So Your Beckett Says Your Card Is Worth How Much??
- Thread starter mikefri
- Start date
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I covered this in another post. I can restate here. It's really simple actually. Beckett has a standard method of calculating Beckett values and also forces us to use common sense once we see what the process is.
First they collect a random sample from online and in person sales. They employ buyers to hit card shows to purchase lower cards and survey buyers at shows to see how much their purchases totaled. This is old school tactics that contribute slightly to the overall pricing estimates. In the last decade, e-Bay (et. al) has provided a lot of insight as well. Furthermore, in conjunction with the Beckett Marketplace, they log the sales made through their website. Hence they try to census e-Bay (et. al) and online sales but only random sample the shows and dealers. BE CAREFUL: Shipping is included in online sales. This is part of the basis for the "over 50 dollars will include free shipping." on Beckett marketplace.
After a suitable number has been sampled (typically 20-50 sales) the robust measures are used to cite the high and low numbers. Typically the 90th percentile marks the high value and the 10th percentile marks the low value. This is to minimize outliers and reduce the impact of shipping costs.
Now as cards get older, interest in the cards subside. Therefore it becomes very difficult for the minimum number of cards to be sold for a value to change. This is why we rarely see older cards ever fluctuate.
In more technical terms, if there are N total cards made, they require the sample to be representative say with size n to be at least 1% (I don't personally know this representative number) of the cards made.
From there, cards are typically binned into specific values and processed into their cataloguing system.
Hope this helps.
First they collect a random sample from online and in person sales. They employ buyers to hit card shows to purchase lower cards and survey buyers at shows to see how much their purchases totaled. This is old school tactics that contribute slightly to the overall pricing estimates. In the last decade, e-Bay (et. al) has provided a lot of insight as well. Furthermore, in conjunction with the Beckett Marketplace, they log the sales made through their website. Hence they try to census e-Bay (et. al) and online sales but only random sample the shows and dealers. BE CAREFUL: Shipping is included in online sales. This is part of the basis for the "over 50 dollars will include free shipping." on Beckett marketplace.
After a suitable number has been sampled (typically 20-50 sales) the robust measures are used to cite the high and low numbers. Typically the 90th percentile marks the high value and the 10th percentile marks the low value. This is to minimize outliers and reduce the impact of shipping costs.
Now as cards get older, interest in the cards subside. Therefore it becomes very difficult for the minimum number of cards to be sold for a value to change. This is why we rarely see older cards ever fluctuate.
In more technical terms, if there are N total cards made, they require the sample to be representative say with size n to be at least 1% (I don't personally know this representative number) of the cards made.
From there, cards are typically binned into specific values and processed into their cataloguing system.
Hope this helps.
I had a bunch of offers from him as well that were really undesirable...my opinion of Mr. Olds has not improved.
I hear ya. I called him out on twitter and his excuse was, "Whatever. I've seen worse".
I should have replied and asked if those were from beckett employees too.
Ha! You'd think there'd be some sort of "conflict of interest" clause there.
I think at this point it's a bit too late to change...people are so used to only paying a percentage of "book value" that if they changed the BVs to reflect actual real world prices, then nobody would want to pay more than 50% of THAT price and everything would keep spiraling downwards.
The best we can hope for is that Beckett would go back and revisit some of their outdated prices that they've gotten lazy about changing lately; some examples given already are Donruss Crusades selling way higher and Nomar selling way lower. There's also stuff like failed prospect prices that have never been adjusted, many Upper Deck Gold/99 cards being priced almost as high as Topps Black for some reason, this year's Topps Golds and Diamonds being priced the same even though Golds are tougher and there is more demand for them, and many cards that have been out for several years and are not rare yet are still priced $n/a.
Seriously Beckett, get an intern to look at this stuff, or I bet you could hire a serious card collector pretty cheaply to do some part time work cleaning up your messes.
Richard
The best we can hope for is that Beckett would go back and revisit some of their outdated prices that they've gotten lazy about changing lately; some examples given already are Donruss Crusades selling way higher and Nomar selling way lower. There's also stuff like failed prospect prices that have never been adjusted, many Upper Deck Gold/99 cards being priced almost as high as Topps Black for some reason, this year's Topps Golds and Diamonds being priced the same even though Golds are tougher and there is more demand for them, and many cards that have been out for several years and are not rare yet are still priced $n/a.
Seriously Beckett, get an intern to look at this stuff, or I bet you could hire a serious card collector pretty cheaply to do some part time work cleaning up your messes.
Richard
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