Pricing & Deal-Detection Methodology

Last updated 2 September 2026

Every listing presented as a deal on this site is a real, currently-active eBay listing that has cleared the checks below. No prices, sellers, sales, or statistics are invented, and a card in the catalogue is not the same thing as a deal.

What Pokemon Deal Finder does

Pokemon Deal Finder tracks Pokemon card and sealed-product listings on eBay and compares each one against recent-sold market-reference pricing to identify listings priced below market. It also maintains catalogue-backed pages for Pokemon, individual cards and sets that show reference prices and let you browse, even when there is no live deal. Those catalogue pages are not deals and are never presented as deals — they are a price and identity reference.

Where listings come from

• eBay Browse API — live listings from the Pokemon single-cards category across six marketplaces: the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Germany and Italy. New listings are discovered continuously and existing ones are re-checked on a rolling schedule.
• Every deal links straight to the exact eBay listing it was priced from. The link is checked to make sure it opens that specific item rather than a search result or an eBay catalogue page.
• The site earns a commission through the eBay Partner Network and the TCGPlayer affiliate program when you click through and buy. This does not change your price and does not affect whether a listing is shown or where it ranks. See the affiliate disclosure.

Pokemon Deal Finder is an independent tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by Nintendo, The Pokemon Company, Creatures Inc., Game Freak, or eBay beyond the affiliate relationship described above.

Market reference and pricing

Card and sealed-product reference prices come from our saved catalogue. Since 27 September 2026 it is synced daily from TCGplayer's market prices via TCGCSV, a free public mirror of TCGplayer's catalogue; TCGplayer compiles its Market Price from recent sales completed on its own marketplace. Before then, and still for the cards and products that sync has not priced (chiefly the WOTC-era sets, whose 1st Edition and Unlimited copies TCGplayer prices as one product), the figure is the one PokemonPriceTracker supplied. PokemonPriceTracker data also provides the condition tiers below Near Mint, recorded graded sales and our earlier price history.

• A market reference is an estimate of recent sold value — it is not a guaranteed sale price, and it moves over time — we measured how much in a 30-day sample of 150 product records. Every figure on the site is accurate only as of the listing's last scan.
• Reference prices are sourced in US dollars. When a listing is priced in another currency, or you have selected a country, prices are converted for display using recent exchange rates so every figure in a comparison shows the same currency. The percentage below market is unaffected by conversion.
• Raw and graded values are never mixed. A graded card is compared only against a reference for that exact grading company and grade - recorded sales from PokemonPriceTracker data or, since 28 September 2026, the valuation a third-party deal site states for that grade (a listed figure, not a sale) - never a raw price with a multiplier applied.
• Where a card has both a 1st Edition and an Unlimited printing, the reference is taken for the correct printing so an Unlimited card is not measured against an inflated 1st Edition figure.
• If a card has several trustworthy listings and every one of them sits far below the reference, the reference is treated as unreliable and none of those listings are shown as a discount.

How a listing is matched to the correct card

eBay search is relevance-based, so a search for one card routinely returns others. Before a listing is trusted, it is matched to one exact catalogue printing. The match looks at identity evidence including:

• the Pokemon and card name, and the set;
• the collector number;
• the card form or variant — for example Mega versus non-Mega, and ex / EX / GX / LV.X distinctions;
• the language of the printing;
• any other conflicting identity signals in the title.

When strong identity evidence conflicts — a different collector number, a different form, a different language — the listing is excluded rather than forced onto the closest-looking card. English and Japanese printings are priced and shown separately; a listing that says it is the Japanese print is never matched to an English card, and vice versa. Matching is automated and will occasionally be wrong, which is why every deal links straight to eBay for you to check the photos and description yourself.

Non-card and non-matching product filtering

Listings that are not actually the tracked trading card are filtered out. This includes empty wrappers and packaging, sealed product mistaken for a single card, obvious novelty merchandise, and proxies or custom reproductions where they can be detected. Card lots and bundles, playsets, “pick your card” listings, repacks, digital or code-only items, display cases, and trading-service listings are also excluded. For sealed products, a listing carrying a numeric third-party card grade is rejected, because a grade only applies to a single card and not to factory-sealed product.

Image-based authenticity screening

Selected higher-risk listings can receive an additional image-based check that compares the listing photo with the card's expected official printing. This is not card authentication, not grading, and not a guarantee that any card is genuine. It runs only on a subset of listings and is fully automated.

• A counterfeit result means the photo shows an obvious physical fake or novelty reproduction — for example a metal or resin “card” — rather than a genuine printed card. These listings are hidden.
• A wrong-printing result means the card in the photo looks genuine but is a different printing than the listing describes. These listings are also hidden, but this is a matching error, not a counterfeit accusation.
• When the check cannot reach a confident answer, the listing is simply treated as not screened. It is not accused of anything and, in ordinary browsing, is not hidden on that basis.

Automated image screening has real limits: photo quality, angle, lighting and sleeve glare all affect it, and it can miss a well-made fake or misjudge a genuine card. It is one safeguard, not a verdict.

Promotional placement

The site's most prominent recommendations — the homepage promotional modules and the curated best-deals lists — use a stricter standard than ordinary browsing. A sufficiently high-value and deeply discounted non-graded listing must have passed the image check described above before it can appear in those placements. A listing that has not been screened yet can still appear in normal browsing; it just does not get top billing until it has.

What counts as a deal

• Where eBay gave us a shipping charge, the price compared is the item price plus that recorded shipping, using the real figures eBay returned when we scanned the listing.
• Where it gave us no charge, we compare the item price alone and label the saving “before shipping”, so you know delivery is still to be added.
• Where we hold no shipping breakdown at all, we show the recorded price and make no saving claim for that listing. An auction is shown as a current bid that can still rise, never as a settled saving.
• None of these is a checkout total. Shipping to your own address, taxes, duties and any import charges are set by the seller and eBay at checkout, and can differ from what we recorded.
• A listing has to be meaningfully below its market reference to be shown — a modest, genuine discount, not a rounding difference.
• A listing priced far below market — roughly the level where it is much more likely to be the wrong card, a proxy, a damaged item, or a scam than a real bargain — is excluded, not shown as a huge discount.

Condition and grading

• eBay's condition field only distinguishes “Graded” from “Ungraded” for cards, so a raw card's wear is read from the seller's own wording (Near Mint, Lightly Played, Moderately Played, Heavily Played, Damaged) and priced against that condition — never against a better one. A listing whose condition cannot be established is not shown as a verified deal.
• Graded cards are priced against a reference for the specific grade from PSA, CGC, BGS, SGC, ACE, or TAG (see Market reference and pricing above for what that reference is).
• Sellers shown must clear a positive-feedback percentage and a minimum feedback-score threshold.

Freshness and ended listings

• Auctions known to have ended are removed automatically.
• A listing that has gone too long without being re-seen in an eBay scan stops being shown as a live deal. That window is shorter for higher-value and more deeply discounted cards.
• A separate, bounded process re-checks individual eBay items directly and retires ones that have ended or sold.
• The site records when each listing was last seen in a scan. That is not the same as confirming the exact item on eBay at that moment — prices and availability can change between scans.
• Historical database rows may be kept for internal history after a listing stops being displayed as a live deal.

Which pages exist, and which are meant for search

Every supported National Pokedex Pokemon resolves to a page on this site. Individual real cards have a permanent page. Beyond that, a page is only intended to appear in search results when it meets the site's current useful-content standard:

• A Pokemon page can exist from catalogue data alone, with no live deal. It is intended for indexing when it has enough real, priced, catalogued cards to be a useful price and identity reference, or when it has enough simultaneous live listings; thinner Pokemon keep a page but it is not indexed.
• A set page can also exist from catalogue data alone, with no live deal. It is intended for indexing when the set has enough real, priced, catalogued cards to be a useful card checklist and price reference, or when it has enough active below-market listings to browse; a set below both bars keeps no page.
• An individual card page exists permanently even with no current deal. If there is no trustworthy market price for it, the page stays available but is not indexed until a real price returns.
• A card hub — one page consolidating every current listing of one exact printing — exists when two or more listings of that printing are active at once. Empty and near-duplicate pages are not generated.

Limitations

• Card-to-listing matching and image screening are automated and will occasionally be wrong.
• Prices and availability change constantly; every figure is accurate only as of its last scan, and there can be a lag between a sale and the next scan.
• Market pricing depends on third parties (TCGplayer's prices via TCGCSV, and PokemonPriceTracker for older and graded data); for very obscure or very new cards the underlying data can be thin.
• None of the checks here is a guarantee that a card is genuine or accurately described. Always open the eBay listing and review its photos and description before buying.

Spotted a wrong match or a pricing problem? Tell us and we'll correct it. For a plain-language walk-through, see how it works.