  I brought up some of the shortcomings of the pricing data within the Collections feature in a dedicated community chat about it back in October.

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Weekly-Discussion-with-eBay/Community-Chat-October-13-11-00-am-PT-Pric...

It seems like at least some of the inaccuracies come from the lack of filters for grade and other variables.  At the time they told me they were working on adding more filtering capability, but didn't have a timeline for when that might happen.

Like you mentioned, I've also seen this reflect some pretty inaccurate prices in the price guide info shown just in the regular search results as well. I'm not an expert in either buying or selling trading cards, so I can't say how much of a negative impact it is having, but I think it is definitely an important question and thank you for sharing your experience.

If you look at that link for the dedicated chat from October, there are a few eBay community staff members who were involved - they may be good contacts for you to tag with any concerns you may have about this feature.

[soh.maryl]

How and when did eBay say you overpaid for a card when you knew you did not?

Buyers or shoppers may you accuse of that, but why would eBay?  

[gauzef42]

Thanks for sharing the knowledge! I think I would have to agree that it is an overreach by a desperate and aging electronic marketplace to stay relevant and trendy by offering "tools" to reduce presumed risk for potential buyers. The flawed algorithm in question should be ceased completely until it can be reliable enough so as to not have a negative effect on the market it was created to serve.

With the advent of many developing e-market platforms, it is understandable that companies are willing to rush out a flawed tool to give the appearance that they have a controlled and safe trading environment.

I personally am expecting a trading card platform to emerge soon, IG is trash, FB Marketplace can be risky, Mercari is a joke, eBay high fees/tax, Etsy maybe?? In all seriousness though, the need for a craigslist style platform of trading cards is real.

[valueaddedresource]

marlin@collectibles  - any updates on when more filters might be added into the Price Guide feature to allow more refining of results to get closer to apples to apples comparisons?

[gauzef42]

It does seem strange to say but yes eBay does tell me I am overpaying when I enter offer amounts for cards. An example is I want to buy a card that is worth roughly $40 but when I go to send an offer to the seller I get a message popping up saying "items of this nature typically sell for between x and y". I pause and ask myself am I getting ripped off? No, the reference data is just inaccurate. If I wasnt aware of the real value of the item I would have either low balled the seller by mistake (offense) or just walked away from the transaction altogether. I frequently pay above the range of what something like this sells for according to eBay. I only do this in areas I feel confident enough in my knowledge to disregard this reference. The larger point being that this bad data is harming the market on both sides.

[valueaddedresource]

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@gauzef42 wrote:

It does seem strange to say but yes eBay does tell me I am overpaying when I enter offer amounts for cards. An example is I want to buy a card that is worth roughly $40 but when I go to send an offer to the seller I get a message popping up saying "items of this nature typically sell for between x and y". I pause and ask myself am I getting ripped off? No, the reference data is just inaccurate. If I wasnt aware of the real value of the item I would have either low balled the seller by mistake (offense) or just walked away from the transaction altogether. I frequently pay above the range of what something like this sells for according to eBay. I only do this in areas I feel confident enough in my knowledge to disregard this reference. The larger point being that this bad data is harming the market on both sides.

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@gauzef42  would you be able to and/or comfortable with posting a screenshot of what you are describing (with your info and the sellers info blanked out)?

It might help the collectibles team to have specific examples to dig into.

[onefootflipper]

Ah, now I at least understand what everyone is talking about. My business model is not particularly offer based. I list cards at the price I actually expect to sell them for and sometimes send out 5 percent off offers. I don't have the feature where someone can send me an offer even turned on. As a buyer that just tells me that the seller will for sure take less money. 

Although I don't do a lot of sports, I mostly do gaming, which has very up to date market pricing databases on other websites. Is listing very high and taking offers the norm on sports? I have just been accruing sports cards for a long time without listing them unless they are vintage as it always seems like I have something else I can list instead that takes less research, so I never get to the box full of sports cards.