ebay finds that PWCC engaged in shill bidding?

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by Snowman

It doesn't strike me as being that much of an outlier when you compare it to their standard monthly ebay auction volume. I think they did something like 35,000 cards in their final month on eBay. And it's been a couple months since they were booted off the platform, so they likely had a backlog of sales stacking up. If you combine their expected eBay volume for the past 2 months, assuming they were still there, that's probably ~70,000 cards. It seems realistic to me that they could have lost ~28,000 of those ~70,000 sales because of the ebay fallout, owning them with 42,000 cards to sell. I'd be surprised though if they have more than 42,000 next month though. I'd guess it will be closer to 30,000 next month. Although surely it'll depend on how well they do in this one.

Following up on the number of listings in PWCC's monthly auctions. It looks like they have 23,717 cards listed this month for their November auction. They had about 42,000 in October, which included some amount of backlog after being offline for a couple months. It'll be interesting to see how things trend from here. I think watching the number of cards they get going forward over the next 6 months will be critical to their success or failure as an independent platform. Can they still realize strong prices on their own? They certainly did with some cards, but there were also plenty of bargains to be had as well. Although despite the conspiracy theories, the same was actually true for them on eBay. I've been building a sales history database for vintage basketball cards and you'd be surprised how many of the outlier sales, on the low end, came from PWCC listings.

It's possible that this current month still has some amount of backlog in it. Also, I'm not sure how much seasonal effect there is in the expected monthly volume (what does a "normal" November or December look like for them historically?). I would anticipate their expected volume going forward to continue to be in the low 20,000s though each month. It might dip into the high teens if some of this ~24,000 still has some backlog in it though. But if we see it dip below 15,000, then that will be indicative of PWCC struggling on their new platform, and if we see it back up above 30,000, then that will be a sign that the hobby is latching on to them as a viable alternative to eBay and other consignment options. As a data geek, those are the two magic numbers I'd be watching out for (15,000 and 30,000 listings per month).

Grabbing my popcorn...