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Whatever the card is selling for is its price.  You have touched on an issue that ebay will not solve, commons.  It would only work for higher priced cards because nobody sells 1990 fleer commons as singles on ebay due to shipping.

I am also open to better ways

the unpaid and refunded angle is good.  I do not believe the API would handle this price minpulation well but any kind of automation would have issues with price minupulation.

I am not sure if SportLots and COMC have API's also but an aggregate of many sources is the best way to improve accuracy.  I suggested ebay because I believe it has far away more sports card transactions than any other site but that could be changing also.

Musclebeech wrote:

I'm not opposed to using eBay "sold" prices as one source for pricing (and I agree that the use of the API would take a lot of guesswork out of it), but there need to be some checks and balances. It would be nice if there was also a way to incorporate some other reasonably accepted sources, such as SportLots, COMC, etc.

Does the eBay API take into consideration auctions that get cancelled or are unpaid/refunded after they close? If not, I would be worried about artificial price inflation occurring.

Are we ALL frgetting that the site is a DATABASE, and not attempting to be a definitive Price Guide.  I see it as a helpful hint, if you desire to use it during trades.  Otherwise, look it up in Beckett or whatever pricing material you choose.

Since Ebay is one of, if not the biggest seller for cards, the sold prices we enter here are probably more reflective of the actual market than most other sources. For those of us that actually use and update prices here the current process is good, not perfect, with the exception of vintage cards. I'm not sure how it effects the people that complain about it all the time, its easy to ignore it. Anyone that doesnt want to use it is not forced to. I could care less about DOB and other things but I don't knock those that spend time on it. It would save a lot of time if we could directly download from ebay and elsewhere but a have no idea what API is or how costly it is. 

Oh man, I agreed with you 100% on the "database" thing but then you said the B------ word. I am so tired of being told "Beckett says" in trade proposals. Too many people on here try to justify proposals they know are crap with "Beckett says it is equal." As bad as Ebay can get with instability it is still the most instant, to-the-second "sold price" reference out there. 

I say kill the pricing all together, it only causes more headaches than it is worth. As it is now, it only confuses newcomers and motivates some to inflate prices or add cards they don't have to reach a total dollar amount they see as a real value.

Junior64144 is right; it is a database. Those who need to reference value for trades or whatever can seek it out themselves.

I'm with you 100%

Yes it is nice to see what the prices are.     Say,  I'm getting 3 cards .50 each and he is asking for 3 cards and one is $5 and the others are $0.18 cards.  If I do not know the one was a $5 card I may have said Yes with out looking.  Now I would double check.   Then I look  maybe I can pick up the $5 card up for $1 so it is not really a $5 card or the best I could find it at $8 now.   Yes a helpful hint.

I see no easy way to keep up with all the changes to all the cards listed here.

Well put. This is a DATABASE not a price guide. 

I can only speak for my self that I am aware this is a database and not a definitive price guide.  That being said, price is an aspect of the data about a card and is included in the database.  Since that is being tracked, I think that having the most accurate information possible for it should be the goal.    These 2 feature requests are an attempt to either automate the pricing completely or make it easier to update and use in trades.

A couple people have asked about pricing for the ebay API and here is infomation on that (spoiler alert, I think that it is free).

https://developer.ebay.com/support/tiers

I can understand the reason for having a listing of prices, it can help people figure out comps or remind someone the price they paid. For so long any price that was added went in automatically and who knows where some of those numbers came from to begin with. Now there is an extra step that requires prices to be reviewed first before posting, and I am seeing prices being declined every day.

My opinion matches Junior64144. We are a database for cards, not a price guide.

EDIT: This was not constructive to the discussion.  I apologize for adding it. 

What if there’s a different approach.  Instead of trying to put a hard price on each individual card, (currently over 4.5 million baseball alone), maybe there’s a middle ground.  People want to know how much their cards are worth but that changes frequently, and at times unpredictably.  Who would have guessed 12 months ago cards would be going for the prices they are now.  There’s discussion over which selling site has the most accurate information, (ebay, Sportslots, Beckett, …).  Do any of them?

We can’t appease the people looking for an exact day to day update on how much a card is worth to the penny.  But, a card’s price/worth is part of its data.  If the Database is going to be comprehensive then the price/worth can’t be ignored. 

What if instead of an actual dollar amount price on each card they were assigned a value.  So where someone pulls up an individual card they can see how that card compares to other cards in the set.  Using the 1990 Fleer Baseball set as an example, (since it was mentioned earlier), current prices for cards range from $0.01 to $4.25.  Out of 666 cards, 91% are 50 cents or under.  Only 16 cards are over $1.00.  The price for a complete set averages out to $15 but adding up the individual cards comes to $148.42.

Some people will care adamantly about those penny differences.  So many sets have large percentages of their base cards that have little monetary worth.  Is it a useful investment to put a lot of the site’s resources into worrying about those pennies?  Consider the idea of putting cards in more generalized categories instead of specific prices. 

Maybe a top 10 or top 20 cards in the set.  There may still be some fluctuation in sets, particularly in newer sets.  But are sets from the 20+ years ago going to change much?  For the 1990 Fleer Baseball set would that top 10 ever really change?  The price of those top cards may increase some over time as they age and due to normal economic inflation, but the same cards will always be more valuable than the rest of the set.  That’s data.  That accomplishes part of the goal.  We have the data to fulfill the site’s mission and the value that people often ask about while the site doesn’t have to act like a price guide.  It also requires far less resources than trying to put a price on each card. 

This brings its own problems.  How are those cards chosen?  Who decides what the most valuable ones are?  Whoever does decide, can they be objective?  How often does it get reviewed?  No solution is perfect. 

[deleted] (Adding this was a mistake. It didn't translate like it did in my head.)