Comping at Scale

The tools work. They're just not built for what's coming

Some notes on comps.

eBay occasionally adds bot protection to its See Insights price guide. One workaround for now is to schedule any price lookups in the early morning hours.

Mine worked well when running in the AM hours today.

Long term, though, this won’t hold — eBay could clamp it down entirely. In just the last couple of days they also changed the See Insights GraphQL response.

When that happens, scheduled pricing analysis breaks and you get zero results. Expect constant tweaking until the data becomes easier to access.

Third-party comp sources work well — they’re just slow. CardLadder and MarketMovers are built to look good on phone or desktop; they weren’t built to comp a thousand cards in minutes.

There’s an opening here for them, or for an emerging brand, to build a database designed for AI agents to use.

For now, your AI will use CardLadder and MarketMovers the same way you do, just not much faster. It’s essentially the same data found in eBay’s See Insights price guide. Today I ran my entire roster of roughly 90 bids through both See Insights and MarketMovers, and they returned similar results.

So if you want to comp hundreds — maybe thousands — of cards in a night using MM or CL, set your AI to run early: in the overnight hours before the auction, or even days ahead.

I’m currently building my own internal price guide to solve all of this (you only need to build one for the players you actually buy), but long term I think it’s a real business opportunity for someone in the hobby thinking bigger than what’s out there now.

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Been surprised at the sell side of the business and how fast things move.

The PSA offers program adds a level of liquidity for cards in the $20–$50 range that wasn’t really there before.

Yesterday I sold 29 cards. Today already 14. Things turnover fairly quickly. That money immediately gets spent on more cards.

I only use the vaults to sell, which can hamper my ability to move cards — but the offers program has been huge.

Looking ahead, I’d love to see PSA, Fanatics Collect, or COMC open up trading/swapping of cards, even with fees attached. You can do this on Upper Deck ePack and it’s amazing. Imagine your AI agent setting up deals automatically.

The future looks exciting.