What in the world is going on here? 
An 8.0 is worth $10, but the 9.4 is worth $5?
CovrPrice reports sales, not predicted manufactured values that fit a perfect price curve. The reality of comics is that at different grades there’s a range of sales. That means VF’s can go for more than NM’s. That’s why we recommend diving deeper into the data over on CovrPrice. It may be one of those values is based off of an older sale, or maybe the lower value one is from an auction and the higher value from a BIN - where the former tends to go for less than the latter. Also, when you’re talking about lower value books - especially sub-$20, free shipping vs separate shipping can play a role in the values reported.
Collectors love to have a nice pretty price curve that seems logical, but that’s just not how comic sales work.
Here’s just one example. A VF copy sold on MCS and is the last recorded VF sale in about a month. It went for $12
Yet this NM- copy sold on eBay for under $7 within the last couple of weeks:
Both pretty highly regarded sellers, yet different platforms. Perhaps the MCS buyer bought a bunch of other books on MCS and the cost per book shipped is like 25 cents. But the eBay buyer bought that one book and paid $5 in shipping that doesn’t appear in the final price.
That’s also why we don’t generally just look at one sale - we look at several within a time period because there will likely be a mix of sales that are from various sellers/platforms, some with included shipping and some without, some auctioned some BIN. Its never a perfect market because there are so many platforms and so many factors.
Good explanation, but it does beg the question… what platforms does CLZ look at? I constantly beat the price cited on CLZ… I figure if I’m paying that much, I’m overpaying by quite a bit.
CLZ gets values from CovrPrice, and CovrPrice gets values from various online sellers including eBay, MyComicShop, Heritage, ComicConnect and others.
In making purchasing decision on more than run filler type books, I would never rely on just the value you see displayed in CLZ. Its helpful for getting a general sense of things, but its only a single reference point. That value is based on at least one sale (often times more as we look to recent sales and perform a weighted average if the data is available), but that sale might have happened years ago, or maybe it was a BIN by an impatient buyer who has money to burn, or an unknowing seller who asked way too little for it and someone snapped it up.
At any given time, a comic in a specific condition is actually worth a range of prices. Its hard to represent that on CLZ’s end, but you can get that level of data over on CovrPrice. So if you’re looking to sell or buy a specific book, I generally recommend diving in deeper on the CovrPrice site. There you can see the recorded sales history, not just for that grade but for other grades for which sales have been recorded.
I also recommend taking a look at how much people are asking for the book online (i.e. on eBay, MCS, etc.). It may be the last sale happened at an all time high but now - days/months/years later - the asking price has dropped but there just haven’t been any recorded sales at that grade since that last high sale.
As a CLZ/CP subscriber, I definitely hope you’re always paying notably less than the price you see on CLZ and on CP. With those tools, you’re seeing what others have paid so you know if you want a “deal” you should be paying less than that. Sometimes a book is hot, its on the rise, and you might not be able to find it for less than what you see on CLZ or CP. If that’s the case, then you need to decide if you REALLY want to book and are willing to “overpay” to have it, or if you’ll just watch it and see if you can get it at a later date for a cheaper price.
If you have any further questions don’t hesitate to ask.
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Thanks, MrDay-CP. A great explanation. Hope you had a great weekend. I wasted mine spending money on comics. lol
Happy to help.
That’s never a waste if you had fun and found some stuff you wanted to add to your collection!
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It’s probably a waste for me… I’m terminal. lol But hey, I miss my old collection so I am putting it back together, at least a little bit, before I go.
Oh man, sorry to hear that … but like Kraven - the hunt is the best part. I wish you the best.
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