Bugs
Fix average ungraded card price please!!
Example: Katara, Bending Prodigy #59 Magic Avatar: The Last Airbender
Ungraded price: $0.40
But the ebay sales underneath it average out to $1.62.
Where is the $0.40 coming from? No effing clue. This site has been utterly riddled with this problem for just about every card since you started importing the garbage that is TCG data.
I don't come to your site to factor in TCG prices. If I wanted TCG prices, I would use TCG. But TCG is a garbage site full of market manipulation, people selling heavily played cards as NM, cards that are the wrong language, empty boxes instead of full boxes of boosters, etc. Ebay is SIGNIFICANTLY more reliable and resistant to market manipulation.
I have been considering buying access to your API. I would have done it months ago if it weren't for the fact that I'm afraid I'm just going to be buying garbage data that I could easily get from TCG for free.
In the ideal world, you'd stop importing TCG garbage and flush it from your site entirely. In the ideal world, you'd fix whatever is bugging the entirety of your data set so that average prices of cards can be reliable again, without us having to do the math on the fly. But at the very least, we need pricecharting to correctly take an average, and to give us the option in our general settings page to ignore all TCG data completely.
Thank you.
Customer support service by UserEcho
Thanks for your feedback on this.
For these common cards, we believe the values with TCGPlayer sales data gives you a more accurate value for your cards and your collection. The prices on eBay will usually include shipping costs which inflates the value of those cards to a higher value then they really are.
Yes, this change will have an impact on your card and collection values, but we feel it will be a more accurate value.
TCG is utterly riddled with erroneous listings that manipulate the market to artificially deflate the value of cards. Empty boxes are sold under ETB listings. Korean and Spanish versions of cards are listed under American cards. Every card I've gotten off of TCG has been in worse shape than the listing indicates. In other words, TCG is an utter mess of garbage data. Garbage in means garbage out--not a good thing for your data.
Giving the users the ability to strip TCG listings from the calculation of ungraded averages gives the user the power to decide what is the best source of data, instead of forcing the user to either incorporate a demonstrably unreliable data source or swear off your site entirely. I'd love to spring for a yearly sub to your API, but I won't if there is no way to strip TCG data from your calculations.
I would also add that many listings on Ebay have free shipping, which negates the argument that the values are artificially inflated. TCG listings typically require a minimum amount purchased (usually $5) before the order will ship, but that minimum order doesn't seem to be reflected in your algorithm, so I'm not seeing where you believe that TCG data reflects the real value of common cards, at least until the PriceCharting algorithm accounts for the obligatory minimum purchase in its average calculations.