T-206.com Free Portfolio Tool

[Archive]

Posted By: David Simon

Hey all,

Hope everyone had a good summer.

Just wanted to let you know I've added a portfolio tool to t-206.com. This should make it a lot easier to manage your collections and to track the values of cards you have or are interested in without having to continually do 'searches' for the cards on the site.

This is a work in process and your feedback is much appreciated. There are no instructions, help file, or FAQ yet, but I'm working on it and the adding features on a regular basis. Since there are no formal instructions, I will attempt to walk you through sign-up and use:

The first thing to note is this is only supporting the T206 set. All of the other sets I track prices on do not have the portfolio linked in yet. Once the workflow and interface are further along, I will link to the other sets.

When you go to www.t-206.com, in the upper left of the page there is a SignUp link. Click that and it was take you to the registration page.

In the right box in the middle of the page is the registration form. Fill that out, and click Register.

In a few seconds or minutes, you should get an email with a confirmation link to complete the registration process. Open the email, click on the link, and your account will be activated. As always, there are no fees for this.

Once your are activated, and login, the site will take you to the 'My Account' page. There are simple controls for changing your profile or password information and a link to the portfolio tool under the My Account title that says 'My Portfolio'. Click the My Portfolio link and it will take you to the collections page.

In the collections page you can create as many collections as you like. Just type in a collection name in the 'New Collection Name' text box, and it will be added to your portfolio. Once you create a collection, it should should up in the box right below with three 'action' buttons.

Click the 'view/add' button associated with the collection and this will take you to the collection page. Next you have to add cards to the collection. At the bottom of the box it says, 'Add (insert the number of cards you want to add) Cards'. Enter a number of cards to add, and click the 'Cards' button.

BTW, Don't worry if you say to add 10 and only end up putting in 5, it's not a problem.

You should now see a number of rows that corresponds to the number of cards you want to add.

Start typing the player name, and the system will bring up the auto complete to select the card you want. Use the arrow keys to select from the auto complete list and hit return when you find the card you want to add.

Next select a grading company, grade and card back from the pull-down menus. Backs are supported in the portfolio, but are not yet live in the price guide. I figured it would be easier to enter the complete card info once rather than have to go back and add it later when back pricing is supported. Backs are not required though, and will not affect prices for the time being. I will be doing a major update to the price guide soon and will be accounting for backs in the price guide.

Next click on the "calendar' icon to the right of the date box and select the date you aquired the card.

Finally add the price paid in the text box, and then click the 'Add' button at the bottom of the table.

Viola! The market prices from the price guide are fed right into the portolio and you can track the market value and increase (or decrease) for the card and the whole collection.

The player name in the collection is also a link back to the market page in the price guide. If you click that, you can get the historical pricing, open auctions, and trending for the card as well.

To get back to the top level collections page, just click the 'My Portfolio' link in the upper right corner.

So again, this is a work in process, if you find any bugs, please email beta@nla.com (there is also a persistent link at the bottom of the page). It would be helpful to get feedback from the community in order to improve the portfolio tool, so please do not hesistate to reply. Also, this is not meant to be a replacement for the commercial tools like VCP or Beckett, which are far more capable, and support all sets in all sports, but is intended to help the casual user manage their collections in a meaningful way.

Several months ago, Leon dinged me for doing incremental update posts to N54, given that the site had ads on it. I've removed the ads, and promised Leon not to do any posts unless there was a major update, and so here it is... hope you all enjoy!

best,ds

[Archive]

Posted By: leon

No problem. I am a capitalist too and there is nothing wrong with that. As long as everyone knows this is not an altruistic venture of yours, and you will make money when they go to ebay from your site and buy something, then all is good. That is the way it works, right? Good luck with it.....

edited to add it is a pretty good looking site and looks to be very functional...

[Archive]

Posted By: David Simon

Leon is right, this is connected to the Ebay Partner Network, however, the miniscule revenue that is generated from EPN (<$400./mo) does not even begin to cover the hosting costs for the site. If you consider the cost of the hardware, development time, development libraries, licensing of ebay's market data, etc., it operates at a loss. Add to that the monthly cost of Adwords to get the word out since I have not posted here in several months, and we are talking about several thousand a month in operating losses.

The engine that drives this took over three years to develop. I'm working towards leveraging the engine in other verticals and use T206 as a development sandbox. So the community gets the benefit of that development. With all due respect to Leon and others who may question my motives, I think that is the indicator of my altruism.

If I was in it for the money, I would charge for access as others do or I would sell advertising on the site. I don't because profit is NOT the focus of the site. For that, I run a profitable software development and infrastructure management company and that gives me the ability to make t-206.com free.

At some point though, I may launch a site, for profit, to compete with the other commercial sites in the sports collectibles space. If and when that happens, T206 will remain up, free, and continue to function as a development site.

I really do believe that market data should be free and transparent. And as far as I can tell, to date, I'm the only one putting my money where my mouth is. Is that altruistic enough?

ds