July 29, 2021 By Rich Mueller
eBay is now offering a built-in price guide feature for sports cards.
The company unveiled the feature as part of a group of tools unveiled Thursday during the National Sports Collectors Convention in Chicago.
Price Guide and Collection are designed to allow users to actively collect and sell trading cards, with the ability to monitor the real-time market valuation changes and list items directly from their collections. eBay is leveraging its extensive data catalog to provide what it calls a “ holistic view of a collection’s past and present value, offering unprecedented assessment, evaluation, and tracking capabilities.”
The new tools have been in development for at least a year and a half, according to Nicole Colombo, General Manager of Collectibles & Trading Cards at eBay. She says the idea came from user feedback.
“We are a source of data, but there’s been no easy way to find market values on eBay. People have found scrappy ways to do it by looking at sold items, etcetera, but it’s not very streamlined so we knew this was an opportunity for us to showcase the information in a transparent way to enable our users to actually track the value of cards.”
eBay’s Price Guide is user search driven. Based on the input for individual cards, it will use eBay’s data from the past 12 months to return results based on actual eBay sales, including Best Offer results, which have typically been available only through Terapeak or other sources.
“The more specific your search is, the more accurate the information will be,” Colombo told SC Daily ahead of the announcement.
Collections will allow users to view cards in their collection through past purchases or by uploading a CSV file. The platform will allow users to view, manager, track values and list items for sale directly from that area of the website.
Collection will support baseball, basketball, football, golf, hockey, soccer, Magic the Gathering, Pokémon, and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards.
Users should be sure to have the latest version of theceBay app if accessing from a cell phone.
How to access Collection:
- Under the My eBay menu tab, click “Collection beta” in the drop down
- Collector will be prompted to upload collection manually or from past eBay purchases
- Select one of the options below in the Collection Hub to view portfolio:
- Total portfolio value view
- Category view
- Item-level view
The platform is designed for on-the-go use through eBay’s mobile app, as well as on desktop.
Sports cards have shown massive growth on eBay in recent years with the first quarter of 2021 resulting in $871 million worth of sales worldwide and double the amount of buyers from the same period in 2020.
You can learn more about the new tools here.
