Sports Collectibles case study
Live Pricing Data for Professional Sports Card Traders
A US sports card trading team needed to spot undervalued cards and respond before listings changed.
- Project type
- Pricing data platform
- Industry
- Sports Collectibles
- Location
- United States
- Services
- Data Engineering, API Integration
At a glance
- Pricing accuracy
- 30%higher
- Bid tracking automated
- 100%
- Build to launch
- 3months
Overview
The Summary.
A US sports card trading team needed to spot undervalued cards and respond before listings changed. Checking prices manually across eBay and Facebook Marketplace could not keep pace with the market. VARTEQ built a pricing system that collects live listings, analyzes historical trends, and puts current evaluations in the traders’ existing tools.
About the project. A professional sports card trading team that evaluates listings across online marketplaces.
Engagement length. 3 months from build to launch; kickoff 2 weeks after discovery.
The challenge.
The team had no single place to track current prices, bids, and completed sales across marketplaces. Listings changed or disappeared before staff could assess them, leading to missed purchases and unreliable valuations. We reviewed how these gaps affected the data traders used.
Findings from Discovery
The review established several requirements:
- Bid and listing updates had to be collected faster than manual checks allowed.
- Expired listings and differences between sources needed to be accounted for in the data.
- Historical prices had to sit alongside current listings so traders could assess trends.
We used these requirements to design the platform’s data collection and storage infrastructure.
The solution.
The platform brings current pricing into the client’s existing workflow. Automated collection and a shared database provide traders with quick access to prices and trends across sources, with an API for their own tools.
The platform includes:
- Scrapers for listings, bids, and sales on eBay, Facebook, and specialist forums
- A structured database of historical prices and performance
- An API that supplies current price evaluations and trend analysis to the client’s existing systems
- 01
Implementation
The delivery team worked with the traders to:
- Prioritize marketplaces and card categories, including basketball and baseball.
- Develop and test marketplace-specific scrapers for live bids and sales.
- Tune collection and processing for frequent updates, low latency, and accurate records.
- Deploy a documented API that the client could connect to its dashboards and tools.
Working directly with the traders kept the build focused on the data they needed and allowed the team to test accuracy as development progressed.
Services on this project
The outcome.
- Project kickoff: 2 weeks after discovery.
- Build to launch: 3 months, ahead of schedule.
- Pricing accuracy increased by 30%.
- Bid tracking on eBay and Facebook was 100% automated.
- The database covered basketball and baseball card listings and their historical trends.
The team could assess purchases using current listings and historical prices together, instead of piecing together incomplete records from different marketplaces. That improved the speed and quality of trading decisions.
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