HOW PRICES WORK
Where the numbers come from, and what they do and don’t mean.
WHERE THE FIGURES COME FROM
Two sources, both from this site. Asking prices are the live listings collectors have posted here right now. Sale prices are orders that completed on FindMeComics, at the price a buyer actually paid.
An issue page labels which one it is showing. An ask is what somebody wants for a book; a sale is what somebody got. They are not the same number and we don’t blend them into one.
WHAT THAT MEANS TODAY
The marketplace has not opened yet, so no sales have completed here. Until they do, every price figure on the site is an asking price from a live listing, and pages that show sale history are empty rather than filled with something borrowed.
This is the honest state of a new marketplace. It gets better as books change hands here, and it does so without us ever presenting an estimate as a sale.
WHAT WE DON’T USE
No prices on this site are taken from eBay, Heritage, ComicConnect, ComicLink, MyComicShop, Whatnot, GoCollect, GPA or CovrPrice.
Their terms bar reusing their sale data to value inventory on a competing marketplace, and the licensed guides sell that data as their product. Scraping it would be both a licence breach and a quiet lie about where the number came from. So the site shows less, and what it shows is ours.
CONDITION BUCKETS
Prices are grouped within condition tiers, never averaged across all grades at once. A GD copy and an NM copy of the same book are different products, and one figure covering both would be useless to either.
High (NM/VF range)
Near Mint · Very Fine/Near Mint · Very Fine
Mid (FN/VG range)
Fine · Very Good/Fine · Very Good
Low (GD and below)
Good · Fair · Poor
Graded (by numeric grade)
CGC/CBCS grades grouped by 0.5-point brackets
GRADED vs RAW
Slabbed copies are tracked separately from raw ones because they are a different product. A CGC 9.8 isn’t just a clean NM: it carries the slab premium and a third-party opinion on the grade. Mixing the two into one figure would mislead buyers and sellers in opposite directions.
Where an issue has both a raw and a graded listing live, the issue page shows the premium between them. Where it has only one, there is nothing to compare and the page leaves it out.
COVER PRICE IS NOT VALUE
Many issues here carry a cover price from the published catalogue data. That is a historical fact about the book, not an estimate of what it is worth now, and it is never used in any price figure.
WHAT PRICES DON’T INCLUDE
Shipping cost. Prices shown are the item only; shipping is added at checkout.
Future projections. We never predict where a price is going.
Grading costs. If you are thinking of submitting a raw copy, pressing and grading fees are not factored into anything shown here.
Insurance or restoration value. An insurance schedule needs a certified appraiser, not a marketplace price panel.
DATA FRESHNESS
Asking prices update as listings are posted, edited, sold or withdrawn. Sale figures are recorded when an order completes. There is no overnight import from anywhere else, because nothing is imported from anywhere else.
QUESTIONS
If a figure looks wrong, or a page shows a price you can’t account for, tell me at support@findmecomics.com.