If you have ever opened a price-comparison tab and seen a PSA 10 listed for 4,000 EUR while the same card sold three times last month for 1,800 EUR, you already understand why this article exists. Listings are aspirations. Sold-data is reality. For graded cards specifically, the gap is enormous — and the source that closes it is eBay.
Listings vs sold — the gap is huge for graded
Raw cards have constant turnover. Listings track sold prices fairly closely because misjudging the market by 20% means your card never moves. Graded cards are different:
- Slabs sit. A misvalued PSA 10 listing can stay up for six months.
- Sellers anchor on the highest historical sale, not the average.
- Buyers shop across grading companies, eras, and even subgrades; sellers do not always reflect that.
- "Best Offer" buy-it-nows hide the real selling price entirely.
The result: average listing prices for graded cards run 25-50% higher than what the cards actually sell for. We covered the same dynamic for raw Cardmarket prices in listing vs last-sold prices; for graded the gap is even worse.
Why eBay specifically
Three factors:
- Volume. eBay handles the majority of graded TCG sales globally. For PSA 9 and PSA 10 across non-Pokemon TCGs, the next largest venue is not close.
- Completed-sale transparency. eBay's sold-listings filter shows what a buyer actually paid, including auction final bids and accepted Best Offers.
- Cross-region coverage. A graded MTG showcase from a French seller routinely sells to a US buyer on eBay. Graded markets are global; eBay is one of the few platforms that captures that.
What about Cardmarket graded?
Cardmarket does support graded listings, and Cardmarket is the right source for raw EUR pricing. But the completed-sale volume for graded singles on Cardmarket is too thin to drive a reliable price for most cards. We would rather mark a price stale than build a "Cardmarket graded average" off three sales a quarter and pretend it represents the market.
This is why Flipzi uses Cardmarket avg1 for raw and eBay last-sold for graded. Different problems, different right answers.
The 14-day staleness rule
Even eBay does not have a sale every week for every grade of every card. When the most recent completed sale is older than 14 days, Flipzi marks the price stale. The card still appears in your portfolio, the historical price is still shown, but the current valuation is flagged so you do not anchor on a number that no longer reflects the market.
Honesty about data quality is not a bug. It is the feature.
What this means for your portfolio
- Reported value tracks reality. Your graded portfolio P&L is close to what you could actually realize on a sale today.
- Alerts trigger on real signals. A graded alert that fires means a buyer paid that price — not that a seller asked for it.
- Decisions improve. Buying or selling decisions made off sold-data are systematically better than ones made off listing prices.
Track graded with honest data
PSA, BGS, and CGC last-sold across MTG, Yu-Gi-Oh, One Piece, Lorcana, and Pokemon — via eBay sold listings, with stale prices flagged, not faked.
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