Go Collect vs GPA 2 2

[entalmighty1]

10 hours ago, jimbo_7071 said:

I have a question about GPA. A while back I purchased a book on eBay that was listed at $600 with the best'-offer option enabled. I made an offer and, after a counter-offer, purchased the book for $500. However, when I search eBay, it shows that the book sold for $600, the original buy-it-now price, not the $500 that was negotiated. Which amount would show up in GPA?

I seem to remember a thread about this in General not too long ago, and I believe the issue was corrected.  Take that with a grain of salt.  I can't be sure.

[telerites]

 

17 minutes ago, entalmighty1 said:

  10 hours ago, jimbo_7071 said:

I have a question about GPA. A while back I purchased a book on eBay that was listed at $600 with the best'-offer option enabled. I made an offer and, after a counter-offer, purchased the book for $500. However, when I search eBay, it shows that the book sold for $600, the original buy-it-now price, not the $500 that was negotiated. Which amount would show up in GPA?

17 minutes ago, entalmighty1 said:

I seem to remember a thread about this in General not too long ago, and I believe the issue was corrected.  Take that with a grain of salt.  I can't be sure.

I think this is the thread em1 was talking about - it doesn't appear they have a way to resolve this according to George (GPA owner) in the last post.  If that is same as what you were asking.

 

 

[october]

14 hours ago, archiefan said:

You know I have always been a bit confused by this. Isn't all auction sales data a matter of public record? The auction house may refuse to freely give out that intel but if you can obtain it through other means I would have thought it valid. I am not sure how public auction data can be deemed proprietary

In ComicLink's terms and conditions they state that all web content is their exclusive intellectual property and can only be used for personal use. Scraping and selling the data violates those terms and would probably result in some stern letters from their attorneys. I don't know enough about IP law to say whether or not their arguments would hold up (law school was a long time ago), but I don't see much reason why it wouldn't. The public availability of the data doesn't impact whether or not someone can repackage it and resell it. 

[entalmighty1]

1 hour ago, october said:

In ComicLink's terms and conditions they state that all web content is their exclusive intellectual property and can only be used for personal use. Scraping and selling the data violates those terms and would probably result in some stern letters from their attorneys. I don't know enough about IP law to say whether or not their arguments would hold up (law school was a long time ago), but I don't see much reason why it wouldn't. The public availability of the data doesn't impact whether or not someone can repackage it and resell it. 

I just wish they would archive the pictures from the past auctions.  I put tracking bids on everything I care about just for future reference of hammer prices, but after a few months they drop the images.  Frustrating to see an odd result from a few months back and not be able to quantify it.  

[telerites]

1 hour ago, entalmighty1 said:

I just wish they would archive the pictures from the past auctions.  I put tracking bids on everything I care about just for future reference of hammer prices, but after a few months they drop the images.  Frustrating to see an odd result from a few months back and not be able to quantify it.  

Does this just pertain to your non-winning or non-bidding items?  I looked at my account of purchased/won items and most pictures show up including items I won in 2003.

Couple of nits I have are -

1) I wish CL would just add a track this item but they force you to bid which I guess is not a bad strategy on their part.  

2) allow you to remove sales pending in a search.  Frustrating to search for a title or book and all you get are sales pending.  

[buttock]

6 minutes ago, telerites said:

Does this just pertain to your non-winning or non-bidding items?  I looked at my account of purchased/won items and most pictures show up including items I won in 2003.

Couple of nits I have are -

1) I wish CL would just add a track this item but they force you to bid which I guess is not a bad strategy on their part.  

2) allow you to remove sales pending in a search.  Frustrating to search for a title or book and all you get are sales pending.  

Clink's UI is terrible.  The usability of the site, particularly for auctions, is awful.  The database needs to be cleared of books that sold 2 years ago, and the pedigree search is so cluttered with "CVA exceptional" and "one of 3 top graded" nonsense that it's just about useless.  But there's no incentive for them to drop the coin to fix it, and we all keep buying, so why change.  

[october]

26 minutes ago, buttock said:

and we all keep buying

It's a valid point, but it doesn't apply to absolutely everyone. I dropped CC awhile ago due to their interface issues, and I am basically done with CLink as well (mostly because I can't filter by age). As someone else said above, I don't want to scroll through 40 pages of silver/bronze/modern stuff I have zero interest in to see the gold. I am down to Heritage and eBay only. Hasn't impacted my buying or my collection one bit. 

Edited August 22, 2018 by october

[buttock]

1 minute ago, october said:

It's a valid point, but it doesn't apply to absolutely everyone. I dropped CC awhile ago due to their interface issues, and I am basically done with CLink as well (mostly because I can't filter by age). As someone else said above, I don't want to scroll through 40 pages of silver/bronze/modern stuff I have zero interest in to see the gold. I am down to Heritage and eBay only. Hasn't impacted my buying or my collection one bit. 

Now that you mention it and I think about it, I have largely done the same.  I still go through the Clink auctions, but my buying with them has dropped pretty dramatically.  I can't remember the last auction I won with them.  Plus dragging it out so long is pretty painful with my schedule.  I simply don't have time to sit through all of that.  I hardly even look at their BIN listings either since they changed the click from the front page.  It's silly, but little things like that can really impact how much you look at a website, and out of sight, out of mind.  

 

CC still has some appeal to me, but they're a distant 2nd to HA.  

[october]

Just now, buttock said:

Now that you mention it and I think about it, I have largely done the same.  I still go through the Clink auctions, but my buying with them has dropped pretty dramatically.  I can't remember the last auction I won with them.  Plus dragging it out so long is pretty painful with my schedule.  I simply don't have time to sit through all of that.  I hardly even look at their BIN listings either since they changed the click from the front page.  It's silly, but little things like that can really impact how much you look at a website, and out of sight, out of mind.  

 

CC still has some appeal to me, but they're a distant 2nd to HA.  

Exactly. Interface fatigue sets in early for me, since my day job involves a lot of heavy IT work. I love the way Heritage is set up, and I am very familiar with eBay, so they get the lion's share of my attention. Not being able to sort items by age is pretty unacceptable at this point. I mean, how much more basic does it get?

[buttock]

3 minutes ago, october said:

Exactly. Interface fatigue sets in early for me, since my day job involves a lot of heavy IT work. I love the way Heritage is set up, and I am very familiar with eBay, so they get the lion's share of my attention. Not being able to sort items by age is pretty unacceptable at this point. I mean, how much more basic does it get?

The ability to track books?  Back cover scans?  Batch bidding?  etc... 

[buttock]

I just checked, I haven't won anything on Clink since 1/17.  I think I've won something in every HA auction over that time frame.  

[entalmighty1]

1 hour ago, telerites said:

Does this just pertain to your non-winning or non-bidding items?  I looked at my account of purchased/won items and most pictures show up including items I won in 2003.

Couple of nits I have are -

1) I wish CL would just add a track this item but they force you to bid which I guess is not a bad strategy on their part.  

2) allow you to remove sales pending in a search.  Frustrating to search for a title or book and all you get are sales pending.  

It's only non-winning items, which are the most relevant.  If I want to look at a book I won, I can just find it in my house.  

When I'm trying to decide my max bid on something and want to take into account any metric besides pricing, it's impossible if the pictures of the books are gone.  There are books I can't see from March of this year.

[telerites]

1 minute ago, entalmighty1 said:

It's only non-winning items, which are the most relevant.  If I want to look at a book I won, I can just find it in my house.  

When I'm trying to decide my max bid on something and want to take into account any metric besides pricing, it's impossible if the pictures of the books are gone.  There are books I can't see from March of this year.

Weird.  Most of mine are there when I access comctrack and look at purchased.  Like I said even ones from back in 2003.  

 

[entalmighty1]

1 minute ago, telerites said:

Weird.  Most of mine are there when I access comctrack and look at purchased.  Like I said even ones from back in 2003.  

 

All the stuff I've won is there, but I'm more interested in remembering characteristics of those I didn't win.

[telerites]

1 hour ago, entalmighty1 said:

All the stuff I've won is there, but I'm more interested in remembering characteristics of those I didn't win.

Sorry - I misread your earlier post in that it was non-winning items.  

[buttock]

1 hour ago, entalmighty1 said:

It's only non-winning items, which are the most relevant.  If I want to look at a book I won, I can just find it in my house.  

When I'm trying to decide my max bid on something and want to take into account any metric besides pricing, it's impossible if the pictures of the books are gone.  There are books I can't see from March of this year.

I have the same issue.  I can see the prices in my bid history, but any links are denied permission. 

[jhm]

On 8/21/2018 at 3:36 PM, Ricksneatstuff said:

OK, I tried the site for a month now and I like it but it still needs help in some areas to achieve comic Nirvana.

There is missing pricing data in some of the more obscure golden age books that is available on GPA. Maybe a lot of it is 5+ years old but it still gives some information on tough books that sometimes I am unable to find on Gocollect as of now.

The biggest issue is that A LOT of the links to sales in HA, CC and especially C Link are dead links and it would be the only place to find the pricing data on many books. This really defeats the whole purpose. It would be great if you had links to screenshots of final sale prices and the books that were purchased instead of the dead links.

I think your site is MUCH better to navigate than GPA and it is great to go to a specific issue so easily. I love that you get to see the actual book that was purchased because it explains a lot of price disparities. When the issues are corrected I will be back and very excited to use GoCollect as my main source. 

Thanks a ton for the feedback!

Regarding missing sales...
We only stretch back on eBay to about 2012/2013. There (obviously) were a lot of sales there before then. This is also a reason I'm personally a GPA user too. GPA also lists sales from various sellers that GoCollect does not. But because they don't state the site that a sale came from, it's tough to tell what's what (or where GoCollect may be missing). I don't want to throw GPA under the bus at all, but it's that lack of transparency that made me want to begin gathering my own data. Gathering the information for my own use was the original intent, but it eventually got to be a big enough database to share.

Regarding dead links...
This should happen very minimally with HA and CC. Clink does take a lot of their stuff down, but it doesn't generally happen right away. One thing I find helpful is to place a "Watch" on the books I like to follow. That way an alert pops up on the Dashboard when a new sale is found. Granted, as a regular buyer/seller it makes little sense to Watch everything so it's a bit more tailored for the focused collector.

And if I could stand on my soapbox for a minute...
As GA buyers, we should have a lot of pull with these major auction houses. I personally spend well into six figures annually across the big three and I'm sure that's not at all unique with the crowd in these GA boards. Will you help me help you? Contact your reps at these houses and ask them to start allowing GoCollect to display the same information that GPA does. I have a team of designers and developers (GoCollect isn't our only property) that would love to do more with the site. I don't say this lightly - I could create some pretty amazing tools with the added sales data. There's no reason we can't have comic valuations essentially resemble your online stock trading account. We just need the major sellers to agree to release the data. That level of transparency and interactivity wouldn't just be better for each of us, it would attract more people to the hobby.

[jhm]

On 8/21/2018 at 3:51 PM, october said:

I understand why you can't show the prices scraped from auction houses that have not given permission, but are you allowed to account for those numbers in your FMV estimates?

In other words, if CLink sold a copy of Adventure 210 in 7.0 recently, but no other venues have, will the FMV estimate you give be near/at that number?

The big selling point of your site is access to data from sites that don't disclose to GPA. I don't want to pay for the same raw data through two services.  

I have to let you a little peek behind the curtain to answer this one. The Fair Market Value areas are ridiculously complex. And, unfortunately, only work when there's enough sales data available across enough grades on a given book. So we have an administrative ability to add a "value" for a given grade/book/date combination in order to help that algorithm out a bit. When that's used, the value isn't systematically tied to a specific auction house. But FMV doesn't care who sold it, so that's not necessary.

As an example - when one of the major houses sells an Action #1, we would likely manually log a dated value for the sale, because that book rarely sells in any grade. Or a couple specific examples - Clink sold a beautiful 9.0 AF15 a few months back for over $400k. We manually logged a dated value on that book in order to assist the FMV algorithm. And I tend to log my own purchases for fun too - I bought the 8.0 Terrific Comics #5 from Clink a while back for $37k and logged that value. Some of those books don't have enough data to even hold FMV's yet, but the logging should pay off over time.

[adamstrange]

2 hours ago, jhm said:

it would attract more people to the hobby

I am in favor of this.  Just after I stop collecting.