Does market price include postage?

Marketplace price points are generally quoted for the item rather than the delivered total, and postage is handled separately, which means two listings at the same headline price can cost a buyer quite different amounts. Check each platform's current documentation before building rules that assume the figures are directly comparable.

Why is market price higher than any listing I can see?

Because it reflects sales that have already happened, including ones at higher prices, while what you are looking at is only what remains unsold. A card whose cheap copies have just been bought will show this gap. It usually closes within a few days as new listings and new sales arrive.

Is eBay sold data a better signal?

It is genuinely transaction-based, which is a real advantage, but it needs cleaning: graded copies, lots, foreign printings and mispriced auctions all sit in the same results. Used carefully it is an excellent cross-check on high-value cards, and it is poor for cheap commons where very little sells.

How quickly do price signals react to a ban or reprint?

Listings react in minutes because sellers reprice immediately; sales-based references lag because they need transactions at the new level. That gap is exactly when manual intervention pays, so treat major announcements as a trigger to review affected cards by hand rather than waiting for the next automatic cycle.

Should buylist offers be based on market or low?

Base them on the sales-based reference. Offering a percentage of a temporarily depressed low means you overpay relative to reality as soon as the outlier listing sells, and it makes your buy prices jump around for no good reason. Sellers also find unstable buy prices harder to trust.

← All glossary terms

Glossary

What's the difference between TCGplayer market price and TCGplayer low?

TCGplayer 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.

Two numbers that answer different questions

Market price is derived from what has recently sold. Low is the cheapest copy currently listed. The first answers 'what is this card worth?' and the second answers 'what is the cheapest anyone will sell me one for at this moment?' Those are not the same question, and treating them as interchangeable is the root of most pricing mistakes.

Because market is computed from completed transactions, it moves more slowly and is much harder for any one seller to influence. Low is a single data point that can be replaced in seconds.

Why Low is so volatile

Imagine a card that has sold steadily around $10. One seller lists a copy at $6 to clear it — perhaps it is played and mis-graded, perhaps they are closing a store. The low is now $6 while the market is still $10.

If your rules price against low, you follow that seller down. So does everyone else pricing the same way, and within a cycle or two the market reference itself starts to fall because the cheap sales are now the recent sales. The card never became less valuable; a pricing convention made it cheaper. This is why racing the low is a strategy that works for exactly as long as it takes your competitors to copy it.

Low also hides context. It might be a damaged copy, a foreign-language printing, a seller with no feedback, or a listing with postage priced high to compensate. A single number cannot tell you which.

Cardmarket's equivalents

Cardmarket publishes a Trend price, which plays the role of market price as a rolling indicator, alongside the lowest available price and various averages over recent windows. The same logic transfers directly: Trend is the stable autopricing input and lowest-available is the competitive sanity check.

The exact definitions, windows and conditions included differ between platforms and change over time, so read each marketplace's own documentation rather than assuming their averages are computed the same way. A rule that assumes Trend and Market are identical will drift in ways that are hard to diagnose later.

Using both signals properly

Price from the sales-based reference and use the listing-based one as a guardrail. A workable pattern is: set price at market plus a margin, then check the result against low — if you are more than a set percentage above the cheapest comparable copy, flag the card for review rather than automatically matching it.

Different cards justify different treatment. On high-volume staples where buyers sort by price, being close to the cheapest copy matters. On scarce cards with few listings, low is almost meaningless and a human should decide. Buy prices are best derived from the sales-based reference too, since offering a percentage of a temporarily depressed low means overpaying the moment the outlier sells.

TCG Sync's autopricing can read from TCGplayer, Cardmarket, CardSynced or eBay sold-listing data where configured, which makes it straightforward to price from one reference while monitoring another.

Common mistakes

Matching low automatically is the biggest, because it hands your pricing to whichever competitor is most desperate. Comparing a near-mint price against a low that comes from a played copy is the second, and it is easy to do accidentally when a feed does not separate conditions.

The third is trusting either number on a card with almost no liquidity. If a single has three sales a month, both figures are noise. Price it by hand against actual recent comparable sales, and accept that it may sit for a while.

Frequently asked questions

Does market price include postage?: Marketplace price points are generally quoted for the item rather than the delivered total, and postage is handled separately, which means two listings at the same headline price can cost a buyer quite different amounts. Check each platform's current documentation before building rules that assume the figures are directly comparable.
Why is market price higher than any listing I can see?: Because it reflects sales that have already happened, including ones at higher prices, while what you are looking at is only what remains unsold. A card whose cheap copies have just been bought will show this gap. It usually closes within a few days as new listings and new sales arrive.
Is eBay sold data a better signal?: It is genuinely transaction-based, which is a real advantage, but it needs cleaning: graded copies, lots, foreign printings and mispriced auctions all sit in the same results. Used carefully it is an excellent cross-check on high-value cards, and it is poor for cheap commons where very little sells.
How quickly do price signals react to a ban or reprint?: Listings react in minutes because sellers reprice immediately; sales-based references lag because they need transactions at the new level. That gap is exactly when manual intervention pays, so treat major announcements as a trigger to review affected cards by hand rather than waiting for the next automatic cycle.
Should buylist offers be based on market or low?: Base them on the sales-based reference. Offering a percentage of a temporarily depressed low means you overpay relative to reality as soon as the outlier listing sells, and it makes your buy prices jump around for no good reason. Sellers also find unstable buy prices harder to trust.

Why this matters in card-shop software

Terms like Market price vs low 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

AutopricerAn 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.
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.