cornelljw
05-21-2019, 06:59 AM
There is a site right now called https://thepit.com/ which is the closet thing to StockX for cards that I know of right now. Here are some of the things I like and dislike about the site and my vision on a modern B/S/T system.
Good: (These are attractive things I like about the site, minor tweaks needed to optimize efficiency and visual appeal)
Make purchase without a running balance. You can use a credit card and don't have to deposit money.
Buy/Sell function on cards that have been already inputted into the system. They exist because another human being put the card into the system. This needs to be better but its the closest thing I have seen to something Wall Street or StockX like. There should be another layer to this which I will explain later on in the write up.
Ability to filter cards with a price tier system. Show me cards of this player that are less than $5. I dont want to see any cards over $5. It allows the user to customize what he wants to see based on his budget.
Watch List on cards that exist in the system. This is the exact system that I envisioned. A watch list that tracks the activity of cards that you are interested in. This allows the user to pretty much search multiple things at once without inputing it into the system. Whereas other sites you need to search one by one to see if any new cards popped up or if previous cards were sold. It is organized in a satisfactory way that reduces clutter but doesnt completely eliminate it.
Bad: (This stuff sucks and needs to be completely revamped)
Can not track cards that are not in the system. If you type Karl Malone precious metal gem in the search bar nothing comes up. Imagine if I was a new collector and wanted high end Malones, how would I know that a Precious Metal Karl Marlone is one of his best cards to own? This sucks, what if someone listed a Karl Malone precious metal gem in the future? How will I know that its on the market? The only way is if I go into the search bar and type Karl Malone precious metal gem and it pops up. Imagine I have been looking for this card for years and then someone lists it a day I wasnt paying attention to the site. Someone else then buys the card but I was actually willing to pay way more than what it was sold for. That would piss me off to no end because I wouldn't of even had an opportunity to make an offer on it. More on how to solve this solution later.
There is no Trade option between users with cards. One of the cool things about this hobby is trades, most kids do it all the time when they are young. Hey ill give you this Russell Westbrook for that James Harden. Its very fun to trade and makes it possible to obtain cards or convert cards into different players when you do not have the financial means to do so at the time. The only way to make this happen is that ThePit.com must act as a middle man. In this case the 2 users who agree to a trade ship the card to ThePit and ThePit then inspects the packages to make sure everything matches up and then sends off the cards to the respected parties. Imagine no more getting vouches to get trades or wondering if you are going to get scammed or not..
Floating chart on the top is awful. I don't know whose idea that was but it needs to be revamped immediately. Absolutely horrible not going to elaborate on it but I cant imagine a lot of people viewing that bar moving at very high speeds on the top of the page to be pleasant.
Physically holds the cards at a location and then ship them off when requested by a customer pack out slip. This is very very bad with cards IMO. Its more risk for the site owners with handling liability or damage through the postal mail. Like think about it if you are the owner of Thepit.com. If you ship a card to someone and it gets damaged is that the fault of the Seller or is it the Middle Man's fault? I'll explain in greater detail on how a peer to peer system can work and flourish.
Does not show the human seller of the card you are buying which means no feedback system exists here.
No Checklist is a big time buzz kill. This is the most important part to make a system like this work. The ability to look up cards in the system and possibly track them that have yet to be put in by a human being. We need the computer to have a stored database system to easily track cards. Here is a rough prototype on how it could work. Lets say I want a Giannis Rookie card but I also want to know how many exist and what the market is for each one. I can simply customize it in a search tab by typing Giannis RCS and all possible Giannis Rcs are loaded into the system. Something like this but with pictures. A system like reddit where you can easily open and close a thread for your curiosity to dig deeper into how many parallels and cards are within each unique brand. This doesnt have to be inclusive for searching just for a player. You can search sets you can search years you can search for a very specific thing which can be narrowed down. For this example I will only list non autograph rookies.
This is what it looks like when you type Giannis RC. I only counted up the parallels for the Prizm RC but you can get the idea. Each subset will list the parallels and have a down bar that you can open and close much like Reddit which is a fantastic system. Obviously there will be a watchlist function which allows you to track specific cards you want to see when you go to your tracking page. You can even track cards that have zero quantity available for sale and the system will let you know when one pops up. Unfortunately I had to take pictures of the Reddit like text stepdowns because blowout format kept pushing everything to align left.
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/46982611075_2f199aafae_z.jpg
This is what it looks like when you open up the Prizm + Tab and for this example lets put a 30 day moving average with a decent variance to give the user an idea of the true value You will need an advance algorithm to predict cards that are extremely rare and rarely sold. Also imagine a picture of each card to the right side of the screen.
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/46982612775_50e37213f0_z.jpg
The same can also be done with Sets, ill give you a vision on how it looks but this is just a rough prototype. I envision pictures being on the right side when you are searching. For this example Lets say I typed Metal Universe Basketball and pretend Fleer Metal Universe produced cards were produced from 1996 to 2000.
I messed up here by not moving over the Precious Metal Red to the right by one more section but hopefully you get the idea here.
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/46982612375_f217a84df7_z.jpg
The same can also be applied to if you just want to search cards by seasons. Like 1996-97 or 2005-06 a similar system like the ones shown above. To even go deeper you can simply type Giannis second year cards and the system will propagate something like this. I already laid out the vision so just use your imagination on how it could work. You can also incorporate stuff like show me cards that are only available. Show me cards that have sold since I last visited. Show me new cards that have been added since I last visited the site. Show me cards that have been on the site for the longest duration. Etc etc etc... you can tailor customize this system to your specific needs. The goal here is to be able to find what you want, see if its available and how many copies, see how many people you are competing with to get the card, see the 30 day moving average variance of the card to get a true real time market fair market value and see what the last card sold for.
Now the question that people may be wondering is why have a peer to peer system? Doesnt it make more sense to hold all the cards at one place and then distribute them? There are benefits and disadvantages to each system. Here are my thoughts:
Peer to Peer benefits:
Faster upload to the system, you use your phone to upload a picture. If the picture sucks users can request additional pictures which will be uploaded to the main system for the public to see. You no longer have the Lag time of shipping it to a 3rd party and waiting for that 3rd party to upload it to the system.
The ability to trade cards. If a deal is made you ship it to the 3rd party who acts as a middle man to make sure both sides honor their side of the deal.
Allows for establishment of a review feedback system like ebay. To dig even further have software like ebay which allows you to print direct shipping label after a sale or trade has been made. Go even a step further you can see the persons average lag time from time of sale to when the package was scanned at USPS. Lets say I sold a card on Saturday and I ship it out on Monday. The system will then tally that up as next business day shipping. Lets say I sold a card on Tuesday and shipped it out friday. The system will then tally that as 3 days to ship after sale was complete. Do this enough and you can get a feel for how fast someone ships a product upon completion of a sale or trade.
Little risk to the 3rd party if a Buy/Sale occurs. Paypal, Credit Card Companies or other payment vendors deal with that stuff. If something happens in the mail that is between USPS and the person who shipped the card.
Peer to Peer disadvantages:
Shipping each card individually simply costs more for the seller whose costs gets passed on to the buyer. This is really bad when you buy a $1 card but it costs $3 to ship. The goal here is to pay $1 for that card and for most of that $1 to end up in the sellers pocket. When cards sell for more money this ratio changes eventually to a point where it is nominal.
Examples:
I sell a card for $1 and pay $3 shipping. I am paying a 300% premium to make this happen.
$3 / 1 = 3
I sell a card for $100 and pay $3 shipping. I am only paying a 3% premium to make this happen.
$3 / 100 = .03
I sell a card for $1,000 and pay $20 shipping. I am only paying a 2% premium to make this happen.
$20 / 1000 = .02
A potential solution for this is for lower end cards you could have a bulk submission process where those lower end cards will actually be held at the physical location of the 3rd party. A buyer could then accumulate all these lower end cards and then request a ship out, pretty much the exact same thing COMC does right now. It makes much more sense for the buyer and sellers to do this at the lower end spectrum and makes less sense when you move up in the price tiers.
THE FUNDAMENTAL PHILOSPHY of the BUY/SELL system:
Right now the StockX system is currently run on simple Buy/Sell commands. If StockX were in the card business with the same principles of the sneaker business the system would do the following. If a Seller puts up a Giannis prizm RC it automatically gets executed when the Bid meets the ask.
Example:
Giannis Prizm Sell Command = $300, when someone puts in a request that they are willing to buy a Giannis prizm RC and are willing to pay $300 then this transaction automatically happens. If the highest Buy command is $290 then it doesnt happen.
Lets pretend there are 2 Giannis prizm RC's on the market for price points of $300 and $310 and there were 2 buyers who were willing to pay $290 and $280 respectively. This is what it would look like
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/46982611395_59647406d7_z.jpg
Ok fair enough but lets say the person who just sold the Giannis card for $300 realizes that he traded or sold that card and no longer has it. That is a GIANT problem.
My solution to this problem is to think of it like Real Estate or selling a house. If you list your house for $200,000 does that mean the first person who is willing to pay $200,000 automatically gets the house as soon as he sends you an offer? No it doesnt you need to have a legally binding contract. So in this scenario if the person who upped his Bid from $290 to $300 it automatically pings the Seller that someone is making you a full price offer. You can now either accept the offer/ reject the offer or counter the offer. There is no legally binding contract until both sides reach mutual agreement. The difference between Ebay and this system is that there is no such thing as a BUY IT NOW. This happens all the time when someone doesnt know what they have and they list a card for sale. Have you ever wondered to yourself man I cant believe that card sold for $50 buy it now, I would of paid way more than that for the card. Or you get that sick feeling in your stomach when you sell a card and wonder man did I under sale this card?
Much like selling a house, homes can sell for above list price or below list price so why cant the same be done for cards? Lets say its the middle of the season and Giannis just did something no one has even seen. He just beat Wilt Chamberlain's record and scored over 100 points in a game. Obviously the market is going to react and the demand for a Giannis prizm RC will increase rapidly. Here is a scenario that could unfold.
Here is what it looks like before the game starts:
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/46982612085_bf35caa2a6_z.jpg
The people who have the 2 cards listed for sale are bombarded with offers and they can accept/reject or counter all outstanding offers. In this scenario the list price becomes meaningless. Whenever someone accepts a counteroffer the deal is done and its a legally binding contract. If the seller accepts a new offer before someone accepts a counter offer then all current counteroffers are canceled. The first contract to reach mutual agreement is the only legally binding contract. Buyers who are bidding can cancel there offer at any time and set a time frame for how long there offer stands. If the seller sends a counteroffer he could put a duration on it to accept/reject/re-counter. If the seller is having second thoughts about his counteroffer he could pull out of the counteroffer if it isn't accepted beforehand.
The seller also has the option to do nothing and simply increase his Ask price and reject all offers because he wants to hold that card. He could have an ask price now of $2,000. Now lets say the other seller sold his card for $1,200 so there is now only 1 card on the market and that seller now wants $2,000 for it. This is what looks like now assuming the 2nd highest bid is still $1,150.
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/46982611755_288bee6705_z.jpg
The 30 day average will move up a little bit because of the recent massive sale but it does not reflect the true market value. Everyone knows this, it then will take 30 days to correctly adjust. For this scenario you probably want to use 1 day Averages instead of 30 day averages.
Anyways I have ideas on how this could be monetized in the future but just wanted to share how a hypothetical B/S/T system like this would make everyones lives easier. I think its inevitable with our growing hobby that eventually something will overtake ebay for the main source of selling and buying cards. I mean you can't even trade on ebay right now. Here is how I rank each digital card platform.
COMC: Best visual interface (Cards line up nicely and very little clutter)
EBAY: Best Feedback and Buy/Sell system
www.Priceguide.cards/en : Best search system
BLOWOUT: Best community
Thanks for the read would love to hear your guys thoughts.
Good: (These are attractive things I like about the site, minor tweaks needed to optimize efficiency and visual appeal)
Make purchase without a running balance. You can use a credit card and don't have to deposit money.
Buy/Sell function on cards that have been already inputted into the system. They exist because another human being put the card into the system. This needs to be better but its the closest thing I have seen to something Wall Street or StockX like. There should be another layer to this which I will explain later on in the write up.
Ability to filter cards with a price tier system. Show me cards of this player that are less than $5. I dont want to see any cards over $5. It allows the user to customize what he wants to see based on his budget.
Watch List on cards that exist in the system. This is the exact system that I envisioned. A watch list that tracks the activity of cards that you are interested in. This allows the user to pretty much search multiple things at once without inputing it into the system. Whereas other sites you need to search one by one to see if any new cards popped up or if previous cards were sold. It is organized in a satisfactory way that reduces clutter but doesnt completely eliminate it.
Bad: (This stuff sucks and needs to be completely revamped)
Can not track cards that are not in the system. If you type Karl Malone precious metal gem in the search bar nothing comes up. Imagine if I was a new collector and wanted high end Malones, how would I know that a Precious Metal Karl Marlone is one of his best cards to own? This sucks, what if someone listed a Karl Malone precious metal gem in the future? How will I know that its on the market? The only way is if I go into the search bar and type Karl Malone precious metal gem and it pops up. Imagine I have been looking for this card for years and then someone lists it a day I wasnt paying attention to the site. Someone else then buys the card but I was actually willing to pay way more than what it was sold for. That would piss me off to no end because I wouldn't of even had an opportunity to make an offer on it. More on how to solve this solution later.
There is no Trade option between users with cards. One of the cool things about this hobby is trades, most kids do it all the time when they are young. Hey ill give you this Russell Westbrook for that James Harden. Its very fun to trade and makes it possible to obtain cards or convert cards into different players when you do not have the financial means to do so at the time. The only way to make this happen is that ThePit.com must act as a middle man. In this case the 2 users who agree to a trade ship the card to ThePit and ThePit then inspects the packages to make sure everything matches up and then sends off the cards to the respected parties. Imagine no more getting vouches to get trades or wondering if you are going to get scammed or not..
Floating chart on the top is awful. I don't know whose idea that was but it needs to be revamped immediately. Absolutely horrible not going to elaborate on it but I cant imagine a lot of people viewing that bar moving at very high speeds on the top of the page to be pleasant.
Physically holds the cards at a location and then ship them off when requested by a customer pack out slip. This is very very bad with cards IMO. Its more risk for the site owners with handling liability or damage through the postal mail. Like think about it if you are the owner of Thepit.com. If you ship a card to someone and it gets damaged is that the fault of the Seller or is it the Middle Man's fault? I'll explain in greater detail on how a peer to peer system can work and flourish.
Does not show the human seller of the card you are buying which means no feedback system exists here.
No Checklist is a big time buzz kill. This is the most important part to make a system like this work. The ability to look up cards in the system and possibly track them that have yet to be put in by a human being. We need the computer to have a stored database system to easily track cards. Here is a rough prototype on how it could work. Lets say I want a Giannis Rookie card but I also want to know how many exist and what the market is for each one. I can simply customize it in a search tab by typing Giannis RCS and all possible Giannis Rcs are loaded into the system. Something like this but with pictures. A system like reddit where you can easily open and close a thread for your curiosity to dig deeper into how many parallels and cards are within each unique brand. This doesnt have to be inclusive for searching just for a player. You can search sets you can search years you can search for a very specific thing which can be narrowed down. For this example I will only list non autograph rookies.
This is what it looks like when you type Giannis RC. I only counted up the parallels for the Prizm RC but you can get the idea. Each subset will list the parallels and have a down bar that you can open and close much like Reddit which is a fantastic system. Obviously there will be a watchlist function which allows you to track specific cards you want to see when you go to your tracking page. You can even track cards that have zero quantity available for sale and the system will let you know when one pops up. Unfortunately I had to take pictures of the Reddit like text stepdowns because blowout format kept pushing everything to align left.
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/46982611075_2f199aafae_z.jpg
This is what it looks like when you open up the Prizm + Tab and for this example lets put a 30 day moving average with a decent variance to give the user an idea of the true value You will need an advance algorithm to predict cards that are extremely rare and rarely sold. Also imagine a picture of each card to the right side of the screen.
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/46982612775_50e37213f0_z.jpg
The same can also be done with Sets, ill give you a vision on how it looks but this is just a rough prototype. I envision pictures being on the right side when you are searching. For this example Lets say I typed Metal Universe Basketball and pretend Fleer Metal Universe produced cards were produced from 1996 to 2000.
I messed up here by not moving over the Precious Metal Red to the right by one more section but hopefully you get the idea here.
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/46982612375_f217a84df7_z.jpg
The same can also be applied to if you just want to search cards by seasons. Like 1996-97 or 2005-06 a similar system like the ones shown above. To even go deeper you can simply type Giannis second year cards and the system will propagate something like this. I already laid out the vision so just use your imagination on how it could work. You can also incorporate stuff like show me cards that are only available. Show me cards that have sold since I last visited. Show me new cards that have been added since I last visited the site. Show me cards that have been on the site for the longest duration. Etc etc etc... you can tailor customize this system to your specific needs. The goal here is to be able to find what you want, see if its available and how many copies, see how many people you are competing with to get the card, see the 30 day moving average variance of the card to get a true real time market fair market value and see what the last card sold for.
Now the question that people may be wondering is why have a peer to peer system? Doesnt it make more sense to hold all the cards at one place and then distribute them? There are benefits and disadvantages to each system. Here are my thoughts:
Peer to Peer benefits:
Faster upload to the system, you use your phone to upload a picture. If the picture sucks users can request additional pictures which will be uploaded to the main system for the public to see. You no longer have the Lag time of shipping it to a 3rd party and waiting for that 3rd party to upload it to the system.
The ability to trade cards. If a deal is made you ship it to the 3rd party who acts as a middle man to make sure both sides honor their side of the deal.
Allows for establishment of a review feedback system like ebay. To dig even further have software like ebay which allows you to print direct shipping label after a sale or trade has been made. Go even a step further you can see the persons average lag time from time of sale to when the package was scanned at USPS. Lets say I sold a card on Saturday and I ship it out on Monday. The system will then tally that up as next business day shipping. Lets say I sold a card on Tuesday and shipped it out friday. The system will then tally that as 3 days to ship after sale was complete. Do this enough and you can get a feel for how fast someone ships a product upon completion of a sale or trade.
Little risk to the 3rd party if a Buy/Sale occurs. Paypal, Credit Card Companies or other payment vendors deal with that stuff. If something happens in the mail that is between USPS and the person who shipped the card.
Peer to Peer disadvantages:
Shipping each card individually simply costs more for the seller whose costs gets passed on to the buyer. This is really bad when you buy a $1 card but it costs $3 to ship. The goal here is to pay $1 for that card and for most of that $1 to end up in the sellers pocket. When cards sell for more money this ratio changes eventually to a point where it is nominal.
Examples:
I sell a card for $1 and pay $3 shipping. I am paying a 300% premium to make this happen.
$3 / 1 = 3
I sell a card for $100 and pay $3 shipping. I am only paying a 3% premium to make this happen.
$3 / 100 = .03
I sell a card for $1,000 and pay $20 shipping. I am only paying a 2% premium to make this happen.
$20 / 1000 = .02
A potential solution for this is for lower end cards you could have a bulk submission process where those lower end cards will actually be held at the physical location of the 3rd party. A buyer could then accumulate all these lower end cards and then request a ship out, pretty much the exact same thing COMC does right now. It makes much more sense for the buyer and sellers to do this at the lower end spectrum and makes less sense when you move up in the price tiers.
THE FUNDAMENTAL PHILOSPHY of the BUY/SELL system:
Right now the StockX system is currently run on simple Buy/Sell commands. If StockX were in the card business with the same principles of the sneaker business the system would do the following. If a Seller puts up a Giannis prizm RC it automatically gets executed when the Bid meets the ask.
Example:
Giannis Prizm Sell Command = $300, when someone puts in a request that they are willing to buy a Giannis prizm RC and are willing to pay $300 then this transaction automatically happens. If the highest Buy command is $290 then it doesnt happen.
Lets pretend there are 2 Giannis prizm RC's on the market for price points of $300 and $310 and there were 2 buyers who were willing to pay $290 and $280 respectively. This is what it would look like
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/46982611395_59647406d7_z.jpg
Ok fair enough but lets say the person who just sold the Giannis card for $300 realizes that he traded or sold that card and no longer has it. That is a GIANT problem.
My solution to this problem is to think of it like Real Estate or selling a house. If you list your house for $200,000 does that mean the first person who is willing to pay $200,000 automatically gets the house as soon as he sends you an offer? No it doesnt you need to have a legally binding contract. So in this scenario if the person who upped his Bid from $290 to $300 it automatically pings the Seller that someone is making you a full price offer. You can now either accept the offer/ reject the offer or counter the offer. There is no legally binding contract until both sides reach mutual agreement. The difference between Ebay and this system is that there is no such thing as a BUY IT NOW. This happens all the time when someone doesnt know what they have and they list a card for sale. Have you ever wondered to yourself man I cant believe that card sold for $50 buy it now, I would of paid way more than that for the card. Or you get that sick feeling in your stomach when you sell a card and wonder man did I under sale this card?
Much like selling a house, homes can sell for above list price or below list price so why cant the same be done for cards? Lets say its the middle of the season and Giannis just did something no one has even seen. He just beat Wilt Chamberlain's record and scored over 100 points in a game. Obviously the market is going to react and the demand for a Giannis prizm RC will increase rapidly. Here is a scenario that could unfold.
Here is what it looks like before the game starts:
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/46982612085_bf35caa2a6_z.jpg
The people who have the 2 cards listed for sale are bombarded with offers and they can accept/reject or counter all outstanding offers. In this scenario the list price becomes meaningless. Whenever someone accepts a counteroffer the deal is done and its a legally binding contract. If the seller accepts a new offer before someone accepts a counter offer then all current counteroffers are canceled. The first contract to reach mutual agreement is the only legally binding contract. Buyers who are bidding can cancel there offer at any time and set a time frame for how long there offer stands. If the seller sends a counteroffer he could put a duration on it to accept/reject/re-counter. If the seller is having second thoughts about his counteroffer he could pull out of the counteroffer if it isn't accepted beforehand.
The seller also has the option to do nothing and simply increase his Ask price and reject all offers because he wants to hold that card. He could have an ask price now of $2,000. Now lets say the other seller sold his card for $1,200 so there is now only 1 card on the market and that seller now wants $2,000 for it. This is what looks like now assuming the 2nd highest bid is still $1,150.
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/46982611755_288bee6705_z.jpg
The 30 day average will move up a little bit because of the recent massive sale but it does not reflect the true market value. Everyone knows this, it then will take 30 days to correctly adjust. For this scenario you probably want to use 1 day Averages instead of 30 day averages.
Anyways I have ideas on how this could be monetized in the future but just wanted to share how a hypothetical B/S/T system like this would make everyones lives easier. I think its inevitable with our growing hobby that eventually something will overtake ebay for the main source of selling and buying cards. I mean you can't even trade on ebay right now. Here is how I rank each digital card platform.
COMC: Best visual interface (Cards line up nicely and very little clutter)
EBAY: Best Feedback and Buy/Sell system
www.Priceguide.cards/en : Best search system
BLOWOUT: Best community
Thanks for the read would love to hear your guys thoughts.