Market Movers Deal Search Buying Guide
We hope you’re enjoying Deal Search in Market Movers, a feature dedicated to helping you find the best deals available on trading cards.
Deal Search compares active Buy It Now listings to the most recent daily average sales price for the same card and presents you with the best deals we can find based on that data. Our data is 95-99% accurate. Our data team works hard to make it as accurate as possible, but because of the nature of online marketplaces, some questionable recent sales comps or inaccurate Buy It Now listings may slip through.
Note: The cards listed here are not “card picks” and are often not “investment cards.” This is a helpful tool to find cards you want to collect at a good price, but don’t buy these cards assuming they’ll make good investments without doing your own research.
PROTECT YOURSELF! HERE’S HOW
You can protect yourself before you buy by taking a few additional steps to ensure the accuracy of recent sales comps and Buy It Now listings:
- Click on the Market Movers image of the card (the photo on the right) to access the slide out panel of additional data.
- Evaluate the completed sales from the last 30 days to determine if the most recent average sales price is in line with other recent comps or if it was an outlier which should be disregarded.
- To access additional information about the completed sales, click on the VIEW ALL button to navigate to card charts. Click the card description to expand the details.
PRO TIP: You can hold CTRL or CMD on your keyboard when clicking VIEW ALL to open it in a new tab. You can also use the back button on your browser to navigate back to Deal Search.
Our data team reviews significant outliers. In cases where there is no evidence that the sale was shill bid, or where there are not other similar cards listed on Buy It Now for significantly less, we include the sale.
Essentially if there is no evidence the sale was not real, we do not exclude it.
Of note, our data automatically excludes zero feedback buyers. While some of these transactions are real (every eBay buyer starts with 0 feedback), a significant portion of these sales are from people intentionally shill bidding auctions in an attempt to manipulate prices. General consensus is that it is best to avoid these sales when comping card prices.
- Click on the eBay link on the left to navigate directly to eBay, and confirm that the listing is the correct card:
It is possible that if a seller mis-titles the listing that there could be an erroneous match which is why we always recommend quickly verifying the data before making any purchase.
As an example, many sellers list Prizm Draft Picks cards without sufficient detail in their listing titles (like “Draft Picks” or “DP” or the card number [65]), so their listing gets pulled in to our For Sale items for the regular Prizm Base card:
This is why we recommend these important additional steps when buying cards that show up under recent sales comps.
Market Movers strives to provide our audience with meaningful data so that they can find the best deals possible.
Thanks and good luck with your deal hunting!
