eBay sold listings vs asking prices, and what the sold view hides

The number on an eBay listing is what one person hopes to get. The number on a sold listing is what somebody actually paid. Only one of those is a price, and the gap between them is where most bad valuations come from.

This is how to see the sold ones, what eBay leaves out of them, and how to turn a handful of sales into a number you can act on. The examples here are Pokémon cards, but nothing below is specific to the game: the mechanics are eBay's.

A listing is an offer, a sale is a price

The clearest statement of this is not from the hobby at all, it is from the IRS. Fair market value, it says in Publication 561, is "the price that would be agreed on between a willing buyer and a willing seller, with neither being required to act, and both having reasonable knowledge of the relevant facts." And then, flatly: "The best evidence of FMV depends on actual transactions and not on some artificial estimate."

A listing has one of those two parties in it. Anyone can list a common card at four figures and leave it there for a year. Until somebody pays, nothing has been established.

Both are worth knowing. The lowest live ask tells you what it would cost to replace the card today, which matters if you are buying. The sold prices tell you what it is worth, which matters for everything else. Just do not mistake one for the other, and make sure both of them describe the exact card in your hand before you compare anything.

How to see sold listings on eBay

On a desktop browser, the reliable route is the advanced search form at ebay.com/sch/ebayadvsearch. Under the search box there are checkboxes for Sold items and Completed items, along with two more that are useful later on this page: Accepts offers and Listed as lots.

Worth noticing, because it explains why so many people cannot find this: eBay's own buyer help page on how to use search walks through the filter rail by item specifics, condition and buying format, and does not mention a sold or completed filter anywhere. And eBay's advanced search help says advanced search "isn't available on mobile," pointing phone users at sorting and filtering instead. If you have gone looking for this on a phone and come up empty, that is why.

eBay only shows you 90 days

This one is worth knowing exactly, because it decides whether a card can be priced from eBay at all. In eBay's help for its product research tool: "eBay completed listings results include only listings that have recently ended sold in the previous 90 days." The same page says the research tool itself can search "time periods of any length, across the last 3 years."

So the public sold search is a rolling three-month window. For a card that sells every day that is plenty. For a card that sells four times a year, the search can come back empty while the card is worth a great deal, and an empty result is not evidence of a low price. It is evidence that you need to look somewhere else.

What the sold view still does not tell you

Best offers

A listing that accepts offers can sell for less than its listed price. eBay's help page on making a Best Offer describes the mechanics, that a seller can accept, decline or counter, and that a seller has 24 hours to respond while a buyer has 96 hours to answer a counter. What it does not document is how an accepted offer amount appears in sold search results afterwards.

The practical position: on any listing that took offers, treat the listed figure as an upper bound rather than as the amount that changed hands. On a card where most listings accept offers, a set of sold prices read straight off the search page is biased high.

Shipping

eBay itself counts shipping as part of a sale. Its selling fees page says the final value fee is a percentage of the total amount of the sale, and that this total includes "the item price, any handling charges, any shipping costs collected from the buyer (some exceptions apply), sales tax, and any other applicable fees." A card listed cheap with expensive shipping and a card listed higher with free shipping can be the same sale. Compare the totals, not the headline numbers.

Lots

A sold listing that turns out to be forty cards for one price will wreck a comp set. This is the one eBay actually hands you a tool for: the Listed as lots checkbox on the advanced search form lets you take them out. Publication 561 makes the same point in its own language, that sales under unusual circumstances, among them small lots and forced sales, may not represent fair market value.

Take the median, not the average

Once you have a handful of sales, one of them will be strange. A misgraded copy, a listing with the wrong photo, two bidders who wanted it more than anybody else ever will. The question is what that does to your number.

The NIST handbook of statistical methods puts the reason in one line: "Extreme values in the tails distort the mean. However, these extreme values do not distort the median since the median is based on ranks." In the drawing above, one sale well to the right drags the average four dollars up. The median does not move at all, because it only cares which sale sits in the middle.

Writing in Sports Illustrated's collectibles section, Jason Neuman makes the same case from the hobby side: look at multiple recent sales so an unusually high or low one does not mislead you, and check the condition of the slab in a graded sale, because chips, cracks and older labels move the final price. He also argues auction results tend to describe a market better than fixed price sales, since a fixed price sale only tells you what one buyer paid and what one seller accepted.

eBay is not the only place cards sell

For anything above the cheap end, eBay-only comps are incomplete. Auction houses sell the same cards, and those results are public, dated, and usually the better evidence for a higher value card because more than one bidder set the price.

This is the part looka exists for. It pulls sold listings from eBay, Goldin and PWCC through 130point, and the cheapest live ask from eBay, and puts the median of the sales and that ask next to each other with equal weight. TCGplayer and Cardmarket show up as market price points rather than as sales, because that is what they are.

The routine, in five steps

1. 01Identify the card properly first: name, collector number, set, and the print variant. Reading the card is the step everything else rests on.
2. 02Search sold listings, not active ones. On desktop that is the advanced search form and the Sold items box.
3. 03Throw out the ones that are not your card: lots, wrong variant, graded when yours is raw.
4. 04Take the median of what is left, and note how many sales it came from. A handful of sales is a hint. A dozen close together is a price.
5. 05Check the cheapest live ask separately, and keep it separate. It answers a different question.

• If the sold search is empty, the card is not worthless, it is just quiet. Widen to auction house results before you conclude anything.
• If your number still comes out below what a price guide told you, there is a short list of usual reasons.

Doing all of this by hand is fine for one card and miserable for a stack. looka does the same steps from your webcam: hold the card up and it reads it, searches the sold listings and shows you the median with the rows underneath. On a laptop, with no app, if that is where you are.