Just got a warning from eBay. Seems like a new thing that PSA complained to them about.
Makes total sense though, because psa was probably losing ground to the other two because of it. Definitely going to hurt sales though
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Ah hell there goes my listing title of “2000 CHARIZARD BASE 2 HOLO USED TO BE PACK FRESH CGC? PSA? BGS? MINT? NM LP HP PLAYED”
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Yeah fun to poke at for sure, but I guarantee like half or more people buying CGC cards find them by searching Pikachu base set psa
Or whatever
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This is great!
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At the start of 2020 my saved eBay search of “pichu psa 10” showed me listings like these:
As you’d expect, all 3 of these listings include PSA 10 Pichu cards.
For a while it went through a phase of being Pichu cards with “PSA?” in the title, or PSA 9 cards with “PSA 10 regrade?” in the title, but we’ve elevated beyond that point now. I turned off email notifications on 27th December 2020, with the final email I received looking like this:
Too little too late if you ask me. I don’t know if this is happening because too many people are listing Pokémon cards for eBay’s staff to cope now, or simply because we’ve reverted back to a L@@@@k!!! mindset when listing items.
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sucks to suck, its a shitty seller practice. i put it at slightly less worse than people who include “PSA” in every random lot listing
About time.
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Hopefully this also applies to all of the raw card listings we see, such as:
“BASE SET CHARIZARD - PSA 10?”
“BASE SET VENUSAUR - PSA READY!”
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I think the big problem here is that “PSA” became synonymus with “graded” for Pokemon cards. Not many people search specifically for CGC or BGS, even though they might buy those too if they’d stumble upon them.
It’s a win for collectors who only want PSA, but a hurdle for sellers and buyers of alternative grading companies. An adjustment will be needed both on the side of listing titles and search terms.
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I don’t see how it’s a hurdle for buyers. People who want CGC or BGS cards will search for CGC or BGS cards. Just about everyone in the hobby knows that these companies exist, so if they really want an alternative to PSA, they’ll search for it.
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Eh I’ll still put it in the description
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@mjs61290 it’s a hurdle when I just want a specific card, graded by ANY company without strong bias/preference. Then I now have to use 3 different search terms to compare which one is the best for me.
Unless it becomes standard to just include an additional “graded” (or something like that) in the titles, which combines all listings under one search term. That would be nice and acceptable for everyone I think.
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@muk, If you want to do one search for any of the three companies, put the options where you want any one of them to match in parentheses. For example: “magikarp (psa, cgc, bgs) (10, 9.5)” will search for magikarp with any combination of psa, cgc, bgs and 10 or 9.5. Also if you want to exclude something preface it with a minus sign.
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No, its bad. Reduces competition for PSA
You can search for multiple terms in a single eBay query by wrapping the terms in brackets and separating them with a comma.
Pichu (PSA, CGC, BGS) gives a whole load of Pichu cards which are PSA, CGC or BGS-graded.
Edit: Ninja’d by @surfnsnow ! Though one thing I will add is:
My biggest pet peeve with eBay is that you can happily add things like -term to remove listings with term in the title, but this doesn’t work for any symbols, meaning you can’t do -PSA? to get rid of the stupid PSA? listings which if people truly believed were PSA-worthy would have sent them in for grading themselves.
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I did not know that! That’s great, at least for me from my perspective as buyer! Thank you! 
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Good stuff. I’ve sold hundreds of CGC cards without that crap.
Time stamping this to compare in a week or a month but currently searching for CGC PSA turns up 6,571 results. Hopefully 0 at next check.
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Who searches for cgc anyway?
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I feel like a slimeball but when i list MNT cards i include as many different grading abbreviations, like MNT PSA BGS CGC GMA KSA SGC PCA BCCGS.
Imagine me selling paint. I got yellow blue red orange pink brown black magenta silver gold white ect ect ect ect.
Theres very few honest sellers, its like lawyers. You catch more bees with honey than vinegar, and unfortunately padding a listing is like honey. Ill stop when i am told by ebay to stop, and only then i doubt ill completely stop, I probably will just find a new manipulation
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About fucking time. People should only include words in the title that actually describe what you’re selling. I’m sick of searching “psa pokemon” or “cgc pokemon” or whatever and getting totally unrelated search results.
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