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SportsCardDatabase - Sports Card Reference & Real Time Pricing

Free Sports Card Real Time Pricing and Collector Tools

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Custom Search - You Can Price Any Card

While we (as a community of collectors) have worked extremely hard building quite an awesome catalog of sports cards, we still have quite a while to go. Over the coming months, we hope our members will continue providing card listings and scans to make SportsCardDatabase.com an even better resource.

What about the cards not yet listed on SportsCardDatabase yet?

We have added Custom Search functionality that allows collectors to enter card information and perform a marketplace search. Each search will deliver:
  1. Marketplace Comparison Shopping for Auction Items
  2. Marketplace Comparison Shopping for Buy Now Items
  3. Market Values (Online Price Guide)
Below is a screenshot of our Custom Search:






Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Welcome to SportsCardDatabase.com

Welcome to SportsCardDatabase.com...  A  better set of tools to help sports card collectors enjoy their hobby- built by collectors for collectors.

As you can probably guess from our name, this site has a huge reference database of sports cards information. But there is so much more that will certainly help you build your collection.

So what is this site and why should I use it?

We're here to make collecting, buying, selling, and trading more fun and productive by providing real time information and easy to use tools to collectors. Everything on the site is 100% FREE.

Why we built this thing...

In 1999, a small group of sports card collectors envisioned an ideal web site dedicated to helping everyone better enjoy the sports card collecting hobby. We wanted it to be more than just a message board, more than an online card shop, more than just a monthly price guide, more than just an auction, more than just a company that grades cards, more than a magazine filled with advertisements, more than anything else we had seen! And just as important as the features, it had to be FREE and easy to use.

Key features:

1) Catalog of baseball, football, basketball, and hockey cards.

Detailed listings of every major issue from1948-1992 (before the insert insanity) to start with, that's over 150,000 cards. With our members help, we'll certainly be adding tons more cards to our library as we go along. Everything is fully searchable with a very powerful search engine, as well as easy lookups by player and set.



2)  Never overpay again with our Comparison Shopping tools.

For every single card in our database, you can see up to date marketplace comparison shopping for that item sold in fixed price and auction formats.


3)  What are my cards worth??? We have a real time pricing engine.

Have you ever been frustrated because you see your card that "books" for $150 , but you can't even sell it for $10?

We have heard thousands of collectors say that cards are only worth what someone will pay for them. When we combine recent sales figures (across multiple marketplaces) with the prices people are trying to sell the card for, we get some really valuable information.

We have seen a few newer sites that offer paid subscriptions to view prices of PSA, BGS, and SGC graded cards closed sales on eBay. While this certainly has value, it represents such a small segment of card sales, usually not many cards, and not reflective of the larger card market on and offline.

We do things a little differently than any other site/service out there. We have spent years analyzing the factors that determine card buying trends and viewed data across millions of items. It's little surprise we found that there are significant swings and variances in the secondary sports card market that just weren't reflected in printed monthly/yearly card price guides, so we needed a better way to calculate card values.

Our pricing process normalizes the data and remove the significant pricing extremes that would skew values. After the data set is collected, our formula then considers the following factors and applies appropriates weights:
  • successful sales and items currently offered
  • both fixed price and auction formats
  • median sales values and average sales values
  • real time and historical trend data
  • number of times item is sold and offered for sale
  • length of time the item is offered and whether it sells successfully
We made the decision to focus our pricing on ungraded cards only, as graded cards are significantly small sector of the total card market and have a statistically significant percentage of pricing extremes. As we go along, we'll continue to monitor market trends and adjust our processes accordingly. We have future plans to analyze trend information for the graded card segment and provide separate pricing for these items.



So what's next?
We have excellent base to work with, and the features coming are going to continue to build on that. We got a very long feature list (many of the more innovative ones we'll keep quiet for  now), but  here are the very immediate  priorities:
  • More Cards.  We'll continue to add more cards to our library, including newer cards and regionals. We can certainly use your help on this, as all of our listings are contributed by our members.
  • More Scans of Cards. During our beta period, our members have been good enough to help us upload thousands of scans of cards from their collections. 
  • Track your Collection & Wantlists. We need an easy way to track of  items you have  and want.
  • Showing  Off  Your Collection. This will be a lot more convenient than learning HTML and posting to a web site. And much more effective and organized than adding a bunch of scans on photobucket.
Please stayed tuned as we will be announcing more functionality initiatives soon along with upcoming partnerships.

I really hope many of you are as psyched about this as we are. Let the card collecting fun really begin.