VCP rant

[Jacklitsch]

"...agreed...we will continue the service....."

Sorry, but I interpreted this as continuing Seth's service. Maybe Jim did too.

[Leon]

Originally Posted by Jacklitsch

"...agreed...we will continue the service....."

Sorry, but I interpreted this as continuing Seth's service. Maybe Jim did too.

Maybe so and if that is the case then my mistake....however the rest of the message said this-

"After a high level meeting this morning we have decided to continue the service. It certainly had nothing to do with the $100 in our decision. It was more principle of being asked to do something we had never done AND We didn't know it was our s/w provider that was asking for the fee as mentioned above. We will talk to Bobby about it going forward. If it helps our bidders and/or consignors then we want to do it."



I guess I should add that I had already said we weren't changing s/w vendors for our auction. Maybe I am not communicating well again though?

[steve B]

The problem with BINs is that some serious price manipulation is possible.

I haven't seen it with normal cards, but I believe it was done with or maybe to Etopps. When I was following that stuff regularly there was a seller who would put up lots of 50-100 of one card at .01 - But also open only to preapproved bidders. Many of his sales were completed at very low price levels, so I asked to be approved. Surprise, I never heard back. And those very low sales drastically changed the average price for those cards. I've long suspected they were buying through another account at the lower prices expecting to do well once they stopped the manipulation.

How many sales of a prewar card at a "low" price would it take to skew the average? If some people don't look at the raw data they could assume the average to be lower than the actual average. Someone with decent inventory could in theory depress the market for a short period while buying.

Steve Birmingham

[cobblove]

Ive noticed this problem for a few years now. But has never been fixed. I dont think they can fix it. Looks like they manually put the info in so they probably dont do it every day.