Updated September 21, 2026. Tool prices, fee percentages and how far back each source reaches all change; the date tells you how fresh this is. Figures come from the tools’ own help pages and the sources listed at the end.

“What is this card worth?” has exactly one honest answer: what the last few people paid for the same card, recently. That number is called a comp, short for comparable sale, and everything else in the hobby that looks like a price, from a listing to a price guide to what a breaker says on stream, is either a comp in disguise or an opinion. This guide is about finding the real ones, reading them properly, and not getting fooled by the things that pretend to be one.

The trouble is that sales are scattered. eBay keeps its own and hides part of them. The auction houses publish theirs with a fee baked in. Live selling apps, which is where more and more cards actually change hands, keep almost no public record at all. So pricing a card is really two jobs: knowing where each kind of sale gets recorded, and knowing what has to match before a recorded sale applies to the card in your hand.

What a comp is, and what it is not

A comp is a completed sale: money changed hands, for the same card, in the same condition, recently. Three words in that sentence do the work. Completed rules out asking prices, which are what a seller hopes for and tell you nothing about what a buyer will pay. Same rules out the base card when you are holding the parallel, the PSA 9 when you are holding the 10, and the raw copy when you are holding the slab. Recently rules out the sale from March of a card whose player got hurt in June.

What a comp is not: an active listing at any price, a price guide’s estimate, a “value” a grading company prints on a slab’s paperwork, what you paid for it, what a similar player’s card sold for, or a single sale with nothing else around it. Each of those can be a useful hint. None of them is a price.

Where comps come from

Every source below records a different slice of the market, and each one hides something. Knowing what is hidden is most of the skill.

eBay sold listings: the baseline, with two blind spots

Search the card, open the filters, and under “Show only” tick Sold items. Sort by end date, newest first. This is free, it is where most modern cards under a few thousand dollars actually sell, and it is where you should start. Two things it hides. First, the public sold filter only reaches back about 90 days, so for a card that sells twice a year you will see nothing. Second, when a listing sold through Best Offer, eBay shows the original asking price crossed out with a “Best offer accepted” label and does not show the amount the buyer actually paid. A card listed at $1,499 and sold for an accepted offer of $1,000 looks, in that list, like a $1,499 sale. Treat every crossed-out price as unknown until you have looked it up elsewhere.

130point: the same eBay data with the offers revealed

130point.com is a free keyword search of eBay’s sold listings, and its one essential feature is that it shows the accepted Best Offer amount that eBay hides. It is not a separate database; it is eBay’s sales, cleaned up. That means it inherits eBay’s weakness: a parallel or grade only lands right when the seller titled it right, so you still read every title. A paid tier adds longer history and exports. For a single card, the free search is the tool.

Terapeak: three years back, free if you sell

Inside eBay’s Seller Hub, the Research tab (eBay calls it Product Research, and it used to be a paid product called Terapeak) covers the last three years of eBay sales and shows the real price even when a Best Offer was accepted. Any seller account gets it, and a seller account is free. For a card that sells a few times a year, this is how you see the last two years of it in one place.

The auction houses: bigger cards, and a fee in every number

Above a few thousand dollars, and for anything vintage or one-of-one, the sale usually happens at an auction house: Fanatics Collect (which now includes Goldin), Heritage, PWCC. They publish results, which is good. The catch is the buyer’s premium. Fanatics Collect adds 20 percent to the hammer price on every auction sale; Goldin and Heritage run about 20 percent for online bidders; PWCC has run 15 to 20. So one card produces two numbers: the hammer, which is what the bidder bid, and the total, which is what the bidder paid. Reports quote either one without saying which. When you record a comp from an auction house, write down which number it is, because a $10,000 hammer and a $12,000 total are the same sale and a 20 percent argument.

The aggregators: paid, wide, and only as good as their matching

Card Ladder ($15 a month, $30 for Pro) pulls sales from eBay plus thirty-odd auction houses and marketplaces, including Goldin, Heritage, PWCC, MySlabs and Alt, and adds PSA, BGS and SGC population counts, so it is the closest thing to one place for everything. Market Movers ($29.99 a month, $64.99 for Elite) does similar work with more portfolio and alert tools and leans toward graded and popular cards. SportsCardsPro is free and produces a single estimated price per card and grade from an algorithm that weighs recent sales, medians and age; it is a quick sanity check, not a comp. PSA’s own Auction Prices Realized lists individual sales of PSA-graded cards by grade and is current, while the PSA Price Guide is an estimate that lags the market and covers only PSA slabs.

All of them share one weakness: a computer decided which sales belong to which card, and a seller who titled a Refractor as a base, or a /99 as unnumbered, has just fed a wrong sale into the right card’s history. Always open the underlying sales, not just the chart.

Live selling: the biggest blind spot in the hobby

Whatnot, TikTok Shop and Fanatics Live move an enormous number of cards, and none of them offers a public, searchable record of what sold for what. The sale happens on stream, the stream ends, and the price is gone unless somebody wrote it down. Card Ladder and the others cannot index what they cannot see. So the cards that trade most on live, especially fresh pulls in the week after a release, are the ones with the worst comps, and the seller on stream telling you “this goes for $400” is usually the only source for that claim. This is the reason the trackers on this site record every sale by hand with a link: for a card like the Debut Patch, nobody else is.

Source	Cost	Reach	What it hides
eBay sold filter	Free	About 90 days	Accepted offer amounts
130point	Free, paid tier for history	eBay sales, offers shown	Mis-titled listings
eBay Product Research (Terapeak)	Free with a seller account	3 years of eBay	Everything off eBay
Fanatics Collect, Goldin, Heritage, PWCC	Free to read	High-end and vintage	Hammer vs total, 15 to 20% apart
Card Ladder	$15 to $30 a month	eBay plus 30+ houses, pop reports	Matching errors
Market Movers	$29.99 to $64.99 a month	Graded and popular cards	Thinner on obscure cards
SportsCardsPro	Free	One estimate per card and grade	It is an estimate
PSA APR / Price Guide	Free	PSA-graded only	The guide lags; APR is current
Whatnot, TikTok, Fanatics Live	n/a	No public sales record	Everything

How to read a set of comps

Once you have the sales in front of you, the method is short. Pull the last 30 to 90 days, newest first, and go wider only if there are fewer than five. You want five to ten sales that pass the five-line check. Then look at the cluster, not the average: if eight sales sit between $55 and $70 and one is $200, the $200 is a bidding war, a mistake, or a buyer who did not check, and it is not your price. Same for one sale far below the rest, which is usually a damaged copy, a cancelled transaction that still shows, or a seller who needed the money that day. Throw out both ends and price to the middle.

Then read the direction. Ten sales sorted by date tell you whether the number is rising, flat or falling, and a falling card’s comps overstate it: the last sale is the price, not the average of the last ten. For a raw card, open the photos, because “raw” covers everything from pack-fresh to a corner ding, and the cheap sale may simply be the dinged one. For a graded card, check the population: a PSA 10 with forty copies in existence and a PSA 10 with four thousand are priced by very different rules, and the pop report is on the grader’s site for free.

The traps

• The asking price. Active listings are wishes. A card with twenty listings at $500 and three sales at $180 is a $180 card with twenty optimistic owners.
• The crossed-out number. On eBay, a strikethrough means Best Offer accepted and the real price is hidden. Look it up on 130point or in Product Research before you count it. The highest sale on the NBA tracker went exactly that way: listed at $90,000, reduced, then sold through an accepted offer, and the $65,000 on the page is the figure from Product Research, not the listing.
• Hammer and total. Auction-house results are quoted both ways. Know which one you are reading; the gap is 15 to 20 percent.
• The wrong parallel. The most common error in the hobby. Sellers mis-title, aggregators mis-match, and a $40 base card gets priced off a $400 Gold. Open the photo and read the back.
• Raw against graded. A raw card’s ceiling is the grade it might get, discounted for the chance it does not. Never price a raw copy off PSA 10 sales.
• One sale. A card with a single recorded sale has a data point, not a price. Say so, and widen the window or price off the set’s ladder instead.
• The hype week. The seven days after a debut, a big game or a release are the most expensive days a card will ever have. Comps from that week are real, and they are also temporary.
• The same two accounts. If the same buyer keeps “winning” the same seller’s cards, or sales get cancelled and relisted at the sold price, you are looking at a price being manufactured, not discovered.

When there is no comp

Some cards never get a clean comp. A one-of-one has, by definition, no other copy to compare to. A card from a set released last Wednesday has a week of panic prices and nothing else. A low-numbered parallel of a bench player may go a year without a sale. In each case the answer is the same: stop looking for the card and start looking at the set’s ladder. Within one product, prices step in a fairly stable order, base, then colour parallels by print run, then autographs, then the low-numbered autographs, and the ratios between the steps hold across players better than the prices do. If the /99 of a player sells for three times his base and you are holding his /25 with no sales, the /99 of a comparable player and the /25 of that same player will tell you roughly where you sit. It is an estimate, and you should call it one.

The Debut Patch cards this site tracks are the extreme case: every card is a one-of-one, no price guide carries them, and most sell at auction or on stream. So the only comps that exist are the ones that get written down. The NBA tracker has 8 recorded sales so far, with a median of $16,000 and a high of $65,000, each with its date, venue and a link to the listing, because a number without a link is just another asking price.

A number without a link is an asking price.

The short version

1. Start with eBay’s sold filter, then check every crossed-out price on 130point.
2. Match all five: set, number, parallel and serial, auto or relic, grade.
3. Take five to ten sales from the last 30 to 90 days, newest first.
4. Ignore the top and bottom outliers; price to the cluster; note the direction.
5. From an auction house, write down whether your number is hammer or total.
6. No comp? Use the set’s ladder, and call the result an estimate.

eBay Product Research (Terapeak): three years of sales, real Best Offer prices · eBay’s sold filter and the 90-day window · Ball Card Genius on hidden Best Offer prices and 130point · Hobby Card Index on 130point · Figoca, reading eBay sold comps · Fanatics Collect: 20 percent buyer’s premium · Auction house fees compared, July 2026 · Card Ladder supported platforms · Card Ladder vs Market Movers pricing · SportsCardsPro methodology · Wax Pack Gods on the PSA Price Guide and APR · PSA Auction Prices Realized