How Ripbin prices cards

Asking prices are not sold prices

We would rather show sold comps everywhere. We cannot yet. eBay's sold-price data sits behind its Marketplace Insights API, which is a limited-release product that is not open to us — requesting the scope returns an error, not data. We have applied for access. Until it is granted, the honest description of an eBay-derived value is “current asking prices,” and that is what we call it here rather than quietly labelling it a market value.

Price history is affected by the same thing. The daily price points we record for a card come from the eBay listing pool, so the history line tracks where the ask has moved, not a series of sales.

How the grade-by-grade prices are built

A card's condition is most of its price, so every card page shows a ladder rather than a single number: ungraded, PSA 7 through 10, BGS 9.5 and 10, CGC 10, SGC 10. A rung only appears when we have a price for it. Empty rungs are left out instead of being interpolated from the rungs either side.

• From SportsCardsPro, the ladder comes straight from their per-grade guide prices for the matched product.
• From eBay, each active listing is assigned to a rung by reading the grade out of its title, and the rung takes the median of its bucket. Listings whose grade we can identify but do not track are dropped rather than counted as raw.
• The two can be mixed on one card: SportsCardsPro rungs are kept and eBay only fills the rungs SportsCardsPro left empty.
• One sanity rule is applied before display: an ungraded headline value can never exceed the highest graded price on the same card, because grading does not reduce value. When it does, the headline number is bad data — it is replaced with the real ungraded price, or dropped entirely if there isn't one. The graded ladder still shows.

What “Prices updated” means

The date under a card's value is the day that card's value was last written, not the day the page was built and not the day you loaded it. If it says June, the number is from June.

• SportsCardsPro pass: nightly, stalest sets first, about 400 sets a night. A given set comes round roughly monthly; recent releases come round sooner.
• eBay pass: nightly, most valuable cards first, capped at 5,000 cards a day. The cap is an eBay rate limit, not a choice.
• Cards in someone's locker: refreshed on their own nightly pass, stalest first, so a tracked collection does not drift.

A catalogue of roughly 78,000 cards cannot be repriced every day within those limits. The trade-off we made is to show the real date instead of hiding it.

Where this is weakest

Anyone can list the strengths of their own method. These are the parts we would attack if we were reading someone else's price guide.

• Thin comps on obscure parallels. A numbered parallel might have two active listings in the world. A median of two is a number, not a market. The rarer the card, the more its value here is an indication rather than a price.
• Parallels sharing a price. This was a real defect. Our eBay valuation query originally left the parallel name out, so every parallel of a card sent the same search and got the same price back — we measured 1,540 of 2,438 eBay-priced cards with parallel siblings, 63.2%, sharing a price with a sibling. Three different Ja Morant National Treasures parallels all read exactly $75,000. The query now includes the parallel, which fixes new pricing, and the honest consequence is that some cards now get no price instead of a wrong one. Older rows priced before the fix can still carry an inherited number.
• Outliers and mismatched listings. A median resists one bad listing, not five. Miscatalogued listings, lots sold as one item, and reprints described as originals all pull a bucket. The graded-ceiling rule catches the worst of it. It does not catch a plausible-looking wrong number.
• Matching errors. Cards are matched to SportsCardsPro products by number and player name. Sets that reuse numbering, players who share a name, and inconsistent parallel naming can produce a wrong match, which means a confidently displayed price for the wrong card.
• Source labelling is incomplete on the page. Cards priced from SportsCardsPro link back to their source. Cards priced from eBay listings do not yet carry that label on the card page itself, so today this page is the only place the distinction is spelled out. We are adding a per-card label.
• Values are US-market, in dollars. Our catalogue, feeds and listings are all US marketplace. Prices elsewhere differ.

What we never do

• We do not estimate a price when we have no data. The value is left blank.
• We do not adjust prices for commercial reasons. Ripbin earns affiliate revenue from eBay, and that relationship has no input into any number on the site or into which cards get a page — see the affiliate disclosure.
• We do not republish a partner's proprietary transaction data. Where our terms with a marketplace allow links but not data, you get a link.
• We do not paywall a price, and we do not require an account to see one.

Reporting an error, and the corrections log

If a price looks wrong, tell us. It is the single most useful thing a reader can send us, and it is faster than you would think to check.

Use the form on the contact page and pick Report a wrong price — it goes straight to the people who maintain the pricing jobs. No account needed. Or email help@ripbin.com. Include the card page link, the number you think is right, and where you saw it. We check the report against the source before changing anything, and we reply either way — including when we decide the existing number stands.

Who maintains this

The pricing pipeline, the matching rules and the sanity checks on this page are maintained by Saad Ahmed, who is also the person who answers help@ripbin.com. Ripbin is run from Plano, Texas; the postal address and the rest of the business details are on the contact page. When this method changes in a way that moves published numbers, the change is written up here.