Stockx is a reputable middle man service for shoes that has since branched out into other luxury goods, watches, and now modern Pokemon.
You send the shoes/product to them and they verify its authenticity, and then send to the buyer.
How/who are they using to authenticate sealed booster boxes?
They are a multi billion dollar company and I wouldn’t be surprised if they had someone directly from TPCi, but what if they don’t?
They only have a few modern sets but will most likely list every new set going forward and potentially add older ones. (you can only buy/sell if they created the page for it)
But I am still curious on what you guys think they are doing.
They are smart. They are simply providing an option for people who are interested. Its an easy transition as they are the main authentication option for sneakers. It will most likely cater to newer collectors/cross collectors, which is a large demograph. They already have their own marketplace, and are valuated higher than any authentication entity in Pokemon. Even if every single E4 member doesn’t use their service, they won’t notice or care.
i still am salty over stockx. no idea who they have there for pokemon. no one on e4 has mentioned it, so i wont be assuming they have a person trust worthy enough to do anything like that. they also just raised another few hundred million in funding. they must be burning through cash like crazy
they have some huge big name investors and have already talked about going public. they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon lol so that’s why im curious on what theyre doing for pokemon.
I have noticed more sneaker collectors entering this hobby myself. How? I see alot of sneaker collectors following the pokeguardian twitter account. Plain simple. Just things i’ve noticed a last 2-3 months.
Since these ‘sneakerheads’ are indeed already comfortable with stockx, I think their pokemon section is there to stay yes. Would I personally use it for Pokémon? That’s another question.
Maybe in the future even eBay will do verification themselves They just started their sneaker verification service a while ago.
with ps5/xbox they completely dominated. the choices for flippers were ship via ebay and pray the buyer doesn’t play games, or make $10 less on stockx with 0 worries and a preprinted shipping label.
i have a feeling decisions like that could drift over into pokemon over the years.
Im sure it will, I’ve had to turn down offers thousands of dollars higher than I wanted just because of ebay’s garbage policies for returns. If I could just use ebay as intended life would be very nice
I haven’t checked up to see how stockx was doing in months. In terms of graded singles, last I checked their most sold cards had an abysmal 4 or so sales after a few months of trying to penetrate the pokemon market. It looks like now they sold a few graded charizords in the double digits. I’ve argued before that their interface is just suboptimal for graded cards and I still stand by that.
As mentioned already it looks like they’ve started doing sealed modern product which I think is FAR more in line with their business model. The whole automated inventory checking/botting of online retailers is a large emerging thing in pokemon and trading cards - I’ve seen the discords were people are actively doing this. They use the same tools and methods as the sneaker people. The volume of expected sales is more appropriate for their price tracker. And unlike graded cards, there’s actually value in “authenticating” modern sealed product because there are just a lot of naive and paranoid new collectors who think a strange crimp is 100% evidence for a resealed box. I really think they found their niche in pokemon as long as we are in this position where the demand exceeds the ability for large retailers to keep product on the shelf.
Just my useless 2c. Sorry if it’s a bit unrelated. To answer the original question with a better understanding of what’s being asked, yes I think you can be pretty confident that the product you buy over stockX is legitimate. But that’s more to do with how difficult it is to make a convincing fake and how inefficient it is to actually attempt to reseal stuff more than it is about the probability of stockX somehow having a pokemon employee on-call
They just started their sneaker verification service a while ago.