Any rule that references a competitor's price will eventually follow someone's liquidation sale downward, unless you stop it. Here's how to set a floor that means something.
Search for TCGplayer price floor and ceiling settings and you get generic help documentation, nothing that explains why a floor matters or how to pick one. That's a gap, because floors are the most-requested safety feature sellers ask for once they've been burned by automated pricing once.
Any rule that prices off a competitor's listing has no concept of a bad reference price. If someone lists a card at half market value because they're liquidating a collection, exiting the game, or made a typo, your rule sees a new low and follows it. So does the next seller's rule, and the one after that. Nothing in the mechanism knows the low listing was a mistake, and nothing pulls the price back up once everyone's matched it.
A floor is the only thing that breaks that chain. Without one, a single bad listing can drag a whole SKU down for every seller referencing it, including you.
The most common mistake is setting a floor at some round figure — $0.50, $1, $2 — chosen because it feels safe rather than because it means anything. A meaningful floor is derived from your actual cost: the price below which you lose money on the sale once marketplace commission, transaction fees, and shipping come out. Below that number, a "low" price isn't competitive, it's a loss you're choosing to take.
Working out that number takes the same arithmetic as fee-aware repricing generally. We cover it in net-margin, fee-aware repricing, and it's worth doing once per price tier rather than guessing.
A ceiling protects the opposite failure: a thin market where one seller lists absurdly high, either by mistake or because they don't expect to sell, and a rule that anchors to the top of the market or to a percentage above Market Price inherits that distortion. This shows up most on low-volume cards where there might be three active listings total, so one outlier carries disproportionate weight. A ceiling caps how far a rule will follow that listing up.
MassPrice supports floor and ceiling settings directly, so if you're already on Pro, there's no reason to run a rule without them. The gap isn't availability. It's that most sellers set a rule up once, don't revisit the floor, and never derive it from actual margin.
Storepass ships one of the more protective mechanisms we've seen in competitive research: a price-approval system that flags suspicious changes before they go live, rather than only stopping repeats of a known bad pattern. That's a genuinely good idea — catching a change before it's live beats catching it after. Storepass markets the feature under its general Price Automation tools rather than naming a specific tier it's gated behind. What is clear is the scale of Storepass's own pricing ladder: a "Scaling" tier at $99/mo plus 2% of sales, and a separate flat $4,999/mo Enterprise tier above it. Reaching either tier is real money for a smaller store, whether or not the approval feature turns out to be gated to one of them.
A protective mechanism only helps if a seller can actually justify the tier it lives on. Storepass's ladder runs from $99/mo up to a $4,999/mo flat tier — real scale to cross before a smaller shop gets there.
Hoard doesn't gate a safety mechanism behind a higher plan. Every tier — Gold, Platinum, Diamond, and Vault — gets watch-only mode, which shows you exactly what a rule would change before it changes anything, and one-click rollback by game or store-wide if a run does something you didn't want. That's not an approval queue exactly, but it means you're never finding out about a bad repricing run from your sales report three days later. See watch-only mode and rollback for the full mechanics, and how Hoard's repricing agent works for how floors and ceilings plug into the sync itself.
The minimum price a rule is allowed to set for a card, no matter how low a competitor's listing or a bad reference price goes. Without one, a single bad listing (a liquidation sale, an exit, a typo) can drag a whole SKU down for every seller whose rule references it, including you.
Derive it from your actual cost — the price below which you lose money once marketplace commission, transaction fees, and shipping come out — rather than picking a round number like $0.50 or $1 because it feels safe. Below that number, a low price isn't competitive, it's a loss you're choosing to take.
Ceilings matter less often than floors, but they protect against the opposite failure: a thin market where one seller lists absurdly high and a rule anchored to the top of the market inherits that distortion. This shows up most on low-volume cards where one outlier listing carries disproportionate weight.
Yes, directly — if you're already on Pro, there's no reason to run a rule without them. The gap isn't availability, it's that most sellers set a floor once, never revisit it, and never derive it from actual margin.
Connect your TCGplayer store and preview a repricing run in watch-only mode — nothing changes until you say so.
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