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 the most protective mechanism 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. The problem is where it sits: Storepass's enterprise tier starts at $99/mo plus 2% of sales, scaling up to $4,999/mo. Most sellers who'd benefit from an approval gate never reach that tier.
An approval gate that only exists at enterprise pricing isn't a safety feature for most sellers. It's a safety feature for the sellers who were already going to be fine.
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.
Connect your TCGplayer store and preview a repricing run in watch-only mode — nothing changes until you say so.
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