Accuracy & Methodology

CardResell exists so card sellers can pick the venue that actually pays them the most. That only works if you can trust the numbers. This page publishes exactly how we calculate them, where the source data comes from, and what we know we get wrong.

Live pricing

When you look up a card, we fetch its live market price from up to three sources in parallel and merge them into a single price ladder per printing (Normal, Holofoil, Reverse Holo, Unlimited, 1st Edition, etc.).

• TCGplayer Market Price — pulled via the official TCGplayer / TCGcsv feed on every card load. This is the primary price for ungraded Pokémon, MTG, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Lorcana, and One Piece singles.
• eBay sold comps — recent completed sales for the same card + printing, used to sanity-check TCGplayer and to power the sports-card path (eBay is the only real comp source for sports).
• PriceCharting — used for graded values (PSA, BGS, CGC, SGC, TAG) and as a graded-tier backstop when TCGplayer's graded slot is empty. See Graded price sanity checks below.

Graded price sanity checks

Graded values (PSA 10, PSA 9, BGS 10, etc.) are harder than raw prices because different data sources use different sample sizes and different clean rules. Our current policy:

1. PriceCharting wins over TCGplayer for graded slots. PriceCharting samples eBay sold comps directly and its numbers matched hand-audited reality more often (e.g. Mew GG10 PSA 10 was $557.50 on PriceCharting vs. $120 on TCGplayer's stale graded slot).
2. 3-attempt retry with 12s timeout against PriceCharting, plus a 60s error cache so a bad response never spams the API.
3. Grade-switch race protection — a _syncGen generation guard prevents stale grade-change results from overwriting a newer one when you rapid-flip between PSA 10 → PSA 9 → BGS 10.
4. Reverse Holo / Holofoil dropdown stays pruned when you switch grades — no dead options bleeding across printings.

Marketplace fees

We track the exact fee schedule for every venue in the payout ranking and re-verify it on the cadence below. Every fee row on a card's Net Payout tile carries a • Fee schedule verified <date> pill that links here. That pill dates the fee schedule we read — it is not a statement about a card's price, which we never verify. If a fee has changed and we haven't caught it yet, tell us.

Sales tax and the fee base

A venue's fee rate is only half the number. The other half is what the rate is charged on — and on some venues that base includes the sales tax the buyer paid, which is money you never receive but are charged a percentage of. We do not model sales tax anywhere on this site. We do not know the buyer's jurisdiction when we show you an estimate, and we would rather show you a caveat than invent a rate. So where a fee is charged on a tax-inclusive base, our estimate can run low — on the orders where the buyer actually paid tax, and by a share of that tax rather than the whole of it. On an order with no tax, there is nothing missing. The fee breakdown says which of those two situations you are in on that venue's row.

What we will not do is let “we never checked” look like “we checked and it does not apply”. Those are different facts and they now have different values in the code. Of the fifteen venues: 2 are confirmed tax-inclusive, 5 are excluded, and 8 are unknown — the published fee page does not settle it. Unknown shows the caveat, so 10 of 15 venues carry the sales-tax row; before this pass, one did.

“Excluded” does not mean the buyer paid no tax. It means no fee we charge you against can contain it — because the venue publishes its fee as tax-exclusive, or because this model charges you no fee at that venue at all, so there is no base for tax to sit in. It is a statement about our arithmetic, not a tax determination about the venue, and nothing on this page tells you what tax a venue owes or collects. We got this wrong in an earlier draft of this table: four buylists were marked excluded on the reasoning that a store buying your cards has no buyer checkout, therefore no buyer tax. Whether a sale is taxable turns on the applicable rules and exemptions, not on the shape of the transaction, so that inference was not ours to make. One of the four (TCG Bulk) turned out not to be a direct buylist at all and is now unknown.

Showing this caveat does not make the estimate complete — it tells you which input is missing, not what the number would have been with it. These answers are about the fee base only. They say nothing about how much tax a buyer pays, who remits it, or what you owe — tax collected and remitted, the amount subject to fees, and your revenue are three separate quantities and we keep them separate. Verifying the tax base is also not the same as re-verifying a fee schedule, so the “Last verified” dates above did not move for this pass: we re-read all fifteen pages, but only for this question. Not one rate, cap or tier was re-checked.

International & cross-border selling

Every payout figure on this site models a US seller shipping to a US buyer. The moment a border is involved the number changes, and on two of the fifteen venues you are not even contracting with an American company. Rather than bury that, each venue tile carries its own cross-border line — on locked rows too, so you know before you pay to unlock one.

Estimated grade scans

Our AI grading estimate is a screening tool, not a PSA replacement. It scores four sub-grades — Centering, Corners, Edges, Surface — and outputs an overall estimate on the PSA 1–10 scale. Two rules keep it honest:

• The AI only sees what your camera shows it. A bad photo tanks the score. The photo-tips overlay walks you through capture rules before every grade scan.
• We don't claim "within N points of PSA." We haven't published a validation set yet. The roadmap is a 100-card gold-set audit (paired PSA slabs + our estimate) — when that ships, the results land on this page with the raw comparison, not marketing copy.

Use grade scans to decide whether it's worth paying $25+ to submit a card. Don't use them to price a slab you don't own yet.

Card database coverage

The offline card index covers every Pokémon TCG set from Base Set (1999) through the latest release, refreshed weekly by an automated seeder. Non-Pokémon TCGs (MTG, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Lorcana, One Piece) are looked up live and don't require pre-seeding. Sports cards are keyed off eBay sold-comp search — accuracy scales with how specific the player + year + set query is.

Known upstream gaps:

• 4 older McDonald's Pokémon promo sets have broken image URLs at the upstream image CDN. Prices work; images 404.
• Alpha Black Lotus and a handful of reserved-list MTG cards have no TCGplayer market row — we fall back to eBay comps or return an honest "no comp data".
• One Piece Luffy Leader mapping in the tcgcsv resolver is being tuned; one specific printing may resolve slowly.

Known limits

If you spot a fee that's out of date or a price that doesn't match a real sold listing, email us — we log every report and audit the flagged venue within a week.