This week I decided to take a shot and try Card Ladder.
The site is one of the top references used by collectors to determine a price of a card.
The name Card Ladder brought to mine a joke I used to have with a lady I worked with at various retail jobs. We alway talked about the ladder of success.
Then it seemed something would happen and a business would close and we be job hunting or in my case attempting another way to break out of the norm of retail jobs.
Eventually every time we saw each other, she would ask how is the ladder, and I would say it broke and I fell off.
Well this week I signed up for a free trial of Card Ladder and it too broke.
I didn’t download the app, instead I decided to use the website. I'm not a big fan of apps.
So I started adding some of my graded cards to see how far off my prices are compared to the card market as analyzed by the site.
Needless to say it seems I think more of some of my cards than the market does.
No surprise.
In the beginning all was well. I would type in the graded card certification number and information would display.
Then I was sad. The site doesn’t recognize Degree graded cards. Instead you would have to click other and input the information.
On the one Degree card I entered, the site chalked it up as a total loss. Okay, I get it, Degree isn’t one of the Big 3, but that doesn’t mean they are totally bad. Believe it or not, there are collectors who buy the cards for the cards and not the grade. Anyway, I continued on.
Then I typed in the information for one my of graded Roberto Alomar cards and the info that popped up was incorrect. In fact it wasn’t even baseball.
I thought I must have made a typo so I tried a couple other times and nope same result.
I double checked Beckett and I had the number correct, so I thought well, I’ll check into this later.
So then I typed in the next card and a Pokemon card description popped up.
That was all for me. The ladder was broken.
Basically I have been tracking on a spread sheet my own profit and loss on my graded cards. So I decided I do not need to pay $20 a month for an app to do what I can do. I would rather spend that money on ice cream.
As for tracking prices, I will continue to do what I do and hope for the best. I get why the dealers use the app and I understand the good points to it, and if I were setting up at shows and selling cards for a living maybe it would be necessary tool.
But for me Card Ladder is not the ladder of success.
