I’m playing around upgrading my new raw books from 9.4 as a default to 9.6 instead.
I am noticing that when CovrPrice doesn’t have a 9.6 value, CLZ is pulling the VF value from CovrPrice, rather than the NM price which might make more sense?
In case you need an example, Absolute Power: Task Force VII #6. In 9.4, it pulls the $4 NM value from CovrPrice. If I increase it to 9.6, it pulls the $3 VF value from CovrPrice.
When we don’t have any data for a given grade, we present the most common condition fair market value. This is going to be different depending on the book as its the condition with the most recorded sales for the type of book you have (mcc for raw or mcc for slabbed). The concept behind this is that the age of the comic often dictates the approximate grade (most moderns and coppers are in the NM range, most Bronze are in the VF range, most Silver are in the VG to FN range, etc.). As such, of we present the MCCFMV, we get close a good chunk of the time. Clearly, however, if you own a book in a condition that is outside the norm (i.e. a GD copy of a Modern) this MCCFMV will be way off. That’s why both CLZ and CP allow users to do their own research and enter their own value. We took this approach because people really wanted some sort of value to appear - even if we didn’t have data for the grade they own. Eventually we’d like to provide more predictive pricing, but as you’ll see below - that’s very hard to do.
You’d probably think, why don’t you just use the closest available grade’s value. Well, this approach is a lot harder than you’d think. Others have tried this and have failed miserably - that’s because its complicated and challenging to properly code it. What if the next closest grade with data has a sale from 10 years ago? What if 2 grades away there was a sale from yesterday? What if that recent sale is 3 grades away? What if you have data from a year ago one grade up and 2 years ago 2 grades down? Which do you use? What if you have 15 recent sales 3 grades away and one 6 month ago sale 2 grades away? What if you have a VF copy, there is FN range data and VG range data but the VG range data is a bit newer and the value is higher than the FN range data?
As it pertains to your example, it gets even worse when you’re talking about low value books. Books under like $15 are HIGHLY susceptible to things like shipping costs, fees, bulk rates, etc. You can have a VF copy sell for $15 with free shipping and a NM copy sell for $12 without free shipping - but the NM actually cost the buyer $19 if you include the shipping (we don’t add in separate shipping costs as selling platforms are commonly not open about what a buyer paid in shipping).