COLLECTORS enjoy it. Now, anyone can go into a card shop, use our app, scan a few cards and feel like they have expert level details in their hands.”
Every item is unique The challenge of assigning value to collectibles is very different from mass-produced consumer products. With each item unique in provenance or condition, price can be hard to establish objectively – particularly at scale. This challenge is something DVT was keen to tackle head-on.
“ The trick is actually not necessarily building that model itself,” he says,“ it’ s organising all of the metadata for the millions of collectibles that are being sold on a daily basis and merging it with ever-changing buyer expectations.”
Taking this analysis on board, Collectors fuses deep learning imaging image models along with prediction models and market price graphs, meaning it gathers sales information across different marketplaces to try to develop a single price range for a specific item. As a result, Collectors saw coverage for trading card price estimates increase from 81 % to 93 % in less than six months, which DVT says empowers users to insure, trade and submit items for auction with newfound confidence.
“ We developed this machine learning model for value estimation and started to refine it and take feedback to continue to grow and evolve,” he shares.“ It took a few years, but at this point the payoff is very tangible.
Our last survey showed that 79 % of collectors who use the scanner would recommend it to their friends – that includes the identification and the estimated value of that collectible. It just shows the level of confidence and trust that we’ ve developed over the years.”
Trust is especially imperative in the collectables trade. Potential hiccups with product features and AI results could be dissected instantly on social media. This proximity to end users, he says, is both daunting and empowering.
“ When we break that trust, they’ re very quick to let us know,” Dan admits. But this risk comes with high reward.“ Collectors range from middle schoolers all the way through to retirees – and all of them are weighing in on how well we did, which is great.
“ We get real-time input from middle schoolers to retirees. It also shows the level of confidence that we’ ve grown and the trust that we’ ve developed over the years by building Collectors up with technology.”
Collectors is working to continue this momentum, which shows no signs of slowing. Its future outlook comes in the form of a three-prong plan.
“ One is global expansion, pushing into Canada, the EU and Asia-Pacific,” he says.“ The second is being multiasset – bringing PSA level confidence to new categories. And the third is intelligence, rolling out more AI-driven features that put a collectibles expert in everyone’ s pocket.” psacard. com 17