Topic: Update on Card Prices

Update on the Pricing situation

We have started to look at devising a formula for a Deckbox Market Price, based on our existing prices, amazon and ebay. We had helpful people with a penchant for economy and markets offer their advice, so we are in good hands!

We have made a Prices help page with some details on how we calculate them. Please take a look, we'd love to hear your feedback.

We still appreciate you reporting issues you see with pricing, in our dedicated forum thread.

We will be benchmarking these prices against Tcgplayer and Star City prices to ensure their quality. As we said, what we want to achieve is having a Market Price that is better and more reliable than other ones on the market.

We will also provide graphs of the evolution of these prices over time. If any of you guys have played games such as Eve Online smile , you know you can get powerful market analysis tools such as Moving averages and Donchian Channels plotted over time.


http://deckbox.org/system/images/forum/evemarket.jpg


We are aiming at that level of tooling, and work has started.


Helping out

Some users have offered to help with donations or kickstarters. We are still convinced we do not want to accept donations. We want to build a solid business that stands up by itself. If you want to help us or show support, you can do that by buying cards from Deckbox sellers, or by becoming a seller and making sales on our market. That helps in many ways - from supporting the business, to solidifying price information and providing us with better data on market movements.


Thank you all for your support and patience.

Re: Update on Card Prices

Not bad at all, way to make lemonade!

Out of curiosity, how many sellers accounts are there so far, as a percentage of deckbox users?

Re: Update on Card Prices

Awesome smile Glad that you guys were able to turn this around pretty quick.

Profile  Tradelist

Re: Update on Card Prices

It looks like the pricing is moving in a great direction.

I know it's only a mock-up, but if you go live, can you please not mix red and green on the same chart?  It's hard for those of us with red/green colorblindness.

Re: Update on Card Prices

This seems much better - the random $25 commons and uncommons seem to be gone, and pricing sanity seems to be restored generally.  I'm looking forward to partner stores to further rationalize and stabilize prices.  Thank you for the quick update, and improvement to the site!

Re: Update on Card Prices

This is great news. 

I want to report a potential bug.  When I am looking at my inventory and hit "show value" it still says it is "using the minimum price on tcgplayer.com".  I thought it could just be saying that and actually using the deckbox proprietary pricing but it doesn't seem to tie out.

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Re: Update on Card Prices

Awesome, prices look a lot better.   smile  Thanks for all your hard work.

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Re: Update on Card Prices

Great news! You guys are handling this a lot better than I thought it would go. Now I'm thinking who needs tcgplayer? wink

I look forward to seeing how this progresses. I will definitely look at selling my cards here. I'm on ebay and amazon so why not.

One more thing, you might consider connecting up with Crystal Commerce. I would love to have my inventory automatically synced. I created a db-->cc conversion script already but even better integration would be awesome especially for all of the established sellers, many of which post on tcgplayer. They would probably love another channel hooked up directly I know I would!

Thank you


-

Last edited by P9CO (2014-04-08 17:19:50)

> http://deckbox.org/users/P9CO

H: Tradelist | W: Standard cards on my wishlist
- The higher number on my want list the more I want it!

Re: Update on Card Prices

Is there only going to be a single "price" going forward? We used to have Min and Mid pricing (and high, but no one used that). It sounds like you're going to collect a lot of (awesome) price info, and have some graphs and stuff which will be cool, but can you say if the current plan is to move towards a single price, or still allow folks to use different pricing mechanisms for trades?

Keep up the great work, and I'm thrilled to resume trading!

Re: Update on Card Prices

Will you be adding a feature to sell sealed product in the market place? 
Think you will be doing Foreign Language prices?

Also, are you guys thinking of providing a price guides for the prices?  I manage a spreadsheet outside deckbox because I dont want to post all of my collection for people to see, and I pull from a pricing database for that spreadsheet.  I would love to keep the prices with what I have on deckbox.

Love the changes!  Hope with all this, there is even yet a better pricing averages!

Re: Update on Card Prices

PRO JOB guys!!
CONGRATS to the deckbox team, Great stuff

Re: Update on Card Prices

lol saw the chart and thought eve right off the bat and was confused by the same chart formating.

I assume someone from deckbox also plays

Last edited by Sidewayzracer (2014-04-08 18:15:04)

Re: Update on Card Prices

I have about 6000 distinct cards in my inventory and they are all priced at TCGplayer mid on I think April 2.  I don't know if that will help with the pricing or anything, but I do know that there are several cards that still need to be reworked.  I will post them in the other forum.  Great job Deckbox team big_smile I look forward to seeing deckbox grow smile


EDIT: The mistakes I saw earlier seemed to have actually smoothed out and the majority of the cards are matching up almost perfectly with what I had set last week. Cheers!


-Byron Gee

Last edited by gnp17 (2014-04-08 18:20:14)

Re: Update on Card Prices

I just want to say that it seems like you guys have done a great job with this. You were caught off-guard but the turnaround on improving things has been pretty good. Here's hoping your hard work pays off.

Re: Update on Card Prices

Good news! A suggestion for you to help sellers. Some peoples prices are quite a bit out of line. Fore example, there is an Elesh Norn for sale, at $42, non-foil. While I respect peoples right to price cards as they see fit, nobody is going to buy Elesh Norn for $42 when it can be had elsewhere for $20-25. Perhaps some sort of alert can be made when a card price is a significant percentage over or under the deckbox price? Like "warning: this card is 105% above deckbox avg. price, do you want to continue?" It helps nobody when people price their cards much to high or much to low. To high and it doesn't sell, seller gets nothing, deckbox gets nothing, buyers go to other sources to find cards priced more in line with the general market. To low and seller gets taken, deckbox gets less than it probably should, encourages arbitage.

Profile|Tradelist|Wishlist

Re: Update on Card Prices

jassi007 wrote:

Good news! A suggestion for you to help sellers. Some peoples prices are quite a bit out of line. Fore example, there is an Elesh Norn for sale, at $42, non-foil. While I respect peoples right to price cards as they see fit, nobody is going to buy Elesh Norn for $42 when it can be had elsewhere for $20-25. Perhaps some sort of alert can be made when a card price is a significant percentage over or under the deckbox price? Like "warning: this card is 105% above deckbox avg. price, do you want to continue?" It helps nobody when people price their cards much to high or much to low. To high and it doesn't sell, seller gets nothing, deckbox gets nothing, buyers go to other sources to find cards priced more in line with the general market. To low and seller gets taken, deckbox gets less than it probably should, encourages arbitage.

I think that tools to help buyers/sellers find/generate good prices are nice, but things like "warnings" reflect an unnecessary level of hand-holding. Plus, what if the Deckbox price is bad for whatever reasons?

Re: Update on Card Prices

9700377 wrote:
jassi007 wrote:

Good news! A suggestion for you to help sellers. Some peoples prices are quite a bit out of line. Fore example, there is an Elesh Norn for sale, at $42, non-foil. While I respect peoples right to price cards as they see fit, nobody is going to buy Elesh Norn for $42 when it can be had elsewhere for $20-25. Perhaps some sort of alert can be made when a card price is a significant percentage over or under the deckbox price? Like "warning: this card is 105% above deckbox avg. price, do you want to continue?" It helps nobody when people price their cards much to high or much to low. To high and it doesn't sell, seller gets nothing, deckbox gets nothing, buyers go to other sources to find cards priced more in line with the general market. To low and seller gets taken, deckbox gets less than it probably should, encourages arbitage.

I think that tools to help buyers/sellers find/generate good prices are nice, but things like "warnings" reflect an unnecessary level of hand-holding. Plus, what if the Deckbox price is bad for whatever reasons?

Then you can ignore them. The idea is to give someone a heads up. If you want to price outside of the general market price, go for it, but your either going to sell quickly because your underpriced and someone is just going to flip your cards for a profit, or your not going to sell squat because you are to high. This is a situation that benefits no one.

Profile|Tradelist|Wishlist

Re: Update on Card Prices

I'm glad you were able to work hard to try and make your own pricing. so many people were extremely negative about the pricing right as you took off the tcgplayer prices, I am elated that you overcame that endeavor, and hope that you continue to fine-tune these prices.

there are still many cards that are not quite right, but I am sure that you'll continue to work the kinks out.

Re: Update on Card Prices

jassi007 wrote:

It helps nobody when people price their cards much to high or much to low. To high and it doesn't sell, seller gets nothing, deckbox gets nothing, buyers go to other sources to find cards priced more in line with the general market. To low and seller gets taken, deckbox gets less than it probably should, encourages arbitage.

I disagree with your position.  Pricing cards too high or low can be for alternative reasons, perhaps reasons you have yet to think of.  There are many reasons for doing either, some more subtle than others.

Profile | Trade List | Wish List

Re: Update on Card Prices

Wow, I'm actually pleasantly surprised by how quickly this is moving forward. I've already made 3 orders and plan to make more once I can "search" for sellers.

Re: Update on Card Prices

jassi007 wrote:

Good news! A suggestion for you to help sellers. Some peoples prices are quite a bit out of line. Fore example, there is an Elesh Norn for sale, at $42, non-foil. While I respect peoples right to price cards as they see fit, nobody is going to buy Elesh Norn for $42 when it can be had elsewhere for $20-25. .

remember at this point we are restricted to our own countries so local prices may be affecting the sale price. also it might be a card that is only for sale for a price because the seller is reluctant to part with it except for a premium for whatever reason

Re: Update on Card Prices

Things are looking up. My faith was wavering for a time. But looking much better. Good job team deckbox smile

Re: Update on Card Prices

Glad to see things shaping up quickly. I'm definitely researching what is required to be a seller...now if I only had cards that I was willing to sell that people wanted roll

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Always interested in expeditions, invocations, foil full art lands, and reserved list

Re: Update on Card Prices

billbollow wrote:

This is great news. 

I want to report a potential bug.  When I am looking at my inventory and hit "show value" it still says it is "using the minimum price on tcgplayer.com".  I thought it could just be saying that and actually using the deckbox proprietary pricing but it doesn't seem to tie out.

The same thing is true for me on Inventory, Wishlist, and Tradelist (although mine says average, because that is what I use).

In general, I am blunt and to the point. I apologize in advance if I appear mean or rude.

I am the Community Admin for the CSUN Magic Players Community. I also sometimes help people with technical issues.
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Re: Update on Card Prices

I hate to bring it up here, but with your own pricing model, it's probably important to start figuring out how to handle promo cards. An FNM Dismember is neither a normal card nor a set foil, and having to price it as one or the other probably skews the pricing of other people's cards as well as my own. Not to mention it makes collection prices look wildly inaccurate (compare the MPR Lightning Bolt to the F&L Lightning Bolt).

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