Big Server Upgrades

SportsCardDatabase has been consistently growing since our launch. In fact, you guys have been so active that the data in our database has grown by 20% in size over this month, not to mention all the images you have been uploading. That is great news, and I can not tell you all how much I appreciate your contributions. Thank you.

When you combine the potential of this site with the substantial growth of SportsCollectors.Net, I wanted to put us in place to take them to a whole new level. While the site is performing nicely and doing well, I have decided that it is time to make a pretty major upgrade to the hardware that powers our site.

I have plans to add some cool stuff on both sites for a while (that no other site has even thought of), and I didn't think our current platform could handle it. So last week I bought some much bigger and more powerful servers, so we have some great things in store for SportsCollectors.Net and SportsCardDatabase.

Yesterday I finished migrating our site to the new servers. You may notice that things are running faster and that we have been working to add more features.

New Features on SportsCardDatabase

We've been hard at work adding all sorts of new functionality to the site. Since so many of you have signed up and enjoy looking up cards/values and shopping for deals, we've been inspired to keep adding more things to help you enjoy this hobby:

Tracking your Collections and Wantlists
This came out about a month ago and so far the feedback has been really encouraging. It's really easy to find the cards you have/want, and add them to your profile.

The Watchlist
We were inspired here by eBay's very useful watchlist, except ours is much better. We figured it would be so much better for collectors to keep track of their auctions and buy now listings across many sites all in one place.

My Favorite Cards
This is a quick way to build a list of cards you are interested in tracking and see their values.

User Profiles
We've added the ability for collectors to create basic User Profiles about their collecting interests, showing off their collections, and showing their wantlists. There's lots more to come in this area.

My SCDB Dashboard
Here is tne one easy place to see a quick overview of all of your activity on SCDB. As we continue to add functionality, we'll add to summary items to this area.

Improvements to our Pricing Engine
As more and more of you look up cards, we analyze more data and can do better analysis. We are constantly evaluating our algorithms to find the optimal price determinations. We've made two small, but important optimizations thanks to your help.

New Homepage
The old was pretty plain and boring, so we cleaned ours a little bit.

New Partnerships
We've been working with more sellers, dealers, and marketplaces to bring even more items to SCDB. This will make shopping even better and bring in more data for determining pricing guidance.

As always, we are asking everyone for their ideas. While we are excited for the start we have going, we are nowhere near making a dent in our feature list - so we'll keeping working hard to improve the site.

Thanks for all your support and encouragement.

Comparison Shopping Works, rookie cards of HOFer Adrian Dantley for 18 cents

I  love our partner site Sportlots, a marketplace that features over 25 million sportscards for sale. I have found some pretty fantastic deals on there over the years, but their search isn't always the easiest to use.

Many of you know just how much I love collecting vintage cards and rookie cards of Hall of Famers. So I am always on the look out for good deals. 

The Comparison Shopping functionality on SCDB really makes it easy for collectors to find the best deals anywhere on the internet. While I was testing out our new My Collection feature, I found a deal I just could pass up:

1977 Topps #56 Adrian Dantley Rookie Card for $0.18 (and I bought 2 of them at that price). This card has SCDB  market value of $4.13 in Ex-Mt condition, so I think I  got quite a deal (scans below).

Now I know what you  are thinking, you got a good price on the cards but you must have paid $3-6 on shipping. The beauty of this deal was that I only paid $0.62 in shipping for these cards. So the total came to $0.88 delivered for both.

While I am excited to tell everyone about my great deal, but the message I want to get across is just how easy it is to use SCDB's comparison shopping to help you find great prices on cards and improve your collection.

We are working on some more features that will make it even easier for you to find  deals on the cards you want and get alerted when they are available at the prices you  want to pay. 

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:

SCDB featured on SportsCollectorsDaily

Rich from SportsCollectorsDaily wrote a nice write up about the site:  

http://www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/latest-sports-collecting-news/new-site-helps-expand-online-collector-tools.html

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.