Posted By:
Bobby BinderBarry & Dan,
Let me correct you there VCP and they "other" are not the same. We are developers for eBay and because of that our computer communicates with eBay 24/7. The software we developed runs every night pulling all new eBay listings that we visually check, make sure is cataloged correctly and approve or ignore then goes into a queue. Once here it sends an email with link to every member that has that card on their Want List if it meets their criteria. Our system will check status of every card in the queue every 15 minutes until the auction has ended. Once ended if the card sells and there are bids and reserve is met then it automatically posts to our site with a link.
The "other" is not a developer and only a market data licensee so they get a xml data sheet sent to eBay. From there with out being able to see the actual scans of the card they have to manually create a price structure to post on site. How they exactly do this is a mystery. I don't know how they account for all the listing errors and failures to list PSA qualifiers in the title. They only get from eBay the title description, number of bids and the final price. A bigger mystery would be how they price raw cards due to the great number of reprints trying to be sold as real. Our system tracks our transaction and we currently have about a 13% rejection rate on eBay auctions that we ignore and do not list in our data.
Hope this clarifies what we do exactly and how we differ with the "other". We are the only real-time price guide with new results that post with in minutes of auctions ending.