budler
"Some time back I needed one card from a member and I had a little over 8,900 cards for him. How would I pick from all of those and get him a card(s) that is higher on his want list?"
Snyderart
"I've been declining the same types of offers. In my decline messages, I've explained the same thing over and over again. LOOK AT THE RED AND GREEN NUMBERS!!! (not in that blunt of a tone, of course. Maybe that blunt tone is required to get the message through?) I'm not trading away insert cards, even the junk wax era ones, where I'm the only one offering them on the site in exchange for cards that are offered by 300+ members on this site."
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I cherry-picked these quotes from another thread as inspiration towards operationalizing these concepts. I had a similar offer from another member as budler was making, where they wanted one card from me, but they had many for me. I ended up clicking to each card page, and noting the GREEN number, looking for a card I want, where this might be the only member with it available (as opposed to that ‘90 Fleer David Little that is in every transaction proposal). At that time I submitted a feature request to sort the trade matching list by GREEN number ascending, since that would have made my life easier at the time. (Note: it would be even more useful the card mentions had two levels; member active in last 30-days and all time)
And, for some time now, I’ve been guesstimating trade offers by roughly averaging the TCDB, eBay, and COMC values. Not great, or easy, but at least a “sniff test” on whether an offer looks “fair” or not. Based on Synderart’s post, I started looking at offers in a different way, let’s call it “TCDB Trading Index”. Essentially, divide RED by GREEN (demand to supply ratio). 10 people want a card (RED), 100 people offering that card (GREEN) 10/100 = 0.10 (pretty low demand to high supply). But 100 people want a card, and only 10 people have it for sale/trade 100/10 = 10.0 (much higher demand to supply).
I recently used this in an offer I received, where the volume was in my favor 15:11. However, the lowest GREENs I was getting were 16, 18, 20 (highest of 74). And the lowest GREENs I was sending were 3, 4, 6 (highest of 17). My conclusion was this wasn’t the best deal for me. After trade matching and reviewing the list, I countered with a 3:12 offer, where the 3 cards I was getting had GREENs of 5, 4, and 1. Not quite as big a dent off my want list, but many of those cards should still be available to me later from multiple members.
I don’t think the feature request I submitted ever made it onto the list to even be ranked/voted on, but am interested in hearing member feedback on these ideas.
Cheers!