How often should I reprice?

Daily is a sensible baseline, with more frequent runs for fast-moving stock and ad-hoc runs after bans, reprints or major tournament results. The cost of repricing more often is mostly computational; the cost of repricing less often is being picked off on every card the market has moved past.

What floor price should I set?

Set it where picking, packing and fee costs stop being covered. Below that figure a card is not really a listing, it is a task you lose money on, and it belongs in bulk or in a flat-price box instead. Most shops find that line is higher than they first assume.

Which cards should I exclude from autopricing?

Anything where the market reference is thin or misleading: reserved-list cards, graded slabs, misprints, signed cards, out-of-print sealed and genuinely scarce collectables. Tag them so they are excluded permanently rather than relying on a rule condition, because rule sets get rewritten and exclusions get forgotten.

Will autopricing undercut my own storefront?

It can, if every channel uses the same rule. Marketplace fees mean a like-for-like price earns you less there than on your own site, so most shops price marketplaces higher to land in the same net position. Decide deliberately where you want to be cheapest rather than letting the rules decide for you.

Can an autopricer handle buylist prices too?

It should. Buy prices derived from the same reference on the same cadence stay in step with your sell prices, which is what stops sellers arbitraging a stale list. Keep the buy percentages as their own ladder, though, since they need different floors and much tighter quantity caps.

← All glossary terms

Glossary

What is an autopricer?

An autopricer is software that reprices a card shop's singles automatically against live marketplace data — typically TCGplayer market price, Cardmarket trend price, or eBay sold listings — applying margin rules per channel and per condition.

What an autopricer is for

A shop with thirty thousand singles cannot reprice by hand. Prices move daily on the back of tournament results, bans, reprints and spoiler season, and stale prices cost money in both directions: too high and the card sits, too low and you sell a staple for a third of what it was worth that morning.

An autopricer solves the volume problem by turning pricing into rules. You define how your prices relate to a market reference, and the software applies that relationship to every card, every cycle, on every channel you sell through.

Anatomy of a rule

A basic rule reads: match the market reference, add 5%, never go below $0.25, round to the nearest $0.25. That is already four decisions — source, margin, floor and rounding — and real rule sets add several more.

The useful dimensions are channel (your own storefront can price differently from a marketplace that charges fees), condition (played grades follow their own multipliers), finish (foils deviate from non-foils), language, game, set, and stock depth. A rule that becomes more aggressive when you hold eight copies and more conservative on the last one is one of the simplest ways to improve turnover without touching your average margin.

TCG Sync's autopricing works this way, repricing from TCGplayer, Cardmarket, CardSynced or eBay sold-listing data where configured, with floors, ceilings, condition multipliers, finish deltas, per-set overrides and tags for stock you never want repriced.

A worked example

Take a card with a $10 market reference. On your own storefront you might price at market plus 5% — $10.50 — because you pay no commission. On a marketplace charging roughly 10% in fees you might price at $11.75 to land in a similar net position. In lightly played you apply your 0.85 multiplier to each, giving $8.93 and $9.99 before rounding.

Every figure there is an example rather than a recommendation, and the fee assumptions will differ for your accounts. The useful habit is to think in net-after-fees rather than in headline price, because a rule that looks consistent across channels can quietly earn very different amounts on each.

Guardrails that stop the race to the bottom

If several shops all reprice against the cheapest current listing, each repricing cycle pushes the price down and the next one follows. That spiral is the single most common way autopricing loses money, and the defences are well established: price from a sales-based reference rather than the lowest listing, set a hard floor per card, and never let a rule price below your recorded cost.

Exclusions matter as much as rules. Reserved-list cards, graded slabs, sealed collectables and anything scarce enough that the market reference is based on a handful of sales should be priced by hand. Tag them once so no future rule change catches them by accident.

Finally, alert on large moves. A card that drops 60% overnight is usually a data problem or a mis-mapped catalogue entry rather than a real crash, and you want a human to look before the whole shelf reprices.

Cadence, drift and common mistakes

Daily repricing suits most shops, hourly suits high-velocity stock, and on-demand runs are useful around spoiler season and immediately after a ban announcement. Repricing less often than your competitors is how you end up being cherry-picked on the way up and stuck with stock on the way down.

The most common mistakes are pricing off the lowest listing, forgetting that your buy prices need the same cadence as your sell prices, and setting the margin once and never reviewing it. Run a monthly check on what actually sold versus what sat: if near-mint staples vanish within a day, your margin is too thin, and if played copies never move, your multipliers are wrong.

Frequently asked questions

How often should I reprice?: Daily is a sensible baseline, with more frequent runs for fast-moving stock and ad-hoc runs after bans, reprints or major tournament results. The cost of repricing more often is mostly computational; the cost of repricing less often is being picked off on every card the market has moved past.
What floor price should I set?: Set it where picking, packing and fee costs stop being covered. Below that figure a card is not really a listing, it is a task you lose money on, and it belongs in bulk or in a flat-price box instead. Most shops find that line is higher than they first assume.
Which cards should I exclude from autopricing?: Anything where the market reference is thin or misleading: reserved-list cards, graded slabs, misprints, signed cards, out-of-print sealed and genuinely scarce collectables. Tag them so they are excluded permanently rather than relying on a rule condition, because rule sets get rewritten and exclusions get forgotten.
Will autopricing undercut my own storefront?: It can, if every channel uses the same rule. Marketplace fees mean a like-for-like price earns you less there than on your own site, so most shops price marketplaces higher to land in the same net position. Decide deliberately where you want to be cheapest rather than letting the rules decide for you.
Can an autopricer handle buylist prices too?: It should. Buy prices derived from the same reference on the same cadence stay in step with your sell prices, which is what stops sellers arbitraging a stale list. Keep the buy percentages as their own ladder, though, since they need different floors and much tighter quantity caps.

Why this matters in card-shop software

Terms like Autopricer are not just vocabulary. They shape how a card shop models products, prices, customers, trade-ins, events, and marketplace listings. Generic ecommerce platforms usually treat these details as notes or custom fields; a TCG platform has to make them part of the workflow so staff can use them at the counter and customers can use them online.

TCG Sync uses this kind of operational language throughout the platform: product records, buylist rules, POS screens, autopricing, deckbuilder results, and marketplace sync all depend on the same definitions. That consistency is what keeps inventory accurate when the same card can be sold in-store, online, or on a marketplace in several conditions at once.

Related terms

Market price vs lowTCGplayer market price is an algorithmic average of recent sold prices across conditions. TCGplayer low is the lowest currently-listed price. Market is more stable and reflects actual transactions; low is a snapshot of the cheapest seller right now and can be skewed by a single outlier.
Condition-based pricingCondition-based pricing is the practice of listing the same trading-card SKU at separate price points for each condition grade — typically Near Mint, Lightly Played, Moderately Played, and Heavily Played. It's standard in TCG retail because card value drops measurably with each grade step.
BuylistA buylist is the set of prices a card shop offers customers for cards they want to sell or trade in. Most shops publish two prices per card: a lower cash rate and a higher store-credit rate.
Reserved ListThe Reserved List is Wizards of the Coast's policy guaranteeing that a specific list of Magic: The Gathering cards (mostly from 1993–1999) will never be reprinted in a tournament-legal form. The promise creates artificial scarcity and underpins the long-term value of those cards.