The Yak Shack Forum

I was wondering should auctions that are just off the wall go in the price book?  We can all think of an example or circumstances that caused a premium card on ebay to sell for way too cheap.  No feedback for the seller.  Or the item wasn't listed well enough to draw any traffic.

For example someone mentioned a Lost AutoPW that was listed poorly and sold for like $35 or something rediculous.  Should that even be put in the price guide?  Only reason being it really influences the average price in the price guide and makes the card look less valueable. 

((actually Roz not sure what you do with auctions like those when you confirm them.  Do you throw them out or use them because they really are valid auctions?))

This is something Anna, Tower, Cindy and I recently discussed when some HP auctions were on a very low BIN.
BINs are a tricky one, it is just what the seller thinks the card is worth and 99% of the time the seller knows what he's doing.

However, there's always 1% of the time when he doesn't (note it couldn't be a she :rofl:).

If that seller doesn't know (in the case you cite a Sawyer autoPW was described as a "pieceworks redemption" and sold on BIN for £20. Bad descriptions and off-the-wall BINs aren't really a true reflection of market price.

I think it should be something we all discuss but my vote would be to omit them where possible, because we are trying to show a guide price rather than catalogue everything, but of course we try to have so many auctions in that one off-the-wall one shouldn't too badly reflect on the price overall.

I disagree.  If we exclude the auctions that sell well below the average selling price, then we would also have to exclude auctions that go well above that price.  Say you have an auction where two bidders lose their heads and get into a bidding war.  The price wouldn't reflect true market value.  If we include all auctions, over the long run the prices will even out.

The auctions Roz referred to that sold for a low BINs were a different story, since the seller truly make a mistake with all of the listings.  Some of the buyers even allowed the seller to back out of the auction due to the mistake.

Cindy, the £19.99 BIN on a Sawyer piecework was also a genuine mistake, since that card sells for anything from $150!

There is a point of view you can take that says if we start omitting high prices too that we are doctoring the prices too much, so it's probably better just to put everything in. A bidding war is a genuine card chase, a BIN is just a mistake.

I believe genuine mistakes don't reflect market price, that's all.

I think as well that all auctions be included. Any sampling should eliminate the lowest price, as well as the highest price to get a mean (if that's the right word) value, but we can all think of the time when we got the DEAL OF THE CENTURY for a card - if it is the price we paid, then why shouldn't it be included? We can also recall the time when we may have paid a little too much for a card, but so be it. Throw them all in :)

Did the seller accidentally list the card at £19.99 BIN when he/she meant to list it at £75 BIN, but didn't notice until it was too late, or do you mean that the seller didn't know what he/she had and listed it too low?  To me, I would exclude the auction in the first case, but not in the second.

I thinks all the auctions should be added into the Price Guide also.  My reason is because although an auction ended at a low price (well below norm) who's to say if that really was a deal in the long run.  If you look at the prices that were commanded for the Whomping Willow card at the onset of PoAU ($1499.95) compared to its current average price ($124.55), there's a major difference.  I'm not a statistician (far from it), but if all the prices were plotted on a bell curve, the very high and low prices would fall out of the norm anyways, so the overall average price should still hold true.  Just my 2 cents...

It is a tough question I obviously lean towards throwing out the obvious abnormal auction.  I know some of us really go by the price average price as the proper price to pay for a card.  If there are 10 sawyer auto PW cards and they all went for between $150 and $200 and the auction with the mistake is also counted it could knock $10-$15 off of the average card price.  That wouldn't be a very accurate (or as close to) price as I would like to see. 

Of course it all depends on how you want to use the price guide as an individual.  If I am buying I want to see the lowest price possible, if I am basing a selling price for a BIN or offline deal I don't want it to be $10-$15 lower because a seller made a mistake on their listing which has affected the average auction price.

For what it is worth I think all auctions should stay in the price guide.  I know a really low selling price will reduce the average price, just as a really high one will increase it.  But when I am checking the guide I don't just look at one figure; I look at all four.

As for whether a BIN low price is a mistake or not I think that is debatable.  If I listed a £100 necklace on Ebay for 10p BIN and didn't bother checking the listing and subsequently went through with the sale, the auction would still be legitimate.  The buyer would get a bargin and I would be stupid but it is still a valid sale of a necklace.

After all none of these cards are actually worth anything.  They are just bits of paper (I will take cover in a minute  ::) ).  The only thing that makes them valuable is the person buying it.  We all try to buy cards as cheaply as possible and occasionally get into silly bidding wars and pay too much (well I do).  But they are all valid sales that I believe need to be included.  Just my thoughts  ;D

That we don't know - the auction lasted 4 minutes.

However, that's not actually what their mistake was, they believed it to be a pieceworks redemption card, not an autographed pieceworks redemption card. That was their mistake. A Sawyer pieceworks card does go for around the price asked.

Roz if the auction only lasted about 4 minutes don't you think that is a bit fishy.  I mean you could be dead lucky and just happen to be searching at the right moment but......... ???

Well, I wondered that, but if the seller bought it himself under another ID s/he would have to pay fees- why not just end it early?

It's amazing how short a time things do last on ebay when they are a bargain ;)

That's true.  The cards only have the value we assign to them.  It scares me to compare what I would pay for a card versus what I would pay for any other item.  $30 for a pair of good sunglasses that I will use for years?  No way.  $30 for a good card?  Let me at it! ;)


I'm not collecting the set.  Is there any difference between the two redemptions?  Does one say that it's an auto pieceworks card and the other just a pieceworks card?

I'm not collecting the set.  Is there any difference between the two redemptions?  Does one say that it's an auto pieceworks card and the other just a pieceworks card?

There is no Sawyer pieceworks redemption, it was pack inserted.

There are two redemptions for Sawyer - the auto and the PW/auto and yes Cindy the two cards do look very different.  On the auto redemption there are loads of names with a cross by the one you can claim.  On the PW/auto there are only three characters on the front of the card and I would imagine only three names on the back.  (as you can tell after entering auctions for the last couple of days I am now a Lost expert - and I don't even collect them  :rofl: ).

I don't mind having all of the auctions included in the guide and the averages. The extremes on the high end can balance out the extremes on the low end. But one thing that's misleading is the "Min Price" listing, which lingers forever and highlights the oddities. Maybe it would be a programming challenge, but I'd find it useful to see a more representative number -- like, if there's at least 10 auctions, don't look at the bottom 5% or the lowest two. It's not a big deal since we have the "5 Most Recent" average.

BINs that go within the first few minutes aren't too surprising. Some people do camp out watching to see the newest listings. A much larger group of bidders put in eBay "Favorite Searches" that send them an email when a specific item gets listed.

I must plead guilty to keeping a certain famous Yak Shacker's selling page in its own window and hitting refresh when new dealer-incentive cards are coming out, ever since another Yakster picked up the first listed HPPOA Pear Tree Leaves for a BIN that was 30% of what the average eventually turned out to be. Sometimes the "market" later makes things pricier than you would think and you can find some early bargains. The best BIN bargains seem to come when a "mostly sports-cards" shop picks up an occasional non-sports box and doesn't fully appreciate what he found.  I also like to search for misspelled names in auction titles. ;)

As long as everything's entered into the price guide a few oddities are ok.

Jeff, nothing like that is a programming challenge, that's the simplest of maths ;) (and if we have any problems we know we can rely on you for help ;) but it's not a bad idea at all. Mark's got lots of "changes afoot" for the guide so that's worth putting to him.

It's time that we re-thought the guide a bit. When we first made it we never imagined it would cover 600 cards and have prices backed up with 20,000 ended auctions in 12 months, it was meant only to help people to calculate fair prices for trades and so it has certainly been scaled up rather more than we had ever expected!!

As a budding statistician (okay, I admit it was my worst subject :P) I say keep all the auctions in - both bidding wars and anomalous BINs. Like Joanna pointed out, they will balance out eventually. A point to note would be that maybe adding a note to view the page where there is a list of ALL the prices would be useful. I always look at that page anyway to look for the most recent trends for a card value rather than evaluating its value over several months which would be problematic for say the Whomping Willow card. I can see people's points about leaving out very low BINs but have we considered the fickleness that is the card market? What is considered a low price upon the release of a set may become the norm price when the initial buying frenzy peters out. If we left out those initial auctions, then we throuw out the accuracy of the PG -  averaging across a greater data range will result in a curve that approaches a perfect normal bell curve ie. a more accurate estimation of card prices

Morning All ;) :D ;D,

I know only been a member for a short time but I feel all auctions should be kept in that way the accuracy of the top and bottom line price figures become more of a true reflection of the card market. I know I use this like a bible when i'm buying as we all like to try and get a bargin every now and then,it's different for partner and I as we dont buy to sell as this is purely a hobby but understand its even more important for seller's as they can see approximations of what to sell cards for in reflection to past auctions.

Cheers

paul

Yeah I think you are all right... ha ha ha - by which I mean, shall we keep everything in? I know that if a Platform 9 and 3/4 (where we only have 3-4 auctions) that went for a cent it would skew the guide a little, but we must also remember that it's very easy to look at all the different auctions on one page to see what the norm is.

I'd say that usually you should be guided by the long term average price, and use the recent price just for interest's sake.

Roz would it be poss. to show say the last three lowest prices?

$00.99
$52.99
$54.99

So then you could look and see that although the lowest was $00.99 the other two prices hit well over $50.
Giving you good idea of the true going rate.
Just a thought.

In my opinion yes you should put everything in, What if it's the start of a trend and the card really has become worthless(god forbid!).
Do you just keep leaving out all new info, because if I was selling then I'd want to know that the last 5 times people have sold it, it went for pennies.

All you have to do is click on the "View all auctions" button and you'll see everything that's been entered, starting with the most recently ended auction first. :)  Once you're in the list of auctions page for a particular card, you can sort the auctions by date (reverse chronological order), price (highest first), and normal or variant.

I like to discuss about it again. It's only the auctions of sellers which can be possibly frauds i have problems with. These auctions do not reflect the market price. If we have a Potter Quad with no picture for example and the seller has zero feedback and only accept money order (no paypal), then it will sell for $100-200. Because everyone will know, the chances to get the card are very low, it's probably a fraud. These auctions should not be in the price guide IMO. High priced auctions (bidding wars) are totally different IMO. If the market (2 people) are willing to pay that money, it's okay, that's a reality. But if the price is only a result of the fact, that the winner has good chances not to get the card, then it's a wrong decision IMO to put it in the guide. See my Quad example, does that really make sense?  ::)

I know, some of you say, bidding wars and to low BINs are balancing out in the end. That's true. But i don't talk about these 2 kinds of auctions. I only speak about frauds.

So i like to renew the discussion about this fact. Of course it should be easy to decide which auction are those "fraud-auctions". We need hard facts for the decision. My opinion is that these should be auctions of sellers with no feedback which don't accept paypal. Then it's easy to decide (and these are so rare, so it's not a big deal).

What do you think.  ::) I would vote for that.  8)

I agree with you Thomas.  This happens so rarely and there is always a big discussion over whether the auction is genuine or not.  It shouldn't be too hard to discount one card if we there is a general agreement it is dodgy - I am thinking of the triple auto that we were all speaking about a while ago, no feedback was ever left.

I agree with everything Thomas has replied....the other price guide (grey area) that should also be considered is the one off variants
That blue Karkoff costume, a couple of months ago.... that I still think is an error card.....this card did sell in the $400 plus range
If entered into the price guide it would have taken the average value up quite a few notches where in real fact that card can be had anywhere for $10 or even much less
I know that the variant swatch of any Potter card is at a premium because everybody wants the best show set...but in real fact, the card variant or not is still the same card 1/400 or 400/400
Most collectors are just aquiring these great swatches soley on the content of the swatch ,the card it self is really of little matter
I myself have bought pretty swatches on the content of the swatch not which card it is...Maureen

Hi Maureen,

All the variant cards are checked off as variants when entered, so their prices won't affect the Price Guide averages.  To see the variant prices, you need to use the pull down menu to see the prices.  The average prices listed in the Price Guide are for normal, non-variant cards.

oh Ok thanks Anna !!!!

I don't think we need to worry over-much about averages, even when "one person's variant isn't variant enough to appeal to somebody else." But the 'lowest price' number can be misleading, and we might want to consider (say) eliminating the low two auctions whenever we have at least ten completed auctions, or maybe a few lowest BIN sales.

Sometimes the low end is skewed by early Buy-It-Now listings, where the seller was not yet aware of the "real" value of what he had. The most famous case is with the original POA set, where one well-known seller put up an early BIN for Pear Tree Leaves and another well-known buyer happened to notice it immediately; it's still by far the Low ending price. For a while after that, I snuck in some checks for new BINs while I was at work using a "company" computer.

Then, occasionally a card will be listed with misspellings in the title, or in a category that didn't give it visibility, or unavailable to USA or UK buyers, etc.

On the other hand, the rare weird results are part of the legends and lore of the hobby. Just like the auction listings of "Buy-It-Now for 0.01 ... Or Best Offer".

As a guide to my own bidding, I watch the last-five-average and the low result, but quite often the low result is so much lower than the next lowest that it doesn't help much. ::)