How often should you reprice your TCGplayer cards?

Repricing cadence gets argued about like a matter of taste. It isn't. It's a function of two things you can measure: how fast the market moves for the cards you actually own, and how much of your inventory value sits in the fast-moving part.

A store with $40,000 in current-set Pokémon and Standard-legal Magic is exposed to swings that a store with $40,000 in older sealed product simply is not. Same money, completely different correct answer.

Work out your own number

Step one — split your inventory by volatility, weighted by value. Not by card count. A thousand bulk commons moving 30% is noise; ten staples moving 8% is your month.

Step two — measure how long your prices stay right. Take a sample of your highest-value rows, record listed price against market, and re-check daily for two weeks. The day your median gap crosses whatever you consider unacceptable — 5% is a reasonable starting line — is your cadence.

Step three — check what you're actually losing. Multiply the median gap by the quantity in the fast-moving tier. If it's smaller than the cost of repricing more often, stop. If it's larger, you have your answer.

Most sellers who run this exercise land faster than they expected, because they'd been reasoning from card counts rather than from value.

What each cadence is actually for

Weekly suits stores whose value sits in stable, older, or sealed product, and sellers who'd rather be slightly stale than constantly adjusting. It is not a failure state. It is correct for a lot of inventory.

Daily is the sensible default for most active singles sellers. It catches ordinary drift and set-release movement without demanding attention.

Every few hours earns its keep in exactly two situations: your money is concentrated in volatile constructed staples, or you want spike capture. A ban announcement, a tournament result or a surprise reprint moves prices within hours and often corrects within days — see catch a price spike before it corrects.

The thing that actually decides it

There's a version of this question that isn't about markets at all: how long does repricing take you, and would you do it more often if it were free?

Almost everyone says yes. Which means for most stores cadence isn't a pricing decision, it's a labour decision — and it's worth pricing that labour honestly. Warehouse staff at large card operations run roughly $15–24 an hour. If repricing takes you six hours a week, that's a real number whether or not it appears on a payroll.

That's why our plans are priced by sync frequency rather than by inventory size or a share of your sales: Gold, Platinum, Diamond, and Vault repricing plans. You buy the cadence you need. If you want to see the mechanics, how Hoard's automated repricing agent works.

Before changing anything, it's worth reading why manual repricing stops scaling — the failure isn't effort, it's that the work grows with your inventory while your evenings don't.

We're measuring this properly

We're running a study on whether faster cadences genuinely sell faster, within the same game and price band, using our own anonymised data. The methodology is written down before the numbers are, and we'll publish the result even if it says cadence doesn't matter much. Hoard's benchmark report on real seller repricing behavior.

Common questions

How often should I reprice my TCGplayer listings?

It depends on how fast the market moves for the cards you actually own and how much of your inventory value sits in the fast-moving part. Weekly suits stores whose value sits in stable, older, or sealed product. Daily is the sensible default for most active singles sellers. Every few hours only earns its keep when your money is concentrated in volatile constructed staples or you want to catch a price spike.

What's the difference between weekly, daily, and near-real-time repricing?

Weekly repricing is correct for a lot of inventory, not a failure state — it fits stores whose value sits in stable or sealed product. Daily catches ordinary drift and set-release movement without demanding attention. Every few hours matters for volatile constructed staples and for spike capture, where a ban announcement or reprint rumor can move a price within hours and correct within days.

Is repricing more often always worth it?

No. Work out your own number by splitting inventory by volatility weighted by value, measuring how long your prices stay accurate, then comparing the money you're losing to the cost of repricing more often. If the loss is smaller than that cost, a slower cadence is the right answer for that inventory.

Does a scheduled repricing cadence catch a sudden price spike?

Not reliably. A card can triple on a ban announcement or reprint rumor and mostly correct back within days, so a cadence slower than that window can miss the whole move. See catching a price spike before it corrects for why cadence, not the rule itself, decides whether you catch it.