As an avid collector, probably the #1 activity I do on a regular basis is look up the values of cards! I’m looking up hundreds of cards per week—I want to know if it’s time to buy, time to sell, the values of new cards I’m opening….
I’m even looking up the prices of retail packs & boxes online to know if I’m getting a good deal!
To find out how much my basketball cards are worth, I use websites like 130 point, eBay, COMC, and PWCC. Some apps I use are Sports Card Investor, Card Ladder, and Card Base. Lastly, I will also ask others for their opinion in groups I’m in online.
Pricing cards ain’t always easy…so I’m going to dive into my whole process. I’ll first show you the resources I use, but then also how to understand the market about the value of your cards and how to figure when to sell.
My Favorite Resources for Valuing Cards
Ebay Comps
eBay is my go-to because I sell so many cards there that I’m already on the website! Also, the fact they have an amazing app makes a big difference.
Plus, I can see not only what has sold, but I can also see current auctions and Buy It Now (BIN) Listings to help price out my cards accordingly.
First and foremost, the biggest newbie mistake with eBay is looking at current listing when finding comps (comparable) for your cards!
People can…and often do…list their cards for ridiculous prices on eBay. They might be doing this to try to lift the overall market perception of their card, or they just have it listed for the long haul, hoping the card goes up in the future and their listing is already up.
What you’ll do is toggle the selection next to “Sold.”
Now you’ll see what other cards have sold for!
There are a few things to keep in mind:
- They won’t show you the real price if an offer was accepted by the seller. You’ll see what the price was listed at with a line through it:
In a second, I’ll show you how you CAN see those prices!
- Keep an eye on dates. If it’s the middle of July (the offseason), and you’re seeing comps for your NBA rookie card that sold in May (during the playoffs)…well your values are likely going to be off. With more popular cards, this isn’t usually an issue because there’s SO MUCH VOLUME on eBay. With rarer cards, always look at how recently comps have sold.
- You should also check current listings and not just sold. If you see several comps that sold at $10, but then you see 3 active listings at $7.99 that aren’t selling, the market might have shifted on your card. I’d expect to get $6 – $7 for that card at most. This happens with new releases—the first ones to hit the market go for higher price because they’re rare. Once a million people have pulled that same card, it’s going to drop in price precipitously.
130 Point
Honestly, this is probably the best overall place to get card values. I do often use eBay for convenience and 130 point can sometimes be clunky.
However, it’s crazy useful to see the ACTUAL best offer accepted price:
(This is the same listing as before—but here you can see that it sold for $2,000.
I use 130 point if many of the recent comps on eBay had offers accepted and I can’t properly comp out my card without more information.
I also use 130 point if I’m pricing out a bunch of cards at once—like if I’m double-checking the values of my long-term holds.
PWCC
Their interface is more like 130 Point’s, but much cleaner and they have a longer history of cards
You can go all the way back to 2004! Don’t know how useful that is…but certainly interesting!
The issue here is that they don’t have the real price on accepted offers. For this reason, I don’t use PWCC much, but many people swear by them because they’re clean, easy-to-use, and they have high quality pics that you can hover over and see enlarged for the main listing image. I’ve found that useful in the past.
COMC
I know tons of people that use COMC exclusively for selling their lower valued cards. You can send them a bulk submission, and they’ll take all the pictures and load them up for you. It’s extremely convenient.
If you’re trying to find the value of a random 90s Shawn Kemp insert, it might not be on eBay. Odds are you’ll find it on COMC though and they have a pretty good sales history. You do have to create an account, but it’s a fast and simple process.
Card Ladder
This is the only app that I currently have a paid subscription with. They have a lot going for them:
- Easy, clean interface
- Easy to toggle through different time frames
- Track the overall profit/loss and total value of your collection
- Put cards on your “Watch List” and notifications when a card drops into a pre-set price range (Just got one this morning that a Darius Garland Prizm PSA 10 is now in my range…going to scoop that up)
It certainly has some drawbacks though. As of now, it has a very limited collection. Popular rookies are about all they have, and sometimes they won’t have the grade you need, like a PSA 9 or a raw value. They don’t have SGC, HGA, CSG or anything else besides PSA and BGS (and even those are hit or miss)
For example, here’s the 6-month price history of eBay sales for the Luka’s PSA 10 Prizm rookie:
Card Base
I used to have a subscription to Card Base. I won’t give all the pros and cons here, but I found it difficult to find cards in their database. If you don’t type everything in exactly correct, your card won’t pop up and then you have to go through a tedious process of inputting your card manually.
Overall, still one of the better apps for tracking a collection, but I just found Card Ladder a bit better for me.
Sports Cards Investor
I find this one as more entertainment as opposed to actually tracking your collection.
They have an algorithm for determining the “biggest movers” among the sports card world. It’s a combination of price as well as volume of movement.
They display them in order and you can scroll through them quickly to get a feel for what cards are popular as well as actual sales from eBay that show price movement over time.
It’s free, so I just scroll through it a few times a week to get a sense for what’s moving.
(They do have a paid subscription, but it’s expensive. I haven’t tried it)
Understanding the Market – What Can Your Cards Really Sell For
In some cases, it’s super easy to know what your card is going to sell for. If you have a relatively common rookie card that’s at least worth $10+, you can find tons of quick comps on eBay.
It’s when you have cheap cards, rare cards, and/or expensive cards that valuing the cards means you need to better understand the market as a whole.
Valuing Low-Valued Cards
The majority of the cards that I sell fall in the $1 – $10 range. This is because I love to rip packs and boxes, and then I sell off anything that I don’t think is going to carry long-term value.
Even if I’m only going to profit $0.60 or so, I still do it because it raises my eBay feedback score (the higher it is, the more buyers will be confident in your product). Plus, my card budget is a little tight, so selling bunches of cheap cards does help me stay in the game.
But here’s the problem:
Many cheap cards won’t have tons of buyers.
So that random Shaq insert from 1995 may say that there’s a comp sold for $2.95…but that does NOT mean you can expect your card to sell for that much.
In fact, when I first got back into card collecting, I went through my entire collection and priced out anything I thought had a chance of even being worth a buck or more.
I made a pile of hundreds of cards. Some were obviously fairly valuable, and the ones in good condition I sent off to be graded.
But that left me a TON of random insert cards of hall of fame players.
I can’t tell you how often I found sold comps on eBay for $3…but then my card would sit on eBay for months at a $0.99 starting bid with no takers!
You have to hope the exact right buyers who happens to want that exact random insert card comes along!
It’s like if you had an obscure knob for a dresser. To 99.9% of people, they won’t care at all. But when that right person comes around? They’ll snatch it up, and maybe even give you $5 for it.
I’ll tell you that probably half the cards I put on eBay never get bought and I put them in a box for storage. These were ALL cards that had sold comps on eBay.
That’s why for all my cards under $10, I just put it on a 7-day auction starting at $0.99. I don’t always trust the comps on cards that cheap, and I’m just happy to get something back for it, even if it doesn’t quite match up to the comps I’m seeing.
If it’s a $50 card, I like to list at Buy It Now to make sure that I don’t accidentally sell it for $25 on an auction. I’d rather be patient and get my $50 for it.
Valuing Rare And/Or Expensive Cards
Rare doesn’t always mean expensive, but often it does. You might have a base veteran card of a non all-star numbered out of 15. It’s rare and hard to price…but it’s not worth much.
But both of these cards have the same problem:
There isn’t enough volume of sales on these cards to properly get comps!
Think of it like selling a $10 million mansion…it’s probably got all sorts of custom and unique features. Maybe it was exactly what you wanted when you bought it.
But now it’s time to sell, and convincing another super-rich person that they should buy your house with your custom features is hard.
When you’re playing on that level, there are so few buyers that comps can sometimes be worthless. Maybe you have a Justin Herbert #/5 National Treasures RPA. Maybe one just sold for $100k (just throwing numbers out).
But maybe a month later you want to sell your exact one…but now there isn’t a buyer for it and yours sells for $85k. It doesn’t mean the market turned…perhaps it just means the one buyer willing to pay $100k for it already got one.
Pricing Serial Numbered Cards
Going along with this conversation, one of the most common questions I see in Facebook groups is a variation of this:
“I have a Justin Herbert numbered out of 10. There aren’t any comps online for it. Help!!”
If there are no comps, how do you know what price to list it at on eBay or Facebook?
Here’s a cool trick:
Look for other serial numbered Herberts!
You can check other brands that have a #/10 card. Then you can try to adjust your valuation based on the type of card it is and the value of the brand.
For example, an insert is usually going to carry less value than a parallel card. A signature is going to carry more value. When doing this comparison, try to keep it apples to apples. Look for other low-numbered signatures or base cards or inserts depending on what yours is.
Then, try to understand some sort of multiplier between the brands. If yours is Prizm and the one you’re researching is Mosaic, well yours will be much more valuable!
One thing you can do is to pick 3-4 rookies and compare prices between the two brands. If Prizm carries a 2x multiplier, then you can roughly establish that your #/10 card is perhaps 2x the #/10 from another barnd.
Does that make sense?
When cards are that rare, it’s really all you can do. It just matters what someone else is willing to pay!
If you do your rough estimate and you think your rare card is worth $500, put it on eBay for $1,000 with Best Offers available. So your rough estimate isn’t even all that important if you’re going to go way higher. You just want to make sure you’re not listing that card at $100 or $20,000…you need to be at least in the same playground.
Okay! I hope this helps you value cards. After doing this for a little while, it will all become second nature. It’s the foundational skill of collecting cards, so just dive in and start getting familiar with valuing cards!