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I don't want to take this off topic but what is the purpose in selecting auction vs. retail when you enter in a price? I suppose it's information but in my mind I can't see why I care if the price was based on retail vs. auction.

I will piggyback on the condition aspect of pricing.

If as was stated earlier, modern era cards are to be assumed to be NM. Great.

So, anything past a certain year to current the default condition is NM. For older cards my idea is that before the system allows a price to be entered a condition MUST be entered for these cards.

In my opinion, and open for discussion, are the cut off years.

• Basketball & Hockey pre 89-90
• Football pre 89
• Baseball, perhaps pre 86, or should it be pre 81

For other sports and genres, it likely would be similar. However, I will defer to the experts in these fields.

This would allow us to track the rise and fall of prices here against all conditions. As well, we can see how the “percentages of BV” is reflected here.

This would/should go hand in hand with the testing of members on grading to be granted the permission level to input this data.

Just an idea.

Not a pricing guy here, but I entered a price i paid for a card the other day, just because.  I think the median value dropped from 65 cents to 60 cents.  Again, I'm not a pricing guy.  It's the first one i remember ever entering, and i doubt I'll ever enter one again.

I nominate NJDevils to get the ball rolling on this one...

As the junior lobbyist for fixing the pricing and in the spirit of turning the TALK into ACTION, I went back and reviewed some of the greatest hits from this thread and categorized them based on who/what is required of each idea/action and maybe even injected some others that have been bouncing around in my noggin or part of offline conversations:

Unanimously (or majority) agreed upon structural site changes (requires ADMIN nomination/action):

1. Limit access to member pricing input only to users who demonstrate a grasp of all pricing guidelines (via test or otherwise), perhaps even with leveled “tiers”/points/tests for increased access/capabilities. Perhaps first-tier access gives pricing capability for last-7 or last-30 days of prices, second-tier access gives last-90 days of pricing access (to coincide with online auction history), third-tier access gives prices capability unlimited by time, and fourth-tier access gives capability to modify, correct, or delete existing prices. These pricing accesses could be granted or denied based on a member’s compliance/disregard for the standards.
2. All users, regardless of pricing capability should be able to “flag” a price to bring a suspicious or errant price to the attention of a member with more access/capability to address it.
3. Create a meaningful distinction between card prices from different “grades”—in price charts and data, different color lines/bars, price calculations, etc. Currently, if the last 5 listed prices for a “Player X” RC have 3 Poor RCs and 2 Excellent-Mint RCs the card will list in the set and everyone’s collection stats at the “poor” price; however, if the last 5 have 3 Excellent-Mints and 2 Poors the card will list at the “excellent-mint” prices. Making the meaningful distinction means an excellent-mint RC would be “worth” the median/average of the excellent-mint cards, a poor RC card would be worth the median/average of the poor cards, etc. Building this distinction will not only ensure that users input a card’s condition (to make their entry relevant), but we could also follow-up to standardize the condition(s) utilized for checklist pricing and collection statistics in any given set/year (i.e. the list price for 1989 Topps Baseball = a calculation of “Near-Mint” and above prices; the list price for 1952 Topps Baseball = a calculation of “Good” and above prices). All sub-standard data could still remain visible to a user exploring the details of the card, but the price calculation should denote a specific condition(s) (with the appropriate disclaimer at the top to the set).
4. Enable a way to import/automate prices from auction site(s) with streamlined user review/confirmation to more expeditiously price cards. This all depends of course on copyright compliance, etc., but if legal and code-able, the site could further prioritize users (“Things to Do”) to confirm new sales from cards (from their collection or otherwise familiar) that are unpriced or have long gaps since the last price.

Unanimously (or majority) agreed upon community standards (for Community action/compliance):

1. There should be a uniform grading standard (for non-graded cards) that members employ when inputting prices. All members should input the condition of a card (if feasible) when adding a price.
2. (Already a standard) Members should only list the prices of completed transactions, whether from auction or sale, online or in-person.
3. (Already a standard) Nobody should input the “asking” price for an unsold card.
4. (Already a standard) Nobody should list the “book value” price from a published “price guide” or external “pricing” resource.
5. All prices inputted should be “verifiable” by member inputting price. Online sales/auctions remain verifiable for up to 90 days. Local retail sales are a little trickier.
6. A member should ALWAYS remain objective when pricing cards and ONLY list a “fair” sample of a card’s sale prices, not just “cherry pick” the 3-5 prices that match their bias. Ex. A user should decide before pricing a card, “I will price the last ten cards sold chronologically at this online auction site, regardless if I think the price is too high or too low” or “I will price all sales of this card in the last 30 days” or “I will follow this rare prized card in my collection and search roughly every 75-80 days to see if a new sale has occurred and list it regardless if I think the price is too high or too low.” This selfless behavior will actually provide you the most honest “truth” of what you card is “worth” to the broader marketplace, and in the process make this site the most trustworthy location for legitimate card prices.

Pending changes/standards that require further discussion, clarification, or consensus-building:

1. Can/Should ADMIN implement a new pricing calculation (last/average/median over occurrences/time/condition) to replace median of last 5?
2. When should we include/exclude shipping costs from online site prices? Do we include the $3.99 shipping on the card that sold for $.99? Do we include shipping rates from UK/Australia/Japan? Either way, should we have admin create fields that enable us to list a “sale’s price”, “shipping cost”, and/or “total” separately (to take some of the edge off the philosophical differences)? 
3. How to grade the “condition” of a card when you were not a party to the transaction (recording completed online sales from a thumbnail being the most problematic—do we trust the “condition” listed by the seller with a limited view of the actual card? Do we or can we list a card that is sold, but has no picture of the card sold or the picture is a vague image of a flash-bulb reflection on a hard case containing our card?)
4. Should ADMIN build an internal marketplace (where cards are bought and sold between members) and thus automate some of the pricing based on completed internal transactions on this site (perhaps “validated” by the receipt of tradincarddb.com commissions)? This could get us closer to verified, automated, real-time pricing?
5. Users are currently required to enter the “source” of a sale, when it can be ambiguous and seems to have no bearing on price calculation (i.e. Is an eBay “Buy it Now” an “auction” or “retail” sale? Is a card bought online from Topps or Upper Deck an “auction” or retail” and if you said “Buy it Now” is “auction”, but Upper Deck is “retail”, why? If I buy a card from a neighbor or someone on this site is that “retail”?) In the end does any of this matter? Will it remain a distinction without a difference (and thus take away from the efficiency of inputting prices)?
6. Should there be a method to identify “common” pricing for a given set/insert and thus allow pricers to focus on the cards of consequence and expedite pricing across the board?
7. Should there be an option to input lot prices, and if so, how should the site identify the distinction? Ex. 10 x Player X card sells for $Y in an online lot; how do we input this price judiciously into the site?
8. Should list/collection card prices be rounded?: Cards over $1 rounded to the nearest $.10; Card over $5 rounded to the nearest $.25; Cards over $10 rounded to the $.50; Cards over $25 rounded to the nearest $1; cards over $100 rounded to the nearest $5, and so on… (or something like this) The purpose of this would be to clean up some of the tracking data and graphs for a card—Ex. so that a card that sells for $10.35 and $10.37 don’t have to each form their own bars on the orange bar graphs, they could show as two entries for “$10.50”.

Dude, you've been here two months and you want to implement a TCDB Marketplace where we sell each other cards and the site gets a cut?  I think if I buy a card from Ranfordfan, it's nobody's business what I pay for it.  About every six months, we get a new guy who wants to completely overhaul some segment of the site, but this one takes the cake.

I see listed many times over about condition tiered pricing. One big issue is that condition is completely subjective in nature. What one person considered Ex-Mt another might see are NM, NM - Mint, etc. Heck, I've seen cards in Ex condition being pawned off as NM. In fact, I'm returning a 84-85 OPC hockey set right now because of that. Guy listed the cards as NM, but they have creases in them (deceiving scans too). And there is object proof of this. Look at the grading companies. I don't know how many times I've seen, usually from smaller companies, cards labled as NM or better that had visible dings, creases, stains, etc. How would a card like that bring a true and fair analysis of pricing levels.

Is pricing screwed up in here, heck yeah. Is it a simple fix, ah no. I'm with switzr about the Marketplace. Open up that can of worms and it creates a whole new set of problems. Admin is small, believed to be only 1 person, how would he/she be able to hhandle that. As far as coding to link to external sites for information, I don't see that happening. Doing do opens up security concerns that now must dealt with too. Think malware coded into the linked site that works its way through the connection. Again, Admin is small and handling additional security concerns while maintaining the integrity of this database. And yeah, what I pay for something to someone else on here is between us and shouldn't be open for public disclosure, 

When I joined I was under the impression that this site was:   

1.  To have the biggest/best listing of all trading cards.

2.  A place you can keep track of your collection

3.  Learning about the hobby  of trading cards even if you do not collect them.  and the people here

4.  With the match alerts and other reports so members can do trading/selling/buying  Most only trade here.

5.   Pricing was the last of its features  IMO  most of us use common sense when doing trading.

New members have been good for this site.  They have been very helpful in many ways.   In the short time I have been here I have seen many new members do 1 or 2 posting about buying/selling/ trading and never come back.  

Pricing will take a lot of time and energy  BUT if someone wants to do it I have no problem.  Can we do my Husker cards 1st  OH!!! that is selfless of me.  I think we can use the time and energy in better ways right now.

LOL. So I take it you’re a hard “no” on #4.

I was truly just throwing it out there. I understand that the culture of the site is very much hobby/collector focused. I was more suggesting it as an opt-in situation. Everyone can currently list their cards as For Sale/Trade and interact with other users for provate, person-to-person transactions.

I was more thinking along the lines of an open marketplace where members can list cards available to the non-member, to come in see the marketplace browse around and leave (as they might at an Amazon or eBay, but as an alternative to Amazon or eBay). And because of the risks/costs/tracking/coding, the site would likely need to increase revenue streams (preferably from commisions of external sales, then arbitrary charges towards community members, etc).

Again, I realize the suggestion is a bit counter-culture to the community here, so I certainly don’t mean to offend anyone. This whole thought process was more in line with BOBSCARDZ question of how we could achieve “real-time” pricing and to me, that capability screams marketplace and automated tracking of completed sales.

I would mever want to suggest wholesale changes to how the community currently interacts with each other.

I'm just curious, does any of this apply to the pricing of my own cards for my benefit only? I like that just the way it is and really don't want that part of pricing changed.

Let's not over-complicate things.

The only real reform is this:

1 - Price submitters become limited to those who pass a quiz on condition identification.
2 - All future price submissions require condition (prices without condition will not be accepted).

And this is where I got my idea from:

As you see, there are ranges - these were determined by this particular source through real world examples (almost 10 years ago this was published). But, if we see that G is %30, F is 20% and P is 10%, then when we see a 1935 Good card sell at $40, we can say that NRMT price of that card is about $130 (actual math says $133.33). Since this is all a database, all calculations can take place nearly instantaneously. One price can tell you the whole range. Of course, having multiple prices gives you a better range.

Obviously, we would need to do more research than grab info from this single source I used here, but with the right people (those who have a firm grasp on true condition ratings), we can get multiple examples of current actual realized prices, and determine our own percentages for the various eras. Then, we'll be able to use those percentages to populate our internal pricing charts. Once we know how 1950s cards shake out, we can determine any grade's current approximate value from the most recent sale, no matter the condition!