About.com: I had no problem narrowing the search terms to get a higher confidence score... but I've been collecting for over 20 years. The search function seems like it may be a bit intimidating to new collectors. Do you envision a way to make the pricing searches more intuitive in the future?
McFarland: I think you hit the nail on the head here. This has been our biggest point of discussion internally, and I can say that we have several ideas to improve this in the future.
We've seen people sign up and do a search for a "berry bonds topps rookie card" and then never come back because they don't see any results, so correcting spelling mistakes is one of the first things I want to tackle. The harder problem is the confidence score, because there's just so much variation out there from item to item. We want to give people help in weeding out the items that shouldn't be there, and we have several ideas, but I can't say that at this point we've settled on any one solution that will work across the board.
We're relying on the user to be able to type in a decent item to price in the first place - no help that we give can correct someone who isn't able to type out the name of the collectible they are searching for. You'd be surprised at some of the crazy searches we see that result in complaints from people because there weren't any results.
At the end of the day however, the most important thing to us is that people like you say, "I had no problem narrowing the search terms to get a higher confidence score". I'd estimate I've discussed in detail the price guide with at least 20 other serious collectors (most of whom have a website or a blog, so are somewhat web savvy), and none of them have had any problems. If we're appealing to them we know we're on the right track and we don't want to do anything to turn them off or dumb the tool down to appeal to the masses while compromising it's functionality to the hardcore collector.
Our product certainly isn't for everyone - I'd say our ideal collector is in that 18-35 range, does a large part of their buying and selling online, is somewhat tech savvy and enjoys numbers and data. We do have a very love/hate product. I have days where I see a handful of emails each way, some praising us for the coolest collecting tool out there and others telling us we have no right to charge for this piece of crap. It's only a tool and it only gets the job done if the user uses it correctly.
A: What other features would you like to see implemented or already have planned for the future?
M: This is where, as a tech guy, I get excited. I see so much potential for the tool and the community we've formed around it. Within the next year, we'll be bulking up what you can do with the "My Collection" section to also act like a collection management software. I want people to be able to add items that they can't price out, tag the item and have better import/export features to go back and forth from Excel.
That ties into the next feature - adding a "community" aspect so you can get feedback on prices. Let's say that you've added an item to your collection that our Price Guide couldn't price. You have the option of making that known to the community and someone can answer you that "the card is priced at $40 in the July 2007 Beckett Baseball magazine," for example. You could also dispute prices in our Price Guide. Say you add an item to your collection that we say is worth $20 but you saw sell at a card show for $4 yesterday, you could overwrite our price and make that information public to the community so that the next time someone prices the item they'll see your comment.
We also want better integration with eBay. eBay is such a monster that we want to get their data directly from them. We're in talks with their official data resale company, so it's not a matter of "if," but a matter of "how" and "when," hopefully in the next 6-8 months.
Further down the road I see stuff like a mobile site so you can run price checks from a cell phone while you're at a show or a card shop and manage your collection on the go. With technology like the iPhone, we're getting better and better mobile browsers and the potential is becoming greater and greater.