How prices work

Card Cabinet values your cards from what they're listed for on eBay right now. This page explains exactly what that number is, so you know how far to trust it.

Asking prices, not sales

Values come from eBay Buy It Now listings that are for sale now, including shipping, in US dollars. They're asking prices: what sellers hope to get. Cards often sell for less than they're listed for, so treat a value as a ceiling and a guide rather than an appraisal or an offer.

For recent sales, every card window has eBay sold comps ↗ (and Sold listings on eBay ↗ in the prices panel), which opens eBay's own sold-listings search for that card.

How a card is priced

When Card Cabinet checks a card, it:

1. Searches eBay's Buy It Now listings for the card.
2. Keeps only listings that match it closely: the same player, year, set, number and parallel. Raw cards are priced only from raw listings. A slab is priced only from slabs of the same grading company and the same grade.
3. Drops obvious outliers, such as lots and placeholder prices far from the rest.
4. Records the lowest, median and highest of what's left, and how many listings there were.

The card's value is the median: the middle asking price, which isn't thrown off by one very cheap or very hopeful listing.

The panel also shows the Typical (90 days) price: the middle of the card's daily medians over the last 90 days. It needs a few days of checks before it appears.

Precise details get precise prices. A card missing its year or set, or a parallel entered as the base card, will match the wrong listings or none.

When prices are checked

• Every night. Card Cabinet re-checks your collection overnight, starting with the cards priced longest ago, and logs each card's median as its value for the day. A value you typed in that day always wins. You can turn this off in Settings → Nightly prices.
• When you ask. Open a card and choose Check eBay prices (or Check again), then Log $… as today's value to record it. Update values does the same for many cards at once.
• Your wish list is checked every few hours for deals. See Wish list.

How many cards the nightly run reaches depends on your keys. With your own eBay keys, it can use up to 3,000 eBay searches a night, which covers most collections every night. On the free allowance, it uses a share of Card Cabinet's daily limit, so larger collections are re-priced over several nights.

A check made recently for the same card, by anyone, is reused rather than searching eBay again. That shared record holds the card and its prices, never who owns it.

When there's no price

• No Buy It Now listings match this card right now: nothing listed matches closely enough. Try again another day, check the details, or log a value yourself from a sale you know of.
• Cards with no value logged in the last 90 days count as out of date, and Home's Needs a look lists them.

Your collection's value on Home

Home shows your collection's total value and its change over 30D, 1Y or All. The change counts only cards that had a value at both ends of the period, so adding new cards doesn't look like a gain.