Cards Under Comps Buying Guide

We hope you’re enjoying Cards Under Comps, our email dedicated to helping you find the best deals available on trading cards.

Cards Under Comps compares active Buy It Now listings to the most recent daily average sales price for the same card, and we send you the best deals we can find based on that data. Our data is 95-99% accurate. Our data team works hard to make it as accurate as possible, but because of the nature of online marketplace buyers and sellers, some questionable recent sales comps or inaccurate Buy It Now listings may slip through.

Note: The cards listed here are not “card picks” and are often not “investment cards.” This is a helpful tool to find cards you want to collect at a good price, but don’t buy these cards assuming they’ll make good investments without doing your own research.

PROTECT YOURSELF! HERE'S HOW

You can protect yourself before you buy by taking two additional steps to ensure the accuracy of recent sales comps and Buy It Now listings:

Click on the PRICE GUIDE button to use our totally free Sports Card Investor Price Guide to verify the recent sales data:

Inspect the recent chart to look for potential recent spikes in price.

Scroll down to the “Recent Sales” section and check any recent sales to ensure they aren’t outliers:

Our data team reviews significant outliers. In cases where there is no evidence that the sale was shill bid, or where there are not other similar cards listed on Buy It Now for significantly less, we include the sale.

Essentially if there is no evidence the sale was not real, we do not exclude it.

Of note, our data automatically excludes zero feedback buyers. While some of these transactions are real (every eBay buyer starts with 0 feedback), a significant portion of these sales are from people intentionally shill bidding auctions in an attempt to manipulate prices. General consensus is that it is best to avoid these sales when comping card prices.

One other tip is to compare the 30 day average price of a card to the for sale listing. Some buyers are more confident buying cards which have a consistent price trend rather than a single recent sale which might be higher:

Click on the card in the email to navigate directly to eBay, and confirm that the listing is the correct card:

It is possible that if a seller mis-titles the listing that there could be an erroneous match which is why we always recommend quickly verifying the data before making any purchase.

As an example, many sellers list Prizm Draft Picks cards without sufficient detail in their listing titles (like “Draft Picks” or “DP” or the card number [65]), so their listing gets pulled in to our For Sale items for the regular Prizm Base card:

Cards Under Comps Buying Guide

PROTECT YOURSELF! HERE'S HOW

Don’t Miss Out!