The Controls
Filters.
A reference for every control in the sidebar. What it does, what it catches, what it deliberately ignores.
Toggles for the qualities collectors care about.
Autographed
Listings with an autograph. Checked against the title for 'auto', 'autograph', 'signed', and common variants. If your search already contains 'auto', we don't double-add it — the toggle remains a soft visual confirmation rather than a redundant filter.
Rookie
Listings with rookie card markers in the title. Targets cards explicitly marked RC, rookie, or first-year. Doesn't try to infer rookie status from a player's career arc — that's brittle and we don't trust the inference enough to ship it.
Numbered
Listings with a real print run. Tier-based: pick The Grail (1–25), Ultra Rare (26–99), Rare (100–249), or Scarce (250–999). You can also enter custom denominators like /73 or /42 for oddball sets.
How the listing is sold.
Three options: Any, Buy It Now, Auction. Auction-only is what you want when you're hunting for a possible steal — it surfaces listings with bids in motion and time pressure. Buy It Now is for when you've decided and you're done watching.
Auction results show their time-remaining badge on the card. A listing ending in under two hours is highlighted; one ending in three days is quieter.
Raw or graded.
Three options: Any, Raw only, Graded only. We detect graded cards by parsing titles for the four major graders — PSA, BGS, SGC, CGC — followed by a numeric grade or grading-context words like "slab" or "gem."
eBay's structured Condition aspect is too inconsistently filled in by sellers to be useful here, so we use title parsing instead. The tradeoff: if a seller forgets to mention the grader in the title, the card may be misclassified as raw. In practice, almost every graded listing puts the grader in the title because buyers search for it.
Min and max.
A range slider, not free-form text fields, because most price-bounding decisions are spatial — you know roughly what your ceiling is and you adjust by feel. The max range adapts based on the magnitude of recent results, so the slider stays useful whether you're shopping $40 commons or $4,000 rookie autos.
How results are ordered after they come back.
Sort runs client-side after results land. That means it's instant — no spinner, no re-fetch. Available orders:
- Best match — eBay's default ranking.
- Price: low to high — the bargain hunter's view.
- Price: high to low — the grail hunter's view.
- Ending soonest — auctions first, sorted by time remaining.
- Newly listed — most recent listings at the top.
AND, not OR.
Every filter narrows. Toggling Autographed + Rookie + Numbered (Grail) + max price $500 gives you autographed rookies numbered to 25 or fewer, under $500. Each switch you flip removes listings — none of them ever add listings back in.
If you end up with zero results, loosen one toggle. The narrower stack is doing its job.