GoCollect vs. GPA 2 2

[blazingbob]

Since when do boardies become the "out of whack" judges?

 

 

[seanfingh]

Since when do boardies become the "out of whack" judges?

 

 

If "out of whack" judges means cheapasses then the answer is "since day 1."

[Paul © ® ⚽️💙™]

Since when do boardies become the "out of whack" judges?

 

 

Since they see books they want at prices they don't want to pay. Of course this philosophy is abandoned when they want to sell said book.

[blazingbob]

So basically they want to see this definition of FAIR

 

Fairly Assured Isn't Retail

[grebal]

Thank you!!

[lou_fine]

General question for those in the know - does GPA ever apply any kind of 'filter' to screen the suckers, er, I mean collectors, that pay the odd outlying price using BIN?

 

 

Well, if this was the case, then most of the eBay results would be screened out as the large majority of comic related auctions on eBay appears to be done using BIB as opposed to the more traditional auction format.

[lou_fine]

: If I can get at least 2 of the above players to share their sales data with us, I will personally invest a substantial amount of money into growing GoCollect.

 

Hey Jeff;

 

Well, maybe we can get you halfway their pretty quickly.

 

If you go onto the Heritage website, I believe you can easily download all of their previous auction results through some kind of .htm file. I've done that for quite a few of their auctions just so I can print off a hard copy of their auction results.

 

Not sure if you can manipulate this data to suit your reporting needs or not, but I am quite sure that some computer techie should be able to figure this out for you?

[grebal]

General question for those in the know - does GPA ever apply any kind of 'filter' to screen the suckers, er, I mean collectors, that pay the odd outlying price using BIN?

 

 

Well, if this was the case, then most of the eBay results would be screened out as the large majority of comic related auctions on eBay appears to be done using BIB as opposed to the more traditional auction format.

 

Thank you, Lou.

 

However, I used the word "outlying" for a reason too. I am sincerely glad to get the info about CPA policy.

 

Personally, I favor a healthy bid-ask spread to help further a liquid market. But I think omitting any kind of 'outlier' filter is a material limitation of GPA data fwiw (admittedly it would involve subjective metrics) that I'm glad to confirm.

[loadstone]

Hi Everyone -

 

I must admit, I'm frustrated to continually hear from our audience that we're inferior to GPA. It frustrates me, because the core argument is absolutely accurate - we only track eBay sales; GPA has more data. However, it's not by choice.

 

I think most would agree that the GoCollect interface is superior (and it’s getting a major upgrade in the coming months). Our "tech" feels superior from my point of view as well. But, at the end of the day, data rules this game. Unfortunately, the major players are keeping us down. I hate to call everyone out here, but it's time. I've read several threads like this one and have bit my tongue out of respect for the following brokers/dealers:

 

Heritage

ComicLink

Metropolis/ComicConnect

Pedigree

MyComicShop

Hake’s

 

I've either personally spoken to many of the leaders within these organizations OR continually reached out to them with no response. They all (except CL) feed data to GPA, but seem to refuse to do so for GoCollect. I've heard many theories "why," but I won't get into that.

 

So why haven't I done anything about it?

 

I'll get real and come clean on this one - GoCollect has not been a major focus of mine personally. There are only a couple of GoCollect employees and they're quite busy managing the fire hose of eBay sales while also maintaining a popular property we acquired a couple years back - ComicList. What about me? Well, I'm the CIO of a mid-size corporation, which chews up about 70 hours of my week. There aren't many leftover hours these days and my family gets most of them.

 

How do we change things? How do we get the collectors a superior valuation product?

 

It's going to start with cooperation from the list above. OR it's going to require a social effort for individuals to manually report sales from those platforms to the GoCollect platform. I've had my legal counsel look into the latter scenario and have a high confidence that no laws would be broken in such a situation. Side note: I'm all ears to hear any disagreements. For those who know or have met me, hopefully my open mindedness has shown through. I truly appreciate being challenged.

 

I’m hoping to get the collector audience on our side. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how we harness this data. As (admittedly) a bit of an outsider in the comic circles, I’m at a disadvantage. Perhaps you’re “on the inside” and are willing to talk to the individuals responsible for suppressing our efforts.

 

I will make the community a promise: If I can get at least 2 of the above players to share their sales data with us, I will personally invest a substantial amount of money into growing GoCollect. I’ll do that by (1) hiring one to three full-time database managers that will be responsible for ensuring our database of US comics is as robust as possible (2) make deeper investments in our UI to ensure a seamless mobile experience (3) make several investments in engineering with a focus on artificial intelligence for extrapolating superior valuations for both GRADED and RAW books (4) use those engineering upgrades/insights to provide the community with highly improved trend analyses.

 

Thanks for listening.

 

Best regards,

 

Jeff Meyer

Founder, GoCollect

jeff@gocollect.com

 

Jeff,

 

I hear you and wish they would cooperate with you. However, a bit of scripting could get the job done so long as selling it is legal. Should be if big data companies are allowed to plant cookies on our browsers and sell our shopping habits to companies. Why nit the other way around. Do they at least offer it for sale to you?

 

Heritage may b the simplest to mine since all you need is a free account to search the archives.

The rest may require you to have tracked the books.

Comiclink, thought about this one for a while. The results for the last 5-10 books are cached for a bit while the auction is in progress and as other books are ending. Might requine downloading every auction as it ends to capture final bid.

 

I participate in nearly all the comic auctions from those sites. If legal, for a free subscription to your site I'd be willing to send you the final hammer price on everything I track and bid on along with certs, page quality and even notes like eye appeal, centering, defects.

If I could provide significant auction data would you be willing to pay a small comission for it?

 

[ttfitz]

Hi Everyone -

 

I must admit, I'm frustrated to continually hear from our audience that we're inferior to GPA. It frustrates me, because the core argument is absolutely accurate - we only track eBay sales; GPA has more data. However, it's not by choice.

 

I think most would agree that the GoCollect interface is superior (and it’s getting a major upgrade in the coming months). Our "tech" feels superior from my point of view as well. But, at the end of the day, data rules this game. Unfortunately, the major players are keeping us down. I hate to call everyone out here, but it's time. I've read several threads like this one and have bit my tongue out of respect for the following brokers/dealers:

 

Heritage

ComicLink

Metropolis/ComicConnect

Pedigree

MyComicShop

Hake’s

 

I've either personally spoken to many of the leaders within these organizations OR continually reached out to them with no response. They all (except CL) feed data to GPA, but seem to refuse to do so for GoCollect. I've heard many theories "why," but I won't get into that.

 

So why haven't I done anything about it?

 

I'll get real and come clean on this one - GoCollect has not been a major focus of mine personally. There are only a couple of GoCollect employees and they're quite busy managing the fire hose of eBay sales while also maintaining a popular property we acquired a couple years back - ComicList. What about me? Well, I'm the CIO of a mid-size corporation, which chews up about 70 hours of my week. There aren't many leftover hours these days and my family gets most of them.

 

How do we change things? How do we get the collectors a superior valuation product?

 

It's going to start with cooperation from the list above. OR it's going to require a social effort for individuals to manually report sales from those platforms to the GoCollect platform. I've had my legal counsel look into the latter scenario and have a high confidence that no laws would be broken in such a situation. Side note: I'm all ears to hear any disagreements. For those who know or have met me, hopefully my open mindedness has shown through. I truly appreciate being challenged.

 

I’m hoping to get the collector audience on our side. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how we harness this data. As (admittedly) a bit of an outsider in the comic circles, I’m at a disadvantage. Perhaps you’re “on the inside” and are willing to talk to the individuals responsible for suppressing our efforts.

 

I will make the community a promise: If I can get at least 2 of the above players to share their sales data with us, I will personally invest a substantial amount of money into growing GoCollect. I’ll do that by (1) hiring one to three full-time database managers that will be responsible for ensuring our database of US comics is as robust as possible (2) make deeper investments in our UI to ensure a seamless mobile experience (3) make several investments in engineering with a focus on artificial intelligence for extrapolating superior valuations for both GRADED and RAW books (4) use those engineering upgrades/insights to provide the community with highly improved trend analyses.

 

Thanks for listening.

 

Best regards,

 

Jeff Meyer

Founder, GoCollect

jeff@gocollect.com

 

Jeff,

 

I hear you and wish they would cooperate with you. However, a bit of scripting could get the job done so long as selling it is legal. Should be if big data companies are allowed to plant cookies on our browsers and sell our shopping habits to companies. Why nit the other way around. Do they at least offer it for sale to you?

 

Heritage may b the simplest to mine since all you need is a free account to search the archives.

The rest may require you to have tracked the books.

Comiclink, thought about this one for a while. The results for the last 5-10 books are cached for a bit while the auction is in progress and as other books are ending. Might requine downloading every auction as it ends to capture final bid.

 

I participate in nearly all the comic auctions from those sites. If legal, for a free subscription to your site I'd be willing to send you the final hammer price on everything I track and bid on along with certs, page quality and even notes like eye appeal, centering, defects.

If I could provide significant auction data would you be willing to pay a small comission for it?

 

I'm no lawyer, and I don't play one on TV, but I'm betting most of the sites have something that prohibit you from doing this. I looked at the "Terms and Conditions" for a membership account on Heritage, and a quick look found this:

 

All images, descriptions, sales data, and archival records are the exclusive property of Auctioneer, and may be used by Auctioneer for advertising, promotion, archival records, and any other uses deemed appropriate.

 

Also the Website Use Agreement that you agree to in order to sign up for an account says:

 

You may not republish, commercially distribute, duplicate, or exploit any aspect of the Website, either code or content. Other than the Fair Usage specified in the License for Limited Uses, You may not download, reproduce, modify, distribute, transfer, sell, or create derivative works of any code, contents, data, whether specifically copyrighted or not. Any unauthorized usage of the Website may subject You to civil or criminal prosecution. By accessing the Website, You agree not to:

 

1. attempt to gain unauthorized access to any programs, code, systems, or data through any means, on any server or database used on the Website;

2. engage in any collection of data, through such practices as “screen scraping,” “database scraping,” “robot,” “spider” or other automatic means;

 

So you or GoCollect would be in violation of the agreed terms of usage if you were to do this sort of thing.

[sckao]

 

There are a lot of legal cases (old and currently pending) about web and screen scraping... It doesn't look good for the company doing it generally.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping

 

 

[Lucky Baru]

GPA is a very good service, but to be honest you need to research several arenas. Ebay,auction results etc.

 

GPA records results from eBay and pretty much all the large auction houses (except Comiclink) :shrug:

 

Comiclink refused to partner with GPA because they have many new breaking records on sales. My books were sold via Comiclink. One book was sold for over $8K that was nearly 3 times higher than I expected. GPA may be irrelevant.

 

Comiclink may have had great sales that have broken records, but I believe that they refused to partner up with GPA because of their poor record-breaking sales.

 

 

+1. No one hides their sales data when it smashes old records.

 

Comic Link takes steps to lower the risk of shill bidding taking place in their auctions. I'd rather bid there than other places where that isn't the case.

[Sqeggs]

General question for those in the know - does GPA ever apply any kind of 'filter' to screen the suckers, er, I mean collectors, that pay the odd outlying price using BIN?

 

[by which I mean selling at a price the vast majority of boardies would agree was out of whack]

 

GPA does make an effort to screen out bogus eBay sales or to flag them. Occasionally I've seen an eBay sale show up and then disappear after a few days, presumably because George becomes convinced it wasn't a legit sale.

 

But screening out sales that seem to be outliers is a different kettle of fish. I don't see how he could that without having to make debatable judgements.

[grebal]

Understood, and agreed in full, it would be iffy at best (because e.g., where is the cutoff?). Thanks. : )

[sterlingcomics]

There are a lot of legal cases (old and currently pending) about web and screen scraping... It doesn't look good for the company doing it generally.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping

 

 

Someone told me that if you web crawl sites, you get a visit from our very own federal government. Not sure if true, but apparently Google has a monopoly on this now.

 

Didn't know about this new service, but apparently it's "same old"...visit many sources to arrive to the truth.

[loadstone]

There are a lot of legal cases (old and currently pending) about web and screen scraping... It doesn't look good for the company doing it generally.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping

 

 

The terms and conditions and fair usage seem to make it clear but the legal standing of those terms and conditions does begin to break down when you get down to the core of what is being sought: raw item and sale price. The article seems to imply that the clarity and definition of what constitutes a true violation is vague an still being defined but centers around anything that harms the business, violates copyright content, and violates trespass chattel of the business systems. Based on that, as you:

1. Do not infringe on copyright (which raw sale item and sales data may not be) so long as you don't totally copy the content directly from their site and reproduce it in the same manner it appears on their website

2. Do not traverse or tresspass their servers/systems to obtain that data

3. Can prove that usage and resale of that raw item and sales data produces no harm to the business which can be likely accomplished via:

a. Completely disassociating the raw data from the site. (i.e. unlike heritage, if the sites do not grant access to all sales data, then there should be no reasonable way to trace a sale item and price back to it's sales location.

b. The site is not already providing a similar subscription service to users to access sale item and data. If there is a lucrative exclusive agreement to license that data with another site, then I can see this being an issue.

c. Arguing that sales comparison data can both generate higher bids as well as lower depending on the free market demand for the items potentially listed for sale.

 

I believe there is a way to obtain the raw item and respective sales data without violating those 3 currently defined legal restrictions to the data. If so, then this raw data should be legally permitted to be:

1. made available for free

2. made available for a fee

 

IMHO, these sites should be trying to sell access to their data and make a bit of extra money.

 

However, if the above still doesn't hold water, someone in China, Denmark or some other country out of the reach of US Fair Use laws could probably get away setting something up via Tor and thus the US loses out on tax revenue, employment growth, and business growth.

 

Well I hope they open up about sharing or at lease selling their data outside of exclusive agreements. I wonder if they would agree to share/sell the data if you promised to reference their site when sale price is strong and leave it as anonymous if the sale price was weak.

Thoughts?

[MetalPSI]

The internet should have never been used as a business.

[jhm]

Thanks for the conversation everyone! I feel like I should shed a little more light here...

 

Part of what makes GoCollect different (aside from listing sales from the other grading company and allowing subscribers to flag bad sales) is that we provide the following extra information on each sale:

 

Venue where it sold

Auction/listing ID of the sale

Sale format (exposing true best offer prices)

Image(s) of the comic sold

Ability to analyze specific venues (now hidden because it’s only eBay)

 

I personally feel like that’s great info for the collector/investor. However, the venues don’t seem to be overly excited about sharing that much info.

 

Aside from the images, that information can legally be organized and reported from our platform. However, it gets tricky when you begin scraping the content in an automated fashion (which yes, is quite simple to do). The only reason we don’t report in that way is out of respect for those venues. I’m not looking to burn bridges in this industry. I’d prefer to work with everyone rather than against them. But if we can’t find some common ground, I’ll eventually need to change my tune.

 

Also, no one seems too excited about selling their sales info.

 

I’ve also been told that some of these venues like the fact that users need to sign into their accounts to access past sales data. It gives their platform additional mindshare for the collector and provides the venue with data on who are the heaviest users. If GoCollect reports those sales at the level of detail mentioned above it will eventually reduce that value for the venues.

 

Anyhow, it’s a great conversation and I’m happy it’s unfolding.

 

Side note: I think GPA is a great service. And although I’ve never met or talked with George, I’ve heard very good things about him. I wish that team all the best. Competition is a good thing.

[mschmidt]

There are a lot of legal cases (old and currently pending) about web and screen scraping... It doesn't look good for the company doing it generally.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping

 

 

The terms and conditions and fair usage seem to make it clear but the legal standing of those terms and conditions does begin to break down when you get down to the core of what is being sought: raw item and sale price. The article seems to imply that the clarity and definition of what constitutes a true violation is vague an still being defined but centers around anything that harms the business, violates copyright content, and violates trespass chattel of the business systems. Based on that, as you:

1. Do not infringe on copyright (which raw sale item and sales data may not be) so long as you don't totally copy the content directly from their site and reproduce it in the same manner it appears on their website

2. Do not traverse or tresspass their servers/systems to obtain that data

3. Can prove that usage and resale of that raw item and sales data produces no harm to the business which can be likely accomplished via:

a. Completely disassociating the raw data from the site. (i.e. unlike heritage, if the sites do not grant access to all sales data, then there should be no reasonable way to trace a sale item and price back to it's sales location.

b. The site is not already providing a similar subscription service to users to access sale item and data. If there is a lucrative exclusive agreement to license that data with another site, then I can see this being an issue.

c. Arguing that sales comparison data can both generate higher bids as well as lower depending on the free market demand for the items potentially listed for sale.

 

I believe there is a way to obtain the raw item and respective sales data without violating those 3 currently defined legal restrictions to the data. If so, then this raw data should be legally permitted to be:

1. made available for free

2. made available for a fee

 

IMHO, these sites should be trying to sell access to their data and make a bit of extra money.

 

However, if the above still doesn't hold water, someone in China, Denmark or some other country out of the reach of US Fair Use laws could probably get away setting something up via Tor and thus the US loses out on tax revenue, employment growth, and business growth.

 

Well I hope they open up about sharing or at lease selling their data outside of exclusive agreements. I wonder if they would agree to share/sell the data if you promised to reference their site when sale price is strong and leave it as anonymous if the sale price was weak.

Thoughts?

 

It's illegal to repurpose another site's data in a commercial setting (either through an API or directly through scraping) without an agreement in place with the site in question.

 

None of your arguments are valid due to the commercial nature of GoCollect.

[mschmidt]

Thanks for the conversation everyone! I feel like I should shed a little more light here...

 

Part of what makes GoCollect different (aside from listing sales from the other grading company and allowing subscribers to flag bad sales) is that we provide the following extra information on each sale:

 

Venue where it sold

Auction/listing ID of the sale

Sale format (exposing true best offer prices)

Image(s) of the comic sold

Ability to analyze specific venues (now hidden because it’s only eBay)

 

I personally feel like that’s great info for the collector/investor. However, the venues don’t seem to be overly excited about sharing that much info.

 

Aside from the images, that information can legally be organized and reported from our platform. However, it gets tricky when you begin scraping the content in an automated fashion (which yes, is quite simple to do). The only reason we don’t report in that way is out of respect for those venues.

 

I would hope that the reason you don't do this is because it's illegal.