From my limited experience, people are very sensitive to price changes. FOMO is a thing, but people who use a site like TCGPlayer are very dedicated to the hobby and I doubt they only have one source where they get their price info – especially when there are some suspicious spikes.
It is very easy to manipulate the numbers or buy up all the stock for a specific card and inflate the prices, but this doesn’t mean people will actually buy at these prices. On Cardmarket recently someone bought up all copies of Mimikyu V and VMAX from VMAX climax and then people started to insert new copies at exorbitant prices starting from 350€ – but no one bought a Mimikyu VMAX for 350€.
In the past I’ve personally purchased several copies of a somewhat rare card at market price for grading so that all copies left were very overpriced. This did lead to a slight short term increase in sales prices, but eventually numbers dropped back to where they used to be.
I won’t claim market manipulation isn’t a thing. It can be pulled off quite easily in an environment where only a couple of copies are offered at a time. But it is questionable whether this will affect the prices long term and even more questionable if it’s even worth it.
I was going to type this out, and then I realized that I had already done so above. Just to reiterate, price manipulation is extremely difficult to pull off successfully, even more so with modern product where the supply is enormous. If you want some data, watch the YouTube video above by AlphaHoarder. Expect an even faster retracement in Modern Pokemon where the supply is much greater than Vintage MTG.
Once again, the issue is that the fact that these 100+ sales can even be recorded in the system is proof that it can be manipulated - because these will only be removed due to it being obvious they are fake.
Who’s to say which ones are real at all when they happen on older cards? Or really any card, edging prices up or down over time?
This is indefensible as a system - and they obviously use it not just for Pokemon but for every other TCG. I’m not sure how this isn’t a big problem for anyone in the TCG space. It affects everyone because TCGPlayer runs around masquerading as market price. As a collector, I get burnt by paying more, as a business, you might be fucked by artificially low prices.
Ridiculous that it hasn’t blown up or been solved - this has been going on for at least 2 years.
Just my opinion here, but buyers will not abide by tcgplayer (especially if cheaper on other sites) as gospel. For example, if charizard #800 is “manipulated” to $500, there will be auctions of the card constantly and eventually price will go down. Actual sellers will list BIN OBO and start taking offers for $400, then $300, etc… to a point where tcgplayer (if it hasnt already happened) is largely disregarded for most single prices.
I havent once checked a cards price on tcgplayer tbh, and the 2 cards i bought nm from them were less than lp so im biased.
Yes i do… where is “here” btw? I buy primarily on ebay and yhj (as with alot of e4), so im unaware if they trend closely with tcgplayer. Manipulation may happen but im very sceptical its effective, most buyers are extremely savvy considering the cost in todays market. My evidence for that is in why urshifu v hasnt held at the $226.40 mark, for even a second, despite it being “sold” on tcgplayer.
If youre concerned about how/why an online website has fabricated data… well consider it a welcome to the world of cybersecurity.
Yeah but anybody with half a brain can see the manipulation. Modern card price manipulation does not work at all, point blank, on tcgplayer for longer than like a day if at all. The supply is MASSIVE.
As others have said, anyone with at least one brain cell will check prices elsewhere to confirm before buying. Most people don’t buy their expensive Pokemon cards on TCGPlayer anyway because few sellers offer pictures. It’s predominantly used for cheap and playable cards.
I highlighted obviously faked prices to show that it’s possible to fake a sale.
And if you can’t detect a single fake sale, it means your system is not good enough to detect any fake sale.
Which means that any sale you see can be faked and the data has no integrity - and yet card stores and buyers are being influenced by that.
And once again, I am highlighting it happening on obvious to detect cards because the manipulators in this case are dumb, but you can do it to any card over time because there are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of cards.
Posters love to caveat sales here with “but was it paid for?” and yet can overlook and ignore a website that has no way to prove any sale actually occurred. Maybe different demographics.
No one is disputing its not happening there, but i was arguing the impact it will have. Liken it to the spam in your email, sure its there but 95% of users will ignore it - the other 5% may get burned once but they will learn and adapt.
I think youre taking it way too serious, these are not stocks or indexes and if i personally treated them as such i certainly wouldnt be largely committed to modern (of which tcgplayer is centered around).
Where is the price manipulation for actually rare cards?
Do you know how much work would have to go into manipulating the price of the card “over time” like you’re saying. Hypothetically, lets say a card is worth $2,000 and it’s slowly manipulated over time by someone to a $1,700 price point. That sort of market manipulation would take countless days/resources/effort/$$$ to pull off. At that point, how is that worth it at all? It isn’t. That person would be better served getting a 2nd job unless they like making 50 cents an hour.
People need to pump the brakes a little on this manipulation stuff. There is no way someone will manipulate this vast market enough, to have people sell them a $2,000 card for $1,500 or buy their $15 for $100 based off of manipulation.
We are talking about cards that have hundreds of thousands of copies.
