Talking With Tim: Beckett Subscriptions

I love buying on comc, and don't miss the BV one bit. I do hate the subscribe text though. Would rather not see a Beckett ad on every card. If they could eliminate that for non subscribers (which I will never be) it would be better in my opinion.

Also after watching the video, had no idea it's pronounced Com C. That threw me off.

IUjapander said:

I love buying on comc, and don't miss the BV one bit. I do hate the subscribe text though. Would rather not see a Beckett ad on every card. If they could eliminate that for non subscribers (which I will never be) it would be better in my opinion.

Also after watching the video, had no idea it's pronounced Com C. That threw me off.

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Good point. Dislike that as well.


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Keyser Soze said:

But seeing the actual going rate won't be as motivating of a factor to pull the trigger than seeing that bogus, inflated book value.

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COMC could do what Beckett apparently does. One column is ebay realistic value for most cards, the other column is that realistic value doubled or overflated by some percentage.

COMC could take their average sales price for the card, inflate it by some percentage, and show that result in the BV column for the "bogus, inflated book value".

uniquebaseballcards said:

BV makes a lot of sense for cards that aren't so rare, of course the problem is that most cards are "rare" nowadays.

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BV makes a lot of sense if it's ACCURATE. It shouldn't be the standard for the two LCS's around me to charge 50% of BV as their standard price for singles and to still not be able to move the cards at that price.

Keyser Soze said:

BV makes a lot of sense if it's ACCURATE. It shouldn't be the standard for the two LCS's around me to charge 50% of BV as their standard price for singles and to still not be able to move the cards at that price.

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For a LCS, I get it... for COMCs, which is a national (or world wide) platform, I think they need something... flying blind with NOTHING is just not good for their business... BV might not be the best or even 50% accurate but at least it's something... again, just IMO but I think you need to come up with a better idea for helping sellers specifically price their "lot" of cards when sending to COMCs. Plus, it's not like 100% of people look at the BV and then price accordingly... I think more than not do their own research.

MansGame said:

For a LCS, I get it... for COMCs, which is a national (or world wide) platform, I think they need something... flying blind with NOTHING is just not good for their business... BV might not be the best or even 50% accurate but at least it's something... again, just IMO but I think you need to come up with a better idea for helping sellers specifically price their "lot" of cards when sending to COMCs. Plus, it's not like 100% of people look at the BV and then price accordingly... I think more than not do their own research.

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Sellers still get BVs for the cards they send in.

Ghumbs said:

Sellers still get BVs for the cards they send in.

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Well then never mind lol :benson:

It looks like they have added some sort of price tracker. If you log in and look under the buyer menu, there is a COMC IQ Test. From there, they explain the new sales feature, and you can earn "history points" to look at sales history for a card via a captcha. The only downside appears to be that the "history" only gives you the current low price, number of sales of that card, and price of the highest sale (including shipping). An average sale price would be really nice, since the numbers can be easily skewed by outliers. For example I noticed most $1-2 autos are displaying a high sale of $4-6. If they offer more detailed info, this could be a great tool. But as is, I don't see how its values are any more realistic of actual market value than Beckett's inflated numbers.

Hi, Moe here...thanks for the input - we're still "tweaking" the historical sales data feature, and we're looking at ways to improve the sales data that we make available. And, feedback like this is a huge part of that process. We don't know what you want unless you tell us.

Granted, we can't do everything...but, we'll do what we can. The idea of displaying an "Average" price is awesome, and I'll definitely pass that along. Thanks!

--Moe@COMC

I'd think BV also doesn't make sense for cards with naturally volatile pricing, meaning mostly prospects. However if there were a way to represent recent price trends in addition to actual pricing, this may not be too bad or crazy to deal with volatility... fewer people would lose their shirts.

Moe@COMC said:

Hi, Moe here...thanks for the input - we're still "tweaking" the historical sales data feature, and we're looking at ways to improve the sales data that we make available. And, feedback like this is a huge part of that process. We don't know what you want unless you tell us.

Granted, we can't do everything...but, we'll do what we can. The idea of displaying an "Average" price is awesome, and I'll definitely pass that along. Thanks!

--Moe@COMC

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I don't think I'd display an average price, as you'll get a LOT of buyers that will be unwilling to pay anything over the average and it'll hurt sales. I'd be more inclined to post the sales range for the last, say, 6 months.

Keyser Soze said:

I don't think I'd display an average price, as you'll get a LOT of buyers that will be unwilling to pay anything over the average and it'll hurt sales. I'd be more inclined to post the sales range for the last, say, 6 months.

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It would be really cool if someone were able to compare ranges from multiple cards and/or multiple players at once.

Pricing is very subjective depending on the item, time of year, time of release, player hot streaks etc. It would be next to impossible to compile all that information for every single card made and keep it accurate and timely. Sure Beckett is outdated and not relevant to most collectors, but for cards that do not trade on a normal basis it is good to have a "REFERENCE" like Beckett. Just because a card does not sell for .99 on eBay does not mean it is worthless, it just means that no one who logged onto eBay wanted to purchase it at that specific time frame.
For modern cards that trade or sell regularly unfortunately eBay completed sells is the way to go. Which as a seller bothers me because eBay is not the be all end all of the hobby but as a buyer I do use it to determine what I should be willing to pay.
I may be able to sell a Rangers card for $120 online or I could sell it locally for $140 just depends on finding the right buyer. Another huge factor is card condition, eBay seller and listing exposure/keywords. None of these things are ever exactly alike so eBay does tend to have skewed data as well that has to be sifted thru to make a fair assessment of value.

Personally I loved Beckett as a kid back in the day nothing like buying the newest price guide and checking out your cards prices.
When I got back into collecting I used their price guides and traded on the site, needless to say I got duped out of some nice cards due to not knowing any better by trading based on Beckett value. Learned my lesson on that one a little to late.