Comic Price Guides
From comic book readers to comic movie fans and comic collectors, the League of Comic Geeks is a home for all. We have a wealth of tools available to discover, track, and discuss past, present, and future titles. These tools have ensured the platform has become an ideal, comprehensive home for many comic geeks. This is in large part thanks to the community feedback to continually iterate on these core competencies. Today, we unveil a new core beta feature that you've requested - Comic Price Guides & Values.
Comic Price Guides & Values on League of Comic Geeks enable our community to identify a comic's estimated selling price (based on grading) on auction sites and ultimately calculate their collection's value. As a comic reader and comic collector, value estimates can also assist with purchasing collectible insurance as well as identifying key issues.
Today's update is very much a first step in a longer journey. This initial update includes Sales History, Grade Value Estimation, and other market analysis on Comic pages. This sales data will be primarily community-driven (via Contributions) like other aspects of our platform to ensure transparency and availability to all League members free. Note values and sales history are not yet populated. Once we (this includes you) are comfortable with the framework, we will begin to expand upon it with reports, integration into your collections, and supplement sales tracking and verification with our own bots. Once out of the initial beta, the feature will also be made available on our mobile apps.
On Determining Values
As many of you know, determining a comic's value is not an exact science. The quality of a Raw comic is subjective and as such we're aggregating all Raw sales from auction sites without taking into account perceived grading. Similarly, we will be excluding sales of signed comics to remove outliers. While we intend to keep the grade value formulas as simple as possible, documentation will be available in our knowledgebase here: https://leagueofcomicgeeks.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/1991746
On Transparency and Openness
One could argue that there is rampant price manipulation within the market skewing data. There is a lot of evidence suggesting this. You could even argue that by adding this feature set we would be enabling this behavior. With that said, we absolutely understand that for some comic collectors the price guides and valuation are of great importance. To that end, we are opting to present our analysis with absolute transparency. All sales data can be marked as verified with audit records and include methods for contributors to report sales as incorrect or fraudulent. These reports will in turn lock out contributors attempting to abuse the system.
Some sites opt to promote particular books based on trends or events to drive values up/down - League of Comic Geeks will not participate in this. We believe there are resources out there that can inform the speculation and investment market, but this goes beyond our intent with this feature set. Our aim is of course something that is healthy for the industry and readers alike.
Next Steps
We understand that not everyone will agree with or like our implementation of this system. There is no silver bullet to determining comic values, but we hope to hear from the community as we continue to iterate on the analysis, design and features available. Feel free to share your thoughts below and on our feedback thread here.
-
Pravius commented
This is one of the features that I am most looking forward to seeing and using. I have been using (and subscribing) to pricecharting.com to track most of my collection, comics included.
You have a serious edge in ease of use, features and there is an overall richness in design of the site that makes me want to keep coming back.
I became a patron today to back that up.
My suggested approach (idea) in a phase 2 for this is to aggregate market data from eBay over a period of time leveraging eBay API's to pull in data and come up with averages to display on the site.
I believe eBay should in some way expose their filters via API. For slabbed/grade comics, you should be able to pull in each grade individually.
Of course condition of raw is going to be subjective but providing the user with a round about average should be enough 95% of the time. I know as a collector personally the first thing I do is check a site like LOCG before I buy a key to see a round about value, then I go directly to eBay to apply human logic for a more granular price using sold auctions to judge value based on condition, market conditions, etc.
For the other 5% of collectors that want more granular level data and to continue improving, ML models could be leveraged here and eventually morph into phase 3 of implementation. ML model's could be trained to look at condition of comics, apply a grade based on grading data, could identify slabbed comics and look at their grades and prices sold and aggregate that together with price data (separate ML model) and have the AI spit out some values. The model could continue to be trained as new auctions are created and sold. It would get smarter and closer to actual value over time (if not already closer than phase 2 values).
Each phase could represent a small price increase to accommodate rising costs of leveraging ML/AI services and/or development support, if tolerable depending on revenue requirements.
You could even expand this into a platform as a service that you could sell to other companies that are looking to do similar with other collectables. :)
My .2
Appreciate everything you have done so far.
-
Robin Cockroft commented
Coming from HobbyDB with creator status this is an awesome idea and helps immensely. Few comments and ideas.
1. Hobbydb guys figured out how to pull the actual sale price from an ebay Best offer. Might be an idea to contact them to see if they can give you the information, this would help with graded slabs especially as many of them i find are Best offers.
2. at a certain level hobby allows admins/creators to place in a best guess amounts for items. Once a certain amount of sales rolls in it removes the best guess and uses the actual data. This would help with sales in small/limited edition collections for example i have a set of 12 Metal LE15 zenescope catch'em comics that while 1 of them has sold on ebay only of the others are even listed. Trying to get sales data on an LE15 item would be pretty hard as they will likely be sold privately in most situations.
3. utilizing purchase data - i cant find it in your notes though using purchase data can help immensely, I am coming from CBR and tried to record where i bought it from and if it was on sale. While it might be hard to keep up with scammers trying to increase value you could make it so people with only a certain amount of time (over a year or with admin status) gets recorded or used, or even create a new admin group just for this (ie powered users or people that have pro or above paid service). You could also include in in the purchase store location 2 boxes, the first being a dropdown with other as the first selected and several sources (i buy a lot directly from zenescope or kickstarter though have been buying a ton off whatnot lately, this could also include ebay which would allow you to ask for a link to the listing automatically so it can be verified) . The second box being a variable entry box, ie for other they can name the store, if ebay ask for a link, etc
4. Give the option for Signed slabs and allow the person to provide their own estimate on the cost as it would obscure and invalidate the reason behind allowing a person to see what their collecting is worth. It would almost be like a custom entry at that point and wouldnt affect the price data in the system.
im sure i have other ideas though lets see what happens with this :)
-
Ryan00101010 commented
Would you like shipping cost included in price when we submit these? I don't see it mentioned in the knowledge base article.
I know shipping is an additional fee and not necessarily part of the price, but I would also argue that a comic that has free shipping sells for a lot less than one with $15 shipping, even if they went for the same true sale price.