PWCC Juggernaught
 

Watching the blitzkrieg of nice, graded PWCC cards on Ebay ending over the next day or 2, I couldn't help but spare a thought for the smaller dealer or collector who uses Ebay as the principal means to sell cards. It must be very difficult to compete, particularly in our sphere of interest, as PWCC continues to have these mega auctions. The cards themselves will draw interest or not but at a minimum buyer wallets seem to be voting in PWCC's favor. And they have provided a greater variety and choice of cards that heretofore existed on Ebay.

PWCC has some nice eye candy, I caught myself many times looking.
As a seller, maybe one needs to create their own high-end stickers.

Compete...???
 

What do you mean compete.....?

You just package up your stuff, send it to PWCC, they do ALL the work, they take ALL the risk in that Ebay minefield, and they pay you quickly EVERY month.

I do get a laugh sometimes when I see the same exact card in an Ebay store that PWCC just sold for 1.5 or 2x the price of the guys card in the Ebay store.

Why fight it?

Love it.

Peace, Mike

Allegedly.

I have consigned with Brent several times recently and he does a great job. Very easy guy to work with and he is easily reached. I did ok overall. Some stuff ended up much lower than what I would have expected and others sold for a bit more than I had been asking for the cards in my eBay store.

Admittedly I have not given him Clemente, Mantle and Mays rookies in PSA 8s but the prices he gets on a good deal of his stuff is unbelievable, literally. No slam against Brent but there is no way money is actually changing hands on some of this stuff. See the same bidder ids running up stuff, many with lots of retractions and those same listings end up being well over VCP highest sales within hours of listings. Sorry but it is highly suspicious.

Smoke and mirrors? :D

Agreed. I gave him a small sampling of stuff, so probably not enough to run a good test on (5 cards), but I was VERY disappointed in the final sales prices on my 5 card consignment. No record breaking prices set for me, and I was thinking I probably could have done just as good, if not better, selling it myself. I am dumbfounded when I see the record breaking prices, especially on the lower end stuff (PSA 5 and lower).

Who says you have to be in competition? The market is what it is, with or without PWCC or any other individual seller. As you said, the cards themselves draw the interest. You don't have to get into a head to head battle with another seller in order to be successful in your area of interest. Unless you're drilling down into some very specific niche, the field of baseball card collecting is far too vast for one dealer to dominate so completely that their meer presence makes it difficult for others to exist.

the record stuff is really for that top 5% that we are all watching....none of us are looking at 1974 topps psa 8 commons..

psa 5s are all not ower end stuff....a psa 5 centered mickey mantle 1951 bowman is not like other psa 5s for example..there are plenty of psa 5s that bring in thousands..

when we arent consigning our water front property cards but are bidding on water front property cards than its more likely we will see record setting prices on cards we are bidding on and getting lower than we expected (even though we werent able to sell the cards on our own for more than what we got) for cards we are consigning

Are we all watching the same 5%? :confused: The world record prices are not limited to what you call waterfront property cards in PWCC's auctions.

yes we are all watching those top 5%..not everyone looking at the same cards but all together looking at them...can be records highs on some other cards..but for the most part its true....when we consign a 1952 Topps standard Frank House PSA 8 of the world i wouldnt expect a record high, in fact commons are trending down...if its a 1952 Mays topps PSA 5..theres a better chance for a record high..or green cobb.etc.......yet people complain they arent getting what the card is 'worth' when consigning the Frank Houses of the world ...and not understanding why that happened considering others are getting record highs on the Mays.....these cards are just being used as examples/symbols

I consigned a small group (7) of cards to PWCC to try them out. While there are still several days to go, one of the cards has already eclipsed the asking price from when I listed it on the BST. I will already clear more than I had asked on the BST even after PWCC fees come out.

Brent seems to be a good guy. He has responded to my email questions...which is more than a lot of big ebay sellers. And somehow he gets a constant flow of quality cardboard.

But with ebay auctions there is opportunity for shenanigans...and it does seem to occur somewhat regularly.

What I find unusual compared to other sellers is the frenzied bidding on some of the high dollar cards almost from the instant they go live. Draw your own conclusions, but for example, 43 bids here within the first few hours of posting. Starting literally one minute after it went live.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1986-Fleer-B...wAAOSw1DtXLUAG

You seem to think I was not happy with the results of my consignments, which is not true. I am also not comparing my sales through PWCC or under my own ID to PWCC's results. My comparison is to the data within VCP and is not based on your 5% figure--whatever is represented in that figure:confused:. Commons are dead for everyone. I am talking about star cards, not even nice examples for the grade and not all in high grade. The listings have the same bidding patterns, with similar ids appearing over and over, auctions with bidders with bid retractions which get run up within the first day of bidding while other cards like them lag behind.

I get it you like Brent and he can do no wrong. I like Brent too but there is clearly something going on with too many of his listings.

yup...that's the kind of suspicious bidding one regularly sees with his big buck cards. I just wonder how many auctions this bidder upper has won in general and what types of items they were.

And that card looks more like a 9! :D

At one point, it probably was.:D

It seems to me that, at least at the moment, that PWCC is the biggest player in Ebay pre-war auctions, bringing far more vintage material to the marketplace than existed before their arrival. And as they say (whoever they are), " if you want to play the game, it helps to know the dealer."

Holy crap, $27,000 with 9 days to go!:eek:

Still it has occurred on more than a few occasions..someone brings up an auction and wondering who the heck was bidding on a card at a certain price in a pwcc auction..and all of the sudden a net54 member says they were bidding or their friend or someone that commonly bid against was the one bidding so it was in fact legit.....i not sure if it was an pwcc auction but recently there was a net54 board member shocked on biddiing results on a wrestling RC card wondering how the bids could be legit then another board member attested that they were legit..

So mostly OT, but in response to that linked Jordan rookie: were basketball cards in the 80s not over-produced junk? Because my Kirby Puckett rookie card is probably worth less than the top loader I keep it in.

There are something like 15,000 Jordans graded by PSA from memory. Not exactly scarce.

If 300M people worldwide (* that could be a small/large number) would want one, then it is a scarce card, relatively speaking.

300 million collectors? Uh, I don't think so.

Kirby Puckett is not exactly Michael Jordan in terms of how many people collect him.

I didn't say that. I said 300M people worldwide would want one. I would guess far more than that have heard of him and a lot of those would know his rookie (first card) would be valuable. It might be a stretch but it might not be, actually. I would imagine close to a billion people have heard of him.

Leon didn't say 300 million collectors, he said 300 million people. The Jordan card transcends collections. There are probably thousands of "people" who only own one card, and that card is the '86 Jordan.

And in the past 5 years we've had, and I'm guessing here, thousands of "investors" who are also not collectors, buying this card as an ego boast.

So, 300 million might be high or low, but Jordan's rookie card is on a entirely different supply/demand curve.

And BTW, I do not own one.

Thanks :).....and I don't own one either but obviously agree.

And edit to add, the more Lebron James lowers his shoulder and bull-dozes his way to the basket and refs swallow the whistle; then shots 25% from 3-point; the Jordan card goes up. Jordan created his own shots, Lebron doesn't.

It's an absurd number IMO.

Eh...not sure how much that has to do with the value of Jordan cards. So much of Jordan's legacy and his aura is based on the fact that he was 6-0 in NBA finals, not 2-4.

Remember, there are over a billion people in China. And they watch NBA basketball. So does France and most of Europe. Jordan is a worldwide star. And I would say that 50K people that think they have this card actually have a reprint. It's up there with the Wagner, I'm sure, in the Top 5 of reprinted/faked cards.

He does advertise the bigger cards, and they're all.listed on his site for days before they go live on ebay. A lot of collectors, myself included, check this site and know what's coming. I put an early bid in so the card shows up in the buying section of the my ebay page and I get the alerts. Perhaps others are doing the same thing, which drives the bidding up quickly. It then flattens out until close to the end.

p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $14,500.00
May-07-16 19:46:19 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $14,200.00
May-07-16 19:46:14 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $14,000.00
May-07-16 19:39:19 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $13,000.00
May-07-16 19:39:14 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $12,500.00
May-07-16 19:37:42 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $10,000.00
May-07-16 19:37:08 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $9,000.00
May-07-16 19:37:04 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $8,000.00
May-07-16 19:37:01 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $7,000.00
May-07-16 19:36:57 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $6,000.00
May-07-16 19:36:45 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $5,000.00
May-07-16 19:36:41 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $4,000.00
May-07-16 19:36:37 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $3,000.00
May-07-16 19:36:34 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $2,000.00
May-07-16 19:36:31 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $1,000.00
May-07-16 19:36:16 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $100.00
May-07-16 19:36:13 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $1.00
May-07-16 19:31:46 PDT

AND THEN

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $20,500.00
May-07-16 19:58:07 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $20,300.00
May-07-16 19:58:05 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $20,100.00
May-07-16 19:51:51 PDT

AND THEN

p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $22,500.00
May-07-16 20:22:29 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $22,200.00
May-07-16 20:22:26 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $22,000.00
May-07-16 20:21:36 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $21,700.00
May-07-16 20:21:33 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $21,500.00
May-07-16 20:21:30 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $21,200.00
May-07-16 20:21:28 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $21,000.00
May-07-16 20:21:24 PDT

Member Id: p***j( 61Feedback score is 50 to 99) US $20,700.00
May-07-16 20:18:47 PDT

I guess with that many bids he will at least be sure to get the notifications. :)

Yes that one certainly looks suspicious. Brent has come to this site and claimed that bidding patterns such as this are often legitimate and that for some reason there are bidders out there who as a practice place small incremental bids until they become the high bidder. Without actually investigating further we can't know for sure. If this same bidder retracted the bid that became the high bid that would be fairly definitive.

And yes, this bidder certainly won't have to worry about not receiving the end of auction notification.

I bid that way sometimes. Whenever I bid from my phone I just keep hitting the bid button sometimes over and over.

That bidder may just really want to that MJ rookie card. He also bid on that card from PWCC last month before getting crushed:

Link

He with the most bids does not win. It does not benefit a buyer to bid early, especially often, on an eBay auction let alone one from Brent who lets all of his auctions go to the end. I would question the bidders tactics even if legit.

This type of bidding pattern can be found in way too many of Brent's listings. Again, not saying they are all done to shill but his coming on here and addressing one or two auctions does not mean in all instances this pattern is legit.

FWIW, I am happy with my first pickup from Brent and team last night............

So what good did the 20 bids before his highest one do him? And why did he stop?

I agree that not everything that looks suspicious necessarily is. All I initially said was that one sees this pattern of frenzied early bidding on high end cards in PWCC fairly commonly.

I agree that this strategy doesn't make much sense, and is not one that I utilize, aside from the one early bid I mentioned I like to place.

I also agree that some bids such as these may very well be placed by consignors shilling their own auctions. My main point is that there is no way for us to know for sure without more information, and that there have been instances in which foul play was assumed but there was none.

as long as the consignors are charged like everybody else if the 'win' their own item i fine with it..

Coming from a guy obsessed with market values that is really surprising, given the potential to run up and manipulate said market values.

Jesse, I agree that we do not know but that does not mean we should not be suspicious or curious. Someone figured out that shill bidding was going on at Mastro and everyone thought it was just business as usual. Seeing irregular bidding patters, same bidder ids over and over, high amounts of bid retractions or bids and it resulting in crushing record prices over and over (and not just on Jake's arbitrary 5% figure) certainly makes me wonder. T206 threads are the only thing here that out number those questioning PWCC but that does not mean people should turn a blind eye and not raise questions.

What about the fact that if this practice being done in such high volume it results in truly giving a distorted and severely inflated market value if bids are being placed simply to set new market highs? That seems to be more dangerous than simply shilling your consignments to maximize your returns.

I agree with your assessment. I also remember Brent saying that he doesn't have access as the seller to the same information we do regarding the bid history as the seller. I don't sell on ebay and can't confirm that. He did say if someone emails him an example like the one Peter posted he will investigate, respond, and take action if appropriate. Maybe we should do that more often and see what happens.

If Brent did post that, then he is mistaken. As the seller he can see the entire ids of each bidder. He also is alerted to bid retractions as they occur, where as we would need to dig for that info. As far as seeing the number of bid retractions a bidder has, he simply needs to log out or open a separate window in private browsing and click on the id in question and he can see the bid retraction history for any of his bidders. This is what eBay suggests sellers do if they seek that information.

Thats right, it was regarding the number of retractions a bidder has that he said he doesn't see. Either way with 10k listings in monthly auctions it would be hard to monitor the bidding history and patterns for them all. If we are concerned as a community about shilling in his auctions and others I still say it's a good idea to take him up on his offer to look into to any suspicious activity reported to him. As big as his business has gotten any time I have reached out to him he has responded personally in a timely manner.

We have had this discussion many times about large ebay sellers. Yes they have too many auctions to monitor each and every one, but on the other hand it's very easy to put your auctions in order by price and check the top 25 or 40 or whatever, which is where -- if any bad stuff is going on -- it's going to be most prevalent and obvious anyhow. The head of a business is accountable. The excuse that it's too big for them to be accountable doesn't work for Tim Cook and it certainly won't work for an ebay seller. IMO.

I don't think Brent would make that excuse either, by the way.