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stephanm Posts: 35
3/7/2018
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Guys, this is cold...
Just realized that you cut the number of recent price changes a Bronze member can view to a mere 20 ...
Now, fair enough, I am a non-paying Bronze member, and you might point out things like "gift horses" and all that.
However...
... honestly, this is not the way that you will entice Bronze members to upgrade.
The best way to do that is make the higher echelons of your site MORE appealing -- not the lowest rung LESS so.
Stunts like this just make me lose trust.
The main reason why I am not interested in shelling out for Silver or Gold is that your site, while brilliant in many ways, does not, in my humble opinion, succeed in a key function, namely to serve as a tool to catalogue a collection, and in particular, to give it a fair total value.
While I more or less think your NM values are about right, any lower grades for issues where you amended the price over the last year, are severely overpriced (essentially, you are applying the wrong fractions to the NM price)
Just look at, I don't know, Fantastic Four 53 (where the value changed a few days ago):
NM $400 -- OK probably right (odd time to cut the value in half, just after the film hit pay dirt, but it WAS severely overpriced before)
VF $286 -- really?
FN $171 -- seriously???
VG $103 -- Wow! For a VG ???
GD $57 ...
That's SERIOUSLY bloated, and clearly out of line with reality, especially for the mid-grades.
And that's true for all books with recent value changes.
The result of this is, I'm no longer even looking at the total value of my 50 most valuable books I entered as a Bronze member -- I know it's a few thousand dollars off (for example my FF 53, in VG/FN, supposedly went UP in value quite a bit, even though, the NM listing went down from 800 to 400)...
So I need to run an Excel sheet anyway, with realistic fractions of the NM values, to have correct figures for my collection. And if I am running an Excel sheet anyway, clearly I don't need a Gold membership.
So, long story short, if I might make a suggestion, don't take away from us Bronze members, instead make life better for the Silver and Gold members, if you want to increase your paying membership.
Also, don't diss us Bronze members too much.
Admittedly, we're not paying. But in terms of advertising dollars, we are bringing up the numbers (I bet we make up something like 90% of the eyeballs on the site... And I'm guessing you're making a lot more money from advertising than from membership. That's just the way of the internet in general...)
Thanks for listening.
Best, Stephan
PS don't get me wrong... the site is great, and I am glad it exists. But it could be so much better. And I was taken aback by the change to the "Recent Price Change" setting, which is a fun feature
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Ronbatman Administrator Posts: 2530
3/9/2018
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Stephan, I understand what you're saying about our values. It's funny someone else on the forum recently complained about the lower grades being worth more than we show. Should we raise them or should we keep them on the old schedule? Before I go into this, I need to apologize for digressing into theory.
Our job as we see it is to report the market not make the market. In years past, certain printed price guides affected the market by speculating and not reporting facts. (Did someone say Wizard? No, not me.) We don't want to guess or speculate that's the collector or investors job.
After researching that specific book the price for mid to low-grade books are in the middle of those two scales.
100
60
35
20
10
Whether I agree or disagree with a vg copy selling for $20 is irrelevant. It happened more than once. We were actually talking about the scales this morning and how they need to change for modern books vs Bronze or other ages. Key books vs normal issues. You will continue to see changes that get closer and closer to the real world pricing with all its quirks.
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