How AI is changing the rapidly growing world of sports cards

Artificial intelligence is having a very real impact in the world of sports card trading, reshaping the way people analyze, value, and sell the collectables.

A growing number of startups have capitalized upon the technology to make the fast-paced world of sports cards more efficient. For a sector that expanded rapidly during the pandemic and is only continuing to grow, the addition of AI tools has been met with a generally positive response. 

Putting a new spin on market analysis 

According to Ted Mann, CEO of card scanners CollX and Card Dealer Pro, 85 million American adults, or about 33% of the population own trading cards. While many are just casual collectors, others buy and sell cards for profit on social media sites such as Instagram. Deals also take place in person at card shops or yard sales. 

That’s where AI comes into play, with companies like mobile sports card scanning app CollX using the tech to help collectors and sellers determine the value of their cards to prevent unfair deals. 

Founder Ted Mann got the idea for the company after his 12-year-old son started getting into sports cards during the pandemic and had trouble determining the value of his cards. In the two years since he launched the company, it’s amassed about two million users. 

“It used to be that you’d have to spend hours searching a card online trying to figure out what [a card] was worth,” Mann says. Now, it only takes a matter of seconds. 

To use the scanner, collectors upload a picture of the card to the app, which in turn matches the card’s features to those in their 20-million-card database. Once a matching card is found, the app populates details on the market value. Determining the market value is important as prices are constantly fluctuating. 

“We have to get all the historical pricing . . . up to the minute, really. We have to pull prices every day, whether it’s from our marketplace or other ones to be able to calculate the average price,” says Mann. “It’s like stocks.”

Easy access to pricing is opening up the hobby to those whose sports cards are sitting in the attic. While 85 million Americans own trading cards, Mann found that only about 20% of them have ever bought or sold a card online. 

Mann says 60% of the people that are buying and selling cards on CollX’s marketplace are doing so for the first time. “AI-enabled card management, or collection management, has brought this huge pool of new collectors into the market,” Mann adds.

In addition to the mobile scanner, CollX also offers an AI assistant called “CollX AI” which uses large language models to coach collectors through card sales and purchases.

“When you are haggling a little bit on a card, getting tips about what’s the right way to make an offer . . . it’s super helpful,” Mann says. 

Increasing Output Potential

Alongside CollX, Mann also founded Card Dealer Pro for professional card dealers. Rather than taking pictures of the cards they want evaluated, dealers feed their cards into a scanner that can analyze 100 cards per minute using AI. Card Dealer Pro’s pricing database also helps sellers determine prices for their cards, and list their cards across multiple channels such as CollX, eBay, Shopify. 

Shawn Hasting, the store manager of Illinois-based shop Diamond Cards, says that this type of technology could be a game changer for sellers. “One of the largest individual sellers on eBay for single cards . . . on any given day he will have 2.5 million items on eBay,” Hasting says. “I know how time consuming it is for his employees.”

To grade or not to grade 

AI is also revolutionizing grading, or the evaluation of the card’s condition.

Historically, card owners would send their cards to third-party grading companies where humans evaluate the card based on the corners, the edges, the centering and the surface. The card receives a grade on a scale of one to 10. The grading company then sends a report back to the card owner and places the card in a case that lists information such as the card name, condition, and stock keeping unit.

A card’s value is determined in large part by its grade. A 1986 Fleer Michael Jordan card that received an eight is currently bidding for $3,850 on eBay, while the same card with a 10 grade is bidding at $12,900.

According to GemRate, a grading trend platform, over 1.78 million cards were graded last month across four grading companies. However, the process of getting cards graded can be a time-intensive and expensive one, often taking months for cards to get graded.

Card Boss is a card scanning app working to combat this issue using AI. Card Boss owner Shaun Rogers describes the app as a “pregrader.” The app uses AI to analyze the condition of a card based on an uploaded image. While grading with a third-party company can take months, Card Boss’s process typically takes 20 minutes, Rogers says. Once users receive a pregrade Card Boss, they can decide if it is worth spending the additional time and money to get their card officially graded. 

“You might say, ‘Cardboss gave [my card] a nine or 10, so this is worth grading,’” Rogers says. “But if it gets a seven or an eight, for example, it might not be worth spending the $40 or $50 to submit it and wait three months to get the card back.”

What’s Next

While plenty of experts are concerned about how AI could affect their jobs and livelihoods, many in the sports card industry are more optimistic about this technology. 

Diamond Cards’ Hasting says he could see larger grading companies adopting AI technology, which could potentially make the grading more accurate. 

“The three large grading companies are all testing AI right now,” Hasting said. “Somebody could be having a bad day at work, so they could grade something differently than if they were having a good day . . . this could take the human portion of the judgment out of it.”

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