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Originally Posted by Aquarian Sports Cards
I still don't understand the idea that they will be competition to ebay. By that logic Heritage, Goldin and REA are competition to ebay. They'll just be another auction house.
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Heritage, Goldin, REA, and the others are only competition in the high end market though. Ebay isn't really competitive in that market anyhow. Most high end cards get sold outside of eBay through the major auction houses. Until now, PWCC has only hosted their monthly Premier Auctions through their own platform, which has gone extremely well so far despite it being their first attempt at it. They didn't have any server issues (unlike the competition), bidding was very straight-forward, their rotating 360° images of each card were great, they broke the record for a Michael Jordan RC despite the market being "down" for that card (and yes, it was a real sale), and they had countless other huge consignments right out of the gate, even 7 figure ones. Imagine some other new auction house launching their platform and doing that well on day one. LOL. Not happening. They became an instant player in the high end auction house market overnight.
But they're not just trying to compete against the high end auction houses. They're going to be running their weekly lower end auctions on their new platform as well. All those $100 to $10,000 cards that previously would have been sold on ebay will now be hosted on their platform using the extended bidding style auctions rather than eBay's snipe-bid-heavy platform. It remains to be seen how much business they'll bring with them, what their fees will be, and what sort of prices they'll fetch, but you're fooling yourself if you don't think this is going to be serious competition for eBay. They have ~150,000 buyers using their vault and many more people who have bought from them in the past. I would bet good money that unless some of these allegations come to legal fruition that they will instantly become the #2 option online for selling $100-$10,000 valued cards, surpassing all other selling platforms like myslabs, COMC, stockx, Facebook groups, Instagram, etc.
They'll also now have access to all buyer info for anyone bidding on their auctions, so they'll be much more well equipped to prevent shill bidding on their platform than they were on eBay. On eBay, the only thing they could do before was block bidders who didn't pay. And eBay's platform only allows a maximum of 5,000 users to be blocked, but PWCC has a list of 20,000+ users that they'd like to block for non payment so they have to recycle the list every time they want to add someone to it. They tried multiple times to get ebay to increase that number but ebay literally couldn't figure out how to do. I'll repeat that in case that didn't land for you. Ebay is incapable of increasing the maximum number of blocked bidders above 5,000 because their database and systems architects are archaic and incompetent. It costs money to upgrade these systems to bring them into the 21st century, and ebay doesn't think it's worth making those investments.