In 1999, a small group of sports card collectors envisioned an ideal web site dedicated to helping everyone better enjoy the sports card collecting hobby. We wanted it to be more than just a message board, more than an online card shop, more than just a monthly price guide, more than just an auction, more than just a company that grades cards, more than a magazine filled with advertisements, more than anything else we had seen! And just as important as the features, it had to be FREE and easy to use.

It was very important that this new site could deliver on this vision, much the way SportsCollectors.Net has become an important resource for so many sports autograph collectors. I strongly believe collectors deserve the best, plain and simple.

It took quite a huge effort to bring about the first steps toward that vision, SportsCardDataBase.com (also can be reached at SportsCardDB.com for short).

So here's the key features we are launching with:

Catalog of baseball, football, basketball, and hockey cards.

Detailed listings of every major issue from1948-1992 (before the insert insanity) to start with, that's over 150,000 cards. With our members help, we'll certainly be adding tons more cards to our library as we go along. Everything is fully searchable with a very powerful search engine, as well as easy lookups by player and set.

During our beta period, our members have been good enough to help us upload thousands of scans of cards from their collections.

Never overpay again with our Comparison Shopping tools.

For every single card in our database, you can see up to date marketplace comparison shopping for that item sold in fixed price and auction formats.

What are my cards worth??? We have a real time pricing engine.

Have you ever been frustrated because you see your card that "books" for $150 , but you can't even sell it for $10?

We have heard thousands of collectors say that cards are only worth what someone will pay for them. When we combine recent sales figures (across multiple marketplaces) with the prices people are trying to sell the card for, we get some really valuable information.

We have seen a few newer sites that offer paid subscriptions to view prices of PSA, BGS, and SGC graded cards closed sales on eBay. While this certainly has value, it represents such a small segment of card sales, usually not many cards, and not reflective of the larger card market on and offline.

We do things a little differently than any other site/service out there. We have spent years analyzing the factors that determine card buying trends and viewed data across millions of items. It's little surprise we found that there are significant swings and variances in the secondary sports card market that just weren't reflected in printed monthly/yearly card price guides, so we needed a better way to calculate card values.

Our pricing process normalizes the data and remove the significant pricing extremes that would skew values. After the data set is collected, our formula then considers the following factors and applies appropriates weights:

• successful sales and items currently offered
• both fixed price and auction formats
• median sales values and average sales values
• real time and historical trend data
• number of times item is sold and offered for sale
• length of time the item is offered and whether it sells successfully

We made the decision to focus our pricing on ungraded cards only, as graded cards are significantly small sector of the total card market and have a statistically significant percentage of pricing extremes. As we go along, we'll continue to monitor market trends and adjust our processes accordingly. We have future plans to analyze trend information for the graded card segment and provide separate pricing for these items.

You love Sports Cards, What can you do to help out:

1. I ask that everyone please visit SportsCardDataBase.com.
   
2. Please sign up and use the site. The more you use it, the better our analytics.
   
3. Tell your friends. The more people who join, the better our analytics.
   
4. If you have a web site or blog, write about and get the word out.
   
5. Please email us with your feedback and ideas to admin@sportscarddatabase.com.

There's so much more great stuff on the way for SCDB...

We have so many big things on the horizon, it's amazing. There are a few things we are working on that could enhance the card collecting experience the way SCN's autograph request tracking has greatly improved TTM autograph collecting. Some of our ideas are not only stuff no one else is doing, but it is stuff that we'd bet no one else has even thought of.

The next thing I'm actively working on is letting everyone track cards in their collections and their wantlists.

Please stayed tuned as we will be announcing more functionality initiatives soon along with upcoming partnerships.

What does this mean for SportsCollectors.Net and how are the sites related?

SportsCardDataBase is totally separate from SportsCollectors.Net. They run as different entities, have different teams running them, and will have their own member bases.

With all of that said, both sites are great resources and I expect them to be complimentary partners. The potential synergy of these two resources together opens a whole new world of possibilities for functionality to help collectors.

Don't worry, we're still committed to continually improving SCN. It will always be my favorite site and something I want to see continually get better. I'll always be listening to your ideas, adding more features and functionality, and continuing to help everyone enjoy this very fun and addictive hobby.

I really hope many of you are as psyched about this as I am. Let the card collecting fun really begin.

PRINT  |  PERMALINK        

Recent Topics

Month List