Over the last few days, you’ve probably noticed a lot of activity on your Dashboard, mostly in regards to prices being removed from your cards. This is happening due to some extensive software updates happening between COMC and Beckett.
In the past, we had developed a system for scheduling updates from Beckett, to ensure the prices we had for our sellers were up to date. However, the algorithm we used might take up to 6 months to catch every update, which meant some prices weren’t as up to date as they could have been. This past weekend, we (with the help of Beckett) changed how we manage the updates, as we move closer to live updates.
This means that all prices for all cards will soon be updated within 24 hours of their change via Beckett. But, unfortunately, when we initiated the change to the live update system, our software detected that many of the prices within our database had not been updated for weeks, or even months.
How Book Price Updates Are Handled
In order to protect against the case where a book price might radically increase while your asking prices might be lower than you had hoped, we will automatically clear those asking prices so that you get a chance to reset the price as you desire.
Our software works like this: if a book price increases and the current asking price is less than 50% of the new book price then the asking price is cleared altogether and the card is brought to the seller’s attention for re-pricing.
Temporary Bug over the Weekend
This past weekend, a lot of data got cleared out, and many people received notices that parts of their inventory needed attention, due to book values changing drastically or being removed. However, that was a software glitch and it has been cleared up, with most people having their original prices restored. Those sellers who started re-pricing their cards noticed (a day later) that their prices were cleared again, due to the book value software updating again. And, for this, we are sorry for your inconvenience.
Status of the Beckett Data Synchronization
Our databases are still working to catch up to Beckett, and we hope to be fully synced with them by the end of this week. When it’s completed, then we’ll be doing smaller updates on a daily basis and your book values will be up to date. However, until the updates have finished, some people are still going to be seeing their prices being deleted. Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
This upgrade to the book value pricing system has been a long time coming, and we’re thankful to Beckett to assisting us in this endeavor. We do this as we strive to make our customer’s experience as positive as possible. We thank you for your patience and your input, as we work together to make COMC.com the best place for collecting cards.
My only issue was that on some cards that needed to be re-priced, the BV said less than a $1. That is all well and good, but there is a huge difference between pricing a card when a BV is 25 cents and the BV is 75 cents. Cam that small hiccup be fixed please.
Thnaks!
Rich
Hello Rich,
In this particular case, we would ask that you provide us between 2-3 item ID numbers and send those by email to our Customer Service Department. That way we can look at these particular cards and give you a more definitive answer. Thank you for your patience in this matter.
Regards,
Mark M.
Mark:
I just repriced those cards, but if this comes up again I wil lbe sure to post this and send in
Will you be going back and making sure the “last priced at” feature shows for these cards when they revert to needing attention for repricing? I feel that this has been spiradic at best since it was started. I have a large quantity of cards (relative to my port size) to reprice from this and it would be a whole lot easier if they showed what I had them previously priced at. I’ve seen different information posted on this feature, but all I know is that for me, my previous prices rarely show up and anymore, and they did not for this larger batch to reprice this week. Thanks!
I didn’t think it was an inconvenience and thought you guys did a great job with it.
What? People had hundreds of thousands of cards lose prices. They are fixing it but to say it was not an inconvenience is an understatement.
Looks like my “last asking prices” were updated on these cards whose BV changed. Thanks for fixing it! It will be much easier to reprice now and I’m glad I waited.
Thanks for the explanation I was wondering why that happened I appreciate the email!
Sent from my iPhone
I would like to copy my email to Mark…who I was very happy with as far as his prompt communication during this situation…
Hi Mark…It looks like everything is ok…
I have to say…I got frustrated for a few minutes but then I remembered what my 8 years on the Beckett Marketplace was like…which was glitches and site outages on a weekly basis. What you guys have done in a relatively short period of time when it comes to site stability and technology is incredible..
Keep up the good work!
If you’re looking to add features to this experience. It would be nice to know why a card needs attention. They seem to pop up out of nowhere and quite often I forget if it’s even a card I submitted. And I don’t have THAT many cards.
Related to the Beckett pricing changes, perhaps instead of sending a PDF every time, make a place in the Dashboard area that is specifically for Book price changes and just send a notification. Or add a filter to the inventory manager. This might be an edge case but if someone has cards to list and then book changes it might be nice to identify. Maybe?
Also related to managing inventory. It would be nice to add some filters and maybe a bulk edit to it. It would be nice to have basically the same mechanism that you use on the left of the website to filter down. If that were in the inventory manager it would be real quick to reprice a subset of items. The bulk edit could be based on that filter where whatever is filtered could be repriced all at once. For example if I want to lower my prices by 10% across the board but don’t want to run an ad about it.
Just some thoughts,
– Mike
what about comic book prices. I had 67 comics with a book price of over 15,000$. Now, I just have 67 items without book prices. Will these be readded, it has made it really hard to move these books.
What about when a players cards have went down greatly in value but sellers are still listing them at sometimes double BV or more, and most of that players cards are lucky if they ever sell for half of BV at best. Couldn’t you just update all the BV’s?
Oh my goodness! Amazing article dude! Thank you so much, However I am experiencing difficulties
with your RSS. I don’t understand the reason why I can’t join it.
Is there anybody getting identical RSS issues? Anyone who knows the answer can you kindly respond?
Thanks!!