Price Guide Beta eBay Experience [2023]: Where To Find, How To Use
Over the past few years, Pokemon card sales on eBay have seen wild levels of growth, with estimates ranging from 500% year-over-year to as much as 1,046% growth!
So clearly, you want to get in on the game.
But if you are letting go of a piece of your precious collection, you want to make sure you sell it for a price equivalent to its worth. A price that isn’t so high that you get no bids or so low that you get taken advantage of. Unfortunately, when you check eBay for pricing on similar cards, what you find is all over the board. It can be quite frustrating.
You’re not alone here. Have no fear – eBay has heard your concerns and developed a new trading card experience known as the Price Guide.
Introducing eBay’s Price Guide Experience
eBay created its new Price Guide with both sellers and buyers in mind. The Price Guide intends to provide a comprehensive and, even more importantly, accurate resource that allows users to manage their trading card (including Pokemon cards) sales and to track the item’s value. This is known as eBay’s market value.
eBay Price Guide Market Value
eBay’s Price Guide allows users and sellers to monitor the value of cards of interest based on real-time market data. This includes a card’s current and past value, so you can see where the most growth is coming from to further focus your sales funnel. The market value is calculated using transaction data from the past year.
Users can dig even deeper by viewing historical data in a sales graph depicting a trading card’s winning bid amounts and the average sales price over the past year. And the best part about eBay’s Price Guide Market Value? It’s updated every few minutes. So you know it’s reflective of the market today.
Where Can You Find eBay’s Price Guide?
The Price Guide experience can be accessed via the mobile eBay application. Simply type what you’re looking for in the search bar, and the price guide will be at the very top of the results page. Click on “See price trend,” and you’re in!
Upon accessing the Price Guide, you will see the following:
- A filter that allows you to sort by All Listings, Buy It Now, Auction, and Accepts Offer
- The option to refine search results by Extended (broad) or Refined (specific) results
- The eBay market value over the past week
- A chart showing the weekly average price of sold items, which can be viewed for one week up to one year
- Statistics from similar items from the past 30 days, such as the price range of all items sold, the volume of sales, and the number of sellers
- The last 50 sales from the preceding 30 days
- Links to guide you to view active listings or to sell a similar product
Make the search your own to get the information you need to feel confident selling or buying.
Bonus Experience: Collection.
If you’ve made it this far in the article – you’re likely selling more than one Pokemon card. Lucky for you, eBay released an additional tool simultaneously, the eBay Price Guide: Collection.
With Collection, sellers with a large portfolio can manage, list, and analyze market value in a single spot.
Setting up your Collection is as easy as populating your inventory based on historical purchase history or uploading a CSV file. Once complete, you will now be able to track the value of both your portfolio overall and individual items. Plus, users can view their collection using three views: total portfolio, category view (maybe limited edition versus common Pokemon cards), and individual items.
If this sounds like what you’re looking for, head to the “MyeBay” menu and select “Collection.”
eBay Price Guide Experience: Example
Let’s say you are looking to sell an Emboar card.
You type in “Emboar Pokemon cards” in the search bar of your eBay app, hoping to get an idea of what price you should set. But low and behold…the first 5 five listings show pretty inconsistent pricing, from $00.99 to $8.99.
And then, you see a note at the top of the search results, inviting you to “Track the value of your trading cards.” Perfect! Stoked to get some clarity, you click and are rewarded with the eBay Price Guide for Emboar Pokemon cards.
You click through the Buying Format drop-down, looking at the differences between all listings, “buy it now” items, auctions, and those that accepted offers. Selecting auction, you see an average price of $7.99 over the past month. And even better, you see recent spikes in pricing – all the way up to $72.60 in the past month!
Feeling grounded in your options, you list your card with a starting bid price of $10.00. How easy was that?
Ready to Sell? Here are 4 Tips for being a Top Rated Seller.
- Details: In this case, less is not more. Provide all the information you would want to know if you were in the buying position. And please stay honest.
- A picture speaks a thousand words: Include a clear photo of the card you sell to show buyers that your product is genuine and aligned with the product description.
- Shipping and handling: Don’t use this as an opportunity to earn a few more bucks. For the most part, shipping and handling for a single card should sit around $1 – $5.
- Delivery: Once packaged, ship right away! If possible, try to get items out within 48 hours of closing, and always notify the buyer if any issues arise.
Good luck in trading your Pokemon cards.