Now this would be a huge improvement!
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that would be great! I’ve also noticed something with eBay lately (probably related to seller tags, if that’s a thing idk) where i search for ‘psa 8 shadowless charizard’ and instead, 500 listings of other miscellaneous cards come up because they’re tagged as ‘st0nk$ 1st edition charizord’ even tho the actual card is completely unrelated. it’d be cool if they could fix that lol
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Honestly this is going to be an upgrade for buyers. One of the biggest issues I experience on TCGplayer is receiving the wrong card. Ebay is extremely buyer oriented, to a fault at times. TCGplayer could definitely benefit. Their return system and policies feel antiquated.
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You’ve been not-so-subtly hinting for quite a while about eBay bolstering their authentication ability, particularly with sealed product. Does this have anything to do with that?
Buy competition, after 1 year throw out all management, liquidate.
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What do you think the ebay seller fees will be in 1 year?
I’ll guess 16%
No real reason to keep them “low” when there is no other seller options
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No, I think 16% would be too dramatic of a change in one year. I am guessing that they will increase little by little over a long period of time. Maybe 13.5% next year, then 13.9%, then 14.3%, etc., etc. while blaming other reasons all along to save face (e.g., it’s due to inflation, shortages, we are “helping” our employees).
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Its already above 13.5% isnt it?
Hmm, I thought eBay was at 12.9% + $0.30. Of course, bigger sellers have better deals set up with eBay.
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Ah yeah I guess it is 12.9%
Though still for a company that now essentially owns the entire tcg selling market, a .6% yearly increase is vastly underestimating capitalism imo
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Let’s hope that you’re wrong 
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I wouldn’t underestimate the market share held by other places like Facebook, Instagram and even discord groups now
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I agree i sell a lot on ig personally. Just until the time i can search on ig for a specific card i want and buy it without having to directly talk to the seller via dm, ill consider it a secondary “marketplace”
Dont get me wrong i love ig for selling and buying but for me its just buying random deals, never specific goals.
I dont have a fb or discord though maybe uts better there
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I think the shipping is a great point. Every time I sell on tcgplayer I wish it had the standard envelope, which I’ve grown to really appreciate. It’s a huge win to have cheap shipping without having to worry about someone ripping you off and lying that they didn’t receive their card.
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I’m not really seeing any good that comes from this. Great for ebay but not so much for sellers and buyers. I guess we will have to wait and see what happens.
Depending on what happens, might make it more difficult for price manipulation on TCGPlayer. It’s now super obvious that it happens and nothing is done about it. Given the business model, it’s probably encouraged.
The Umbreon VMAX AA consistently has sales way above current market value when there are options below it that continues to inflate the market price. You can’t see buyers, so it’s super easy to do.
Also we’ve already seen buyouts before with the Astral Radiance Machamp being very obvious and previously the mass buyout of many trainer FAs in early 2021.
In addition, TCGPlayer doesn’t even calculate the market price correctly. If more than 1x of an item is bought by a buyer, it ignores the 2nd-xx numbered copy in the calculation. So, in an extreme scenario, if you bought 10x of a $0.01 card and 1x of it at $10, the market price would be $5.05 instead of $0.92.
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I think ebay must view cards as strategically important (they’ve revealed card sales are 10+% of total ebay sales). ebay is both vertically expanding (e.g. card authentication service, vault) and now horizontally expanding (TCG Player acquisition).
ebay says there will be no changes to TCG Player but that’s unlikely. Corporate acquisitions are often fueled by some view of increasing the value beyond the current value of the acquired company. I could see ebay going a few directions with this:
-bringing the new value-add services (vault, authentication, etc.) from ebay to TCGP
-combining data from TCGP and ebay to improve search, filtering/browsing, recommendations, etc. across either one or both platforms
Also, going forward, any further “vertical expansion” has 2-for-1 bang for your buck for ebay… let’s say ebay invests in a new “ebay card grading service” - twice as many cards to be graded right off the bat with both ebay + TCGP… specific idea is irrelevant, moreso that they will own 2x of TCG market share instead of 1x now.
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IDK that we can say “x2” of the market share. Is there info on what the actual market share is? I’d be interested to know how TCGPlayer sales actually compare to ebay TCG sales. But, suffice to say, yes. There is now one less player in the game… I’m sad it wasn’t TnT.
It sounds like they’re going to mostly remain business as usual, but I would love to see some sales data integration between the two.
On that note, does anyone know of a tool that visualizes eBay recent sales data? Would love to see some line graphs
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