PWCC Eye Appeal Stickers
 

Despite the PWCC name no longer existing, collectors still place a very high value on their "eye appeal" stickers. I find this very surprising, especially considering all that went on in the end. They were supposedly booted from eBay due to whatever reason and then the whole SlabGate scandal, the authorities getting involved, lawyers, cards being returned, Brent's controversial statements (Alteration vs. Conservation), etc.

Whenever I would get a card with a PWCC sticker on the back, I would just peel the thing off because I didn't want to be reminded of all that. Furthermore, I didn't want any of my buyers to think they were getting a card that might've been "Mosered." However, to my surprise, people were pissed at me for doing this! They told me that I was "burning money" and blah, blah, blah ...

What do you guys think about all of this ?? Would you remove the stickers or not. Do you think they still add value although PWCC is no more? And if so, how much more value do they still add ??

If there is still a premium, I suspect it's because it correlates with a card that is strong for the grade and/or well-centered, but not because it has any independent value. I don't see the point of ripping them off though, especially if they don't come off cleanly, yuck.

This

Agree with Peter. Except that the sticker might cause some buyers to take a closer look to try to identify why it got the sticker and whether it really deserves it.

So it’s probably not adding a whole lot of value, except to the extent that it might cause potential buyers to pay more attention to your listing.

I should add that I would scrutinize any stickered card very carefully, as knowing Brent, he was more likely to give the stickers to insiders and many of those insiders were probably doing stuff to cards. If anyone still cares, that is.

I agree with this 100pct. Especially the part about no one caring.

Brent didn't do the stickers. That program was added a few years back, and it's been the same two guys awarding the stickers the entire time. The stickers have nothing to do with altered cards being sold on their platform and there has never been any evidence to suggest that certain consigners received stickers on cards when the eye appeal didn't warrant them. Those are just Blowhard Forum conspiracy theories.

As far as whether the stickers add value or not, I actually built a regression model to estimate the impact of the stickers on hammer prices and I controlled for eye appeal in the model. I'd have to dig through my computer to find the exact coefficients for each sticker, but I remember that the stickers definitely did add value in addition to just what the eye appeal of the cards would otherwise suggest they would sell for. The A stickers added a very marginal amount in addition to the eye appeal itself (I believe it was around 2% or so, definitely less than 5% though). So if an average PSA 4 of a card sells for $100 and a centered copy with good eye appeal usually sells for $150 without a sticker, then a centered PSA 4 PWCC-A would go for about $153. However, the E stickers added about 15% on top of what the eye appeal of the card itself was worth (so ~$173 in this PSA 4 example), and the S stickers added a shit load. The S stickers effectively guaranteed at least a full grade higher in hammer price PLUS the eye appeal in that grade. So if a card was a PSA 6 PWCC-S, it would sell for at least what you'd expect a centered PSA 7 to sell for, on average. It's worth noting that the S sticker is the only sticker where they expressly state that the card is, in their opinion, under graded in addition to it having good eye appeal. And to their credit, they're usually right. Every time I have cracked and resubmitted a PWCC-S card, I've gotten a bump. I've even gotten bumps from PSA 6s to PSA 9s on them.

Cliff Notes for those of you who aren't good at math or don't know what a regression model is (lawyers): the stickers definitely add value and I proved it using math (though I did not post my code here obviously). You'll just have to take my word for it. Or don't, I couldn't care less.

Should you remove the stickers? Sure, if you don't like them, why not? Are you throwing money away by doing so, if you're a seller though? Yes.

Why do they add value? That's easy. Because the market respects their opinion.

According to Betsy, Brent did the stickers. I think she posted it here, it's possible it was a personal conversation.

Looks like Brent said so as well, though not sure what John was referencing.

https://www.net54baseball.com/showpo...2&postcount=34

Maybe Baker started doing them at some point, but it was Brent in the first years of the program.

With everything else going on at PWCC, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to deduce the sticker program was probably not entirely clean either.

Those idiotic stickered cards are the last ones I’d ever bid on. All the sticker does is increase the odds that the card was “worked” on.

No thanks.

Wrong again, Travis
 

2019 email from Betsy Huigens.

From: PWCC Customer Service <cs@pwccmarketplace.com>
Sent: Monday, April 29, 2019 9:20 PM
To: ----------
Subject: Re: HE and PQ Designation

Thanks for the feedback. It doesn't put us in an awkward spot at all; I'm glad you shared it. I'm sorry you and your colleagues have not been issued one of our eye appeal designations.

I can assure you that this process is completely unbiased; when Brent does his review he does so for the entire auction after the cards have been sorted by sport, year, and issue. This is after any affiliation with any particular submitter has been removed. So there is no way for Brent to know who the submitter is of any of the cards when he does his review. The unbiased nature of this process remains the most important part for us to ensure a quality, consistent outcome. For reference, we are only issuing designations on 30-50 items per auction so it is quite rare for these designations to be issued.

Does this help answer your questions?



Thank you!



Betsy Huigens

PWCC Marketplace

This is dated April 29, 2019. That's the week before their PWCC-A, PWCC-E, and PWCC-S sticker program went live. I believe the first sales were beginning of May 2019, if I recall correctly from my database. I'm sure Brent started the program. But you're a fool if you think he was the main guy sitting there examining every card that went through their doors for stickers for years on end. He taught a team of two guys what he wants them to look for and they've been doing it ever since (what their hire date was, I don't know. But they've been there for several years now. Brent had better things to do with his time than put stickers on cards all day. If you want their names, I'm sure I can get them for you. It's not exactly a secret. Plenty of people in the hobby know them. They are responsible for 99.9% of all the PWCC stickers out there.

Mike Baker never did the stickers for PWCC. His stickers are a completely separate company. He just leased an office in the same complex as PWCC so that he could run his business easier with access to their vault. But the stickers he put on the cards were still his MBA stickers for his customers with cards in the PWCC vault. He never put PWCC stickers on cards or evaluated cards for PWCC.

Personally I like getting stickers on cards I send there from REA, HA, ML, etc. I just got a top 30% sticker on a Morehouse Baking Thorpe card last week so I assume it’s not Brent doing it since he’s gone. It’s also a Fanatics sticker. I also got a top 15% sticker on t206 Cobb Uzit I had sent there from REA last summer.

I don’t understand why anybody would remove the stickers… even if they only add 1 or 2%, heck that’s a lot of added value based on today’s prices.

I’m including pix since every thread needs a card.

Is this entire hobby just about people seeking validation from others and paying for it? If you have a cool card and there’s no one around to oooh and ahhh and say “attaboy good job” is that like the proverbial tree falling in a forest? Self esteem and validation for sale. Just need the right color sticker to feel good about what you are doing.

How can you see this as anything other than adding a few dollars to your card’s value? Here’s the only way to look at it: does the existence of the sticker on the card bother you so much that you’re willing to pay to remove it? It’s really as simple as that. Even the idiots in the hobby recognize this.

+1. And the stickers mean absolutely nothing to me.
.

Isn't the thorpe like population 1?

I recall the first time I received a card with the sticker on the back - I removed it. Who wants the sticker on their card? But when I saw it somehow added some value to a potential sales price I did a simple equation in my head: is the extra money in a future sale worth having to tolerate the sticker on the back? To me the sticker is relatively unobtrusive so I kept them on. At the end of the day, all our cards are to be sold in the future by us anyway. Even if we’re all diehard collectors.

I think there is evidence in many NET54 threads to support this opinion to various degrees but my own opinion is that in whatever guise a card may be; graded, stickered, raw, slabbed, it is only the card that can speak for itself, and I follow this practice. Or do I? I'm sure I try to impress my friends.

I think about this often.

Glad someone said it.

The PWCC stickers are on the back of the slab & pretty unintrusive as you stated. I’m not a fan of the MBA stickers on be slab’s front (should be on the back). I like those.

The new Fanatics stickers are a total joke. Additionally, their big ugly stickers are usually stuck tilted & they lowered the standards (likely new people doing the reviews).

On a diff note, I 100% agree with your last statement. “At the end of the day, all our cards are to be sold in the future by us anyway. Even if we’re all diehard collectors.”

What is wrong with people that they would be mad at this? What difference does it make to them?

I agree completely.

For resale purposes.

It's not their card. Why do they care if the owner removes a sticker and loses resale value?

PWCC Eye Appeal Stickers
 

At the end of the day regardless of adding value to the card, I think eye appeal stickers are dumb & some (not all) people use them as confirmation for purchases (combat insecurity). I repeat, not all people.

So I created my own eye appeal stickers to feel more secure about purchases. [emoji102]

I’m still in testing & will patent these. Maybe PSA will buy my idea. [emoji23]


https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...48da2821f0.jpg

https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...1303e48a24.jpg

https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...9fdf74369a.jpg

I assumed it was in advance of his selling the stickered card to them and they felt it lowered their resale price. I would not understand why anyone otherwise would care if someone lit their money on fire — or removed the sticker.

If you do dig it out, I would be interested in what the regression showed, including the r-squared.

When I think about grading, I am always reminded of a quote by Carl Sagan in The Demon Haunted World:

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

A corollary to this is that the most vigorous defenders of the conman is often the marks.

YMMV

Brent owns MBA.

I wouldn’t bother removing it. But I wouldn’t get a dopamine hit off of either.

The previous high end sticker program had been in place since at least June 2015, four years prior, when I posted about it.
https://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=206630
So Brent had done the reviews himself (despite having better things to do with his time) for those four years, according to Betsy. How am I a "fool" to think Brent continued to do the reviews?

And why should we care about some criminal’s opinion of whether the assigned grade is accurate or not? Wouldn’t it depend largely on WHEN the card was graded? Did he vomit out his vaunted opinion when PSA and SGC were more lenient, and grading far easier 4-5 years ago?

Or were the “King’s” misguided opinions issued AFTER the TPGs adopted their new tougher standards (now grading 1-2 points lower than previously). Wouldn’t this now render the stickers useless and passé?

It’s mind-boggling how many otherwise smart/rational people are taken in by the scam, and live in need of others’ validation.

Some people need validation of their purchases. Shrug.

"And what we said of it became a part of what it is."

Wallace Stevens

The previous sticker program was different though, they just said something like "High-end". That was back when PWCC was a much smaller company. Brent did most of everything himself in the early years until he exceeded his own bandwidth. But once they/the hobby grew exponentially, and after he started the A/E/S sticker program in 2019, he trained two guys how to do his sticker program and they've been doing it ever since. Nearly every A/E/S sticker you see today was put on the slabs by those two guys.

PWCC was running huge auctions 2015-2019. These were not the "early years" that would be the 2000s. So if Brent was doing all the reviews, he was spending considerable time doing it. He may well have handed off the program eventually, not disputing that. Also, at some point while Brent was doing the reviews (2018), it became more than just "high end" it was "HE" and "PQ" or something like that.

For a few reasons: 1) Because they have the card in hand and you don't. 2) Because they know how to grade cards and most buyers don't. 3) Because they evaluate cards for eye-appeal all day every day, and they have a pretty good pulse on what most of these cards *should* look like.

A few people earlier suggested that the reason people like the stickers is because it somehow validates their cards to them, or in some way makes them better because it shows that someone else gave it the thumbs up too. But this is missing the mark. The reason the market values the stickers is because of the points I listed above. The most important of which is they have the card in hand and you don't. Cards often have hidden flaws, especially in the low to mid grade range, and we as buyers are left to wonder whether or not a card has a flaw that we can't see. On ebay, we often ask sellers directly if there any creases we can't see, or for additional pictures, etc. The stickers provide the buyer with a sense of security, knowing that someone who knows what they're doing has evaluated the card in hand, and they think it is one of the best examples you can find in that grade, and/or that it is even under-graded. That information is valuable in a market where 99% of transactions occur online these days. Especially since the grading companies are wildly inconsistent with their grades and do not publish grading notes/flaws for cards. Seeing a card in a PSA 4 holder is merely a starting point for most buyers. If I know that a card in a PSA 4 holder will regrade as a 5 or better with near certainty, then I'm going to bid accordingly. But if I don't know if there are hidden flaws on a PSA 4, then I'm not going to bid it to the moon because the risks that it will always be a PSA 4 at best are too high. So I'll just bid as if it's a 4.

If you don't even know who these two people were, how do you know they knew how to grade? And why didn't they catch all the altered card PWCC sold, if they were so knowledgeable?

The market, and PWCC, grew something like 10x from the days when Brent was doing the stickers himself and when he hired help and switched to the A/E/S format. Just go browse through listings with PWCC stickers and tally up the number of A/E/S stickers vs the number of "HE/PQ" stickers that you encounter. The ratios will tell you how much they've grown. I can't even remember the last time I saw a "HE" sticker.

Maybe he had to buy them all back. 2019 is right when the scandal broke. Are you telling me PWCC grew 10x from then? Your timeline is way off. They were huge in the late 2010s, that was when all the questions were being raised about string bidding and market pushing and so forth. They did not grow another 10x from the start of the scandal in early to mid 2019. I mean if I'm wrong and you can show me data I'll recant, but that does not seem plausible to me.