VCP and auction houses
 

I just saw on the VCP forums that 3 auctions houses (Memory Lane, Goodwin and Mile High) are no longer providing their data to VCP.

I am not sure what to make of this but as a buyer I dont like it. It rings to me like either some of the things Jeff is always saying about unreal prices is having an effect and they want no part of that or they just cant stand showing downward price trends.

One of the posters over their mentioned some Red Man in a recent auction selling at all time lows and he felt they were pulling them because of these kind of instances.

I can understand wanting your prices recorded when cards are bringing all time highs just bothers me when they get pulled for lows (With this economy we have, it was bound to happen). For some reason this made me think about Beckett years ago when the market tanked and they did not show the prices going down.

How does everyone else see this? Good bad indifferent?

Areb't the final selling prices public information?
Does Bobby even need their permission?

Excuse my ignorance...
 

but can't VCP gather the info for themselves and post their findings on their website? I understand that it will entail more work for them but they do charge a fee for their services. :confused:

I wish I had someone doing my legwork for me, free of charge, but unfortunately, life rarely works that way. :(

Bingo...my thoughts too.

Doesn't seem to matter what they do tonight. They are always logged on for me, but tonight, they signed me out and won't allow me to log back in.

There are alot of cards that never make it to VCP. Pricing has to be half you and half them to stay on top of what it really is. Cards that I know for a fact that have sold many times show 08 and 07 as last dates sold. They are auctions and auction houses selling not private and store sales.

If that's the case, why in the hell would anyone pay for their services?!

If paying customers are expected to report all/any of their buys and sells, seems to me that there should only be a nominal fee, if any fee at all.

I don't buy into that argument at all. For example, let's say that there are three auctions a month from the top dozen auction houses with 60-70% of the lots being slabbed cards. I would think that there are plenty of students looking for a part time gig where they could do all of the work at home or in their dorm room. Not that big of deal for them to harvest all of the needed info pertaining to the card sales. Also, I would think that some young go-getter could write some software that could do the bulk of the work.

On the other hand, many auction houses are usually running on a skeleton crew as it is, and to expect them to dedicate X amount of man hours to provide VCP is certainly not reasonable in my opinion.

I want to be clear that I am not saying that this is what VCP is asking from the auction houses in any way, shape, or form, as I have no idea. I'm simply responding to the comments made in this thread.

Sincerely, Jimmy

for what it's worth
 

There has to be code exchanged on both sides of the equation for VCP to scrape data from any place.
It would probably be extremely time consuming to do it manually.

Just to let you know we have been adding there sales data to the site and yes it is very time consuming and a major pain. What you do not get is the email alerts for any items that may be on your want list. I think it is a dumb move on there parts. There explanation to me was that buyers where comparing the lower priced sales from eBay and not paying as much as before. So by not having them in our site does that mean that the people still won't check out prices before placing a bid? And how many potential bidders are they missing out on from our more then 2000 Want Lists created by our members.

Yes there are a lot of private sales but we will not include non verifiable data on the site. We are not going to base values on he said she said.

[QUOTE
I want to be clear that I am not saying that this is what VCP is asking from the auction houses in any way, shape, or form, as I have no idea. I'm simply responding to the comments made in this thread.

Sincerely, Jimmy[/QUOTE]

This is a very simple xml feed that is provided by the auction houses software company and takes just a few minutes and is at no additional costs to them.

What sounds strange to me is that 3 auction houses decided to do this at the same time :confused:
Nothing like having buyers pay waaay over current market price for an item,right? :rolleyes:

This is a very simple xml feed that is provided by the auction houses software company and takes just a few minutes and is at no additional costs to them.[/QUOTE]
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Of course, that makes perfect sense to me now Bobby. Thanks for clearing that part of it up for me as I obviously have no idea about website technology, as well as many other things...

Do all of the other Auction houses participate with you?

Also, how in the world do you gather all of the sales info from ebay? Does ebay give you an xml feed as well?

Anyway, I'm going back to the memorabilia side were I belong...

My best, Jimmy

We have an eBay license and they provide us with API system. We cover most of the auction houses as well as Grandslam once they launch later this month, hopefully.

If they will not provide sales data to VCP, I will not place any bid in their auctions. Simple as that. They are just trying to hide market realities from buyers and I won't stand for it.

Cheers,
Blair

Not submitting their prices doesn't stop me in anyway from getting the same Ebay information. So this explanation doesn't hold water or was poorly thought out.

"It's the economy stupid!" http://smiley.onegreatguy.net/broke.gif

I took their prices with a grain of salt anyhow, so it doesn't bother me.

I use VCP for more than just prices-it's very useful for checklists and to reference color scans of obscure cards. The three houses pulling out is indicative of a lot of things on the web these days-proprietary information that was once shared freely (or at least easily) no longer is. This is true all over now from what I am seeing, not just in the hobby.

I hate to be Captain Obvious, but did anyone notice the three auction houses which have decided not to make their prices available to VCP? What do they have in common? And why aren't REA, H & S and Heritage in this list?

Suffice it to say that it will be much tougher for me to show the board a sale of a card in an auction that "sold" for 47K in May in a Goodwin/Memory Lane/Mile High auction and then sold for 6K in September in an REA/H & S/Heritage auction. And that's exactly how the first group wants it.

Thanks Jeff - this just confirms we need to add you to the list of those who are ruining the hobby.

Captain Hubris. :D:D

And, therefore, humanity as well. :)

Perhaps Mike O'Keeffe will write a book about me?

Captain Big Puss :)

With some good software development (parsing auction results web pages, e.g. Google) you could scrape the data that way couldn't you? Would there be any legal problems in doing this?

Someone correct me if I am wrong, but there is a fee associated with having your auction house results included in VCP. These auction companies PAY for the right to have their results published, i.e. it is a business expense. If the auction house decides it is not a good business decision to participate, why hold it against them?

I thought Heritage never included it's prices on VCP.

We charge the auction houses no fee to be included. For them or any auction house to have their results posted should cost basically nothing except a few minutes for a person to program an xml feed.

Auction houses do all that work to realize sometimes-record prices selling ball cards, and they don't want to publicize and have a record of their accomplishments for collectors to see?

Golly, that doesn't seem to make sense.

As previously noted, the stated rationale makes absolutely no sense. It seems clear the motive is to avoid comparison of their sales prices with other sales prices.

But that confuses me, because I thought each auction WANTS to show high sales prices to attract consignors? :confused:

Bobby, don't kid yourself. A light shining on their prices costs those auction houses plenty. After all, those PSA 8 1915 Crackerjacks and PSA 8 Goudey Ruths are selling for pennies on the dollar on ebay and really drag down auction house prices.

Rob- like your Crazy Joe Davola avatar.

Thanks. It seems appropriate, especially recently.