Valuing Your Comic Book Collection: Assessing the various comic book pricing services
Since comics sales are somewhat unique due to various grades, timing of the sale, and changing whims and tastes of the public – even slabbed comics of a particular issue only come up in the marketplace every so often – the price of a comic isn’t always a known quantity, meaning there isn’t one single price for a given book even for identical conditions.
Price is what a buyer is willing to pay for a given item
Regie Collects does an excellent job breaking down the variables of the various pricing including data sources, how sales data is aggregated, frequency and timing of data pulls, data cleansing (removing odd transactions that do not make sense) or the lack thereof.
Here at wundervault, we ran our own little experiment to demonstrate the range of pricing various services provide to give you a sense of what service might make sense for you to value your collection.
Bottom Line
Whether you are a serious collector who has a ton of books, have recently inherited a collection that you have no basis to judge, or a lay collector who has a few key issues that you’re looking to value to purchase, sell, or store in our vault, consider consulting multiple sources, including CPG and GoCollect as well as review the eBay confirmed sales data. If you want to go a step further, you can cross reference with data points from Key Collector, OverStreet, and/or your local comic shop (LCS).
Having more data points will give you the best sense of the “range” of the market, then you can determine if you want to try to price at the high end and wait awhile (or forever) or price lower and sell the book more quickly.
Happy collecting!
If you have any grail stories or are a LCS that would like to be featured in an upcoming post, we would love to hear your story.
For info on other collectible valuations check out our blog archive.
wündervault is the premier vendor for premium storage for your collectibles. Whether you are moving, spending some time abroad, or storing collectibles for the long haul and need a convenient option that doesn’t involve buying a padlock, we are here to help.
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