www.vintagecardprices.com is now live.....

[Archive]

Posted By: Bobby

Leon,

We started collecting final price results for cards (1949 and earlier) in November 2005. After the site became functional along with our auction watching feature, we added the 50's cards back in May 2006. Since we are eBay partners, we track the auctions through our site via eBay auction number. Our system communicates with their server every 15 minutes. So when an auction ends we will have the results in our system within minutes. For major auction houses, we post the results within 24 hours of close of auction including the auction fee to the total of each card.

We upload prices for cards that have been graded by only the three big grading companies, PSA, SGC and GAI. Reasons being that they have outstanding reputations and all other grading companies have serious doubts as to whether or not there are potential problems such as being trimmed, colored or otherwise doctored. In the case of PSA we do not accept cards with qualifiers. Our system will hold the 25 most recent prices realized for every grade of card for all 3 companies, meaning there will be a maximum of 1175 possible sales records for every card listed in our database. For example once there has been 25 sales for a T206 Ty Cobb red portrait card in SGC 30 grade, every new sale added thereafter results in the oldest sale being kicked off the system. By doing this we can keep an up-to-date record on the latest prices for every type of grade. On each cards profile page, there is a grid of each grade. Within each grade box, the values represent the latest sale price of that card in that grade. We only use real prices and do not set a price estimator formula so if there are no recorded sales, a "N/A" will show in that box. We acquire data by tracking eBay the same way a snipe program does and the results post to the site within 15 minutes of the end of the auction as long as it meets certain criteria, at least one bid and reserve is reached if there is one. Major auction houses prices are added to the system with in 24 hours of the auction ending and include the extra buyer percentage. We verify every listing by visually seeing the complete card in its holder for every auction. We do not have a search engine that looks for the information you are requesting because it would give false data because of so many misleading auction titles and mistakes by the listing seller and grading companies. We take into account people with low feedback and potential false sellers and do not include them in our data.
Rules for acceptance are the cards have to be a single graded card lot sold in a auction format, reserves must be met and there has to be at least one bid. "Buy it Now" auctions are not ever included. This means we have staff checking every auction to verify that the information is correct that feeds the data to our system for you to use. The system we created to properly add the cards is amazing and at Card shows we will gladly show you how this works, it is virtually error free.